Campus adults, protect free speech: Our view Students are right to protest for diversity, but First Amendment protects offensive speech.

The Editorial Board | USA Today

Show Caption Hide Caption Inside the Editorial Board: Campus speech While racially charged events at Mizzou have nothing to do with students violating free speech, events at other colleges do. We say some students need a primer on the First Amendment, but bulk of blame lies with adults. Listen to the discussion.

When student protests and the resignation of the university president revealed deep racial problems at the University of Missouri last week, it seemed at first like a singular event.

Since then, it’s become increasingly clear that similar tensions are raging on campuses from Connecticut to California. Students are right to speak out for diversity and sensitivity to racial and gender concerns. But too often, this has been happening in ways that trample freedom of speech. It’s bad enough that college students don’t seem to grasp how broad the nation's protections for free speech are. Worse is when the adults responsible for running universities ignore what they surely know — that the First Amendment protects just about all speech.

Consider the recent controversy at Yale, sparked by the mere potential of offensive Halloween costumes.

After an administration email suggested that students be sensitive about wearing such costumes, Yale Associate House Master Erika Christakis politely suggested a different tack: “If you don’t like a costume … look away, or tell them you are offended," she wrote in an email, quoting her husband, House Master Nicholas Christakis. “Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”

For anyone aware of repeated Supreme Court decisions protecting Americans' right to say outrageously offensive things — such as yelling "God hates fags" at soldiers' funerals — this hardly seems objectionable. But at Yale, the reaction was swift and unforgiving. Students confronted Nicholas Christakis, also a professor and physician, shouting over his attempts to speak. “You are disgusting,” one young woman screamed at him, tossing out expletives. Some students demanded that the couple be ousted from their positions, presumably because they had the temerity to utter an idea with which students disagreed.

The upshot? Nicholas Christakis apologized to students while senior administrators looked on. Yale President Peter Salovey apologized, too. “We failed you,” he told a group of minority students, according to news accounts.

If this were an isolated incident, it might mean little outside Yale. It isn’t.

On the Missouri campus, students and professors tried to stop a student photographer from taking photos of a public gathering. At Wesleyan University, some students petitioned to defund the college newspaper after it ran an op-ed questioniong the tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement. At California’s Claremont McKenna College, where protests and a hunger strike erupted over racial bias last week, some students who disagreed with protesters’ tactics were afraid to speak up. In a letter endorsed by nearly 300 students, they wrote: “Fear of our fellow students’ rage silenced us.”

These incidents are emblematic of a scary trend in which students insist on being protected from any speech they find hurtful, even if doing that threatens academic freedom and silences debate.

A few universities are fighting these attacks by forcefully affirming devotion to free speech — even speech that some find “offensive, unwise, immoral or wrong-headed,” as the University of Chicago put it in a statement in January. Students battling bias today might recall that civil rights activists exercised freedom of speech to knock down racial barriers and change the nation’s laws and attitudes. Back then, many looked on the activists' speech as offensive and answered with bats, fire hoses and guns.

The adults in charge of college campuses owe it to students to remind them that freedom of expression is among the most fundamental of American rights, and that students can’t get someone fired simply for expressing ideas they don’t like.

Several days after the public shaming of the Yale house master, university President Salovey finally said publicly what needed saying all along, affirming the university's "bedrock principle of the freedom to speak and be heard, without fear of intimidation, threats or harm." Along with the new courses in diversity being promised at Yale and elsewhere, college presidents ought to consider mandating a course in the history and meaning of the First Amendment.

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