Op-Ed: The New Threats to Free Speech on Campus
Originally published June 26, 2023 in the Greensboro News and Record and Winston-Salem Journal; June 27 in Higher Education Works. Story link here.
Frank Wilkinson speaks to UNC Chapel Hill students from “off-campus” during the Speaker Ban in March 1966. Photo by Charles Cooper, Durham Herald
Sixty years ago this week, North Carolina legislators shut down free speech on college campuses across the state. Today, free speech on campus is under threat again – in some cases from the outside by legislators and in other cases from the inside by students and faculty. We need to save it.
On June 25, 1963, in the waning moments of that year’s legislative session, the General Assembly rammed through House Bill 1895, designed to ban any “known Communists” from speaking on the campus of public colleges and universities.
Passage of the bill was urged by then-television commentator Jesse Helms, who claimed “avowed Communists, left-wingers and ultraliberals in a solid phalanx” were descending on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill.
University leaders and newspapers across the state denounced the bill (the Greensboro Daily News called it “fundamentally objectionable”), but public opinion generally favored the ban: Gov. Dan Moore reported letters were 6:1 in support of it.
It took nearly five years before a federal district court ruled in Greensboro that the bill was unconstitutional, failing to meet “clear, narrow and objective standards.” The so-called “speaker ban” law was no more.
Today campuses are again facing challenges to free speech from multiple directions.
On one level are threats by state-level actors on the right to restrict discussion of topics like critical race theory, gender or sexuality. A separate challenge comes from within campuses, with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reporting 24 cases already this year where groups attempted to “disinvite” speakers from campus, either by rescinding an invitation or by shouting down speakers mid-speech. These new efforts to restrict free speech are coming mostly from the left, not the right (23 of the FIRE cases were attempts to censor conservative speakers), and more often from students than adults.
Jeffrey Kidder, a professor at Northern Illinois University who has looked at new efforts to restrict speech on campus, said recently in Inside Higher Education that among those favoring restrictions on speech “there’s very much an idea that speech can be harmful. If you view speech not just as an interchange of ideas but that in fact people can be harmed by speech, it makes sense that you would need to shut that speech down.”
After the speaker ban passed in 1963, the Raleigh Times raised an important question in an editorial, wondering whether legislators thought students were “so stupid and so impressionable and so weak” that being exposed to a Communist speaker “could turn them into Communists.” Are we worried now that students are incapable of learning about critical race theory or hearing conservative thoughts without being converted? Do we really think they can’t make their own decisions?
Despite the threats, there are a few encouraging signs that free speech is making a comeback on campuses. Leadership at Cornell declared that “learning to engage with difficult and challenging ideas is a core part of a university education.” At Stanford, after a conservative federal court judge was taunted and heckled by student protestors and criticized by a dean, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne promised the school is “taking steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again.” Three UNC system universities – UNC Greensboro, NC State and UNC Charlotte – were ranked in the top 15 in FIRE’s 2023 “College Free Speech Rankings.” The UNC System’s Board of Governors has adopted principles endorsing institutional neutrality with regard to speech on campus and “broadly promoting freedom of thought and expression.” We can turn this around, and it shouldn’t take the courts to do it.
Why does preservation of free speech on college campuses matter so much? Why should we care? In a world where algorithms screen out any world view different from the one they have determined we have, college campuses are places we can go to hear ideas we may not like hearing.
After we listen, we may decide we disagree. The Raleigh News and Observer noted in 1963 that the best way to deal with Communist speakers was to “let ‘em come and squirm in their own holes.” But there’s also a chance we will hear something that enlarges or sharpens our perspective, or maybe even rocks our world. That’s where new ideas come from, and why free speech should matter to all of us.
-Leslie
Questions: Are students today fundamentally incapable of listening to ideas on the right or left without danger, or are there some ideas they just should not hear? Is the “heckler’s veto” (someone who makes it impossible for others to hear someone who is trying to voice a different opinion) a legitimate strategy to protect the rights of the oppressed, another form of free speech or restraint of free speech?