Campus Free-Speech Threats Take New Forms | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This post was written by the staff for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    Students are roaming college campuses once again, but many of them are missing out on the robust back-and-forth debate of controversial issues that has characterized higher education for centuries. Campus restrictions on the free flow of ideas concern the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Executive Director Robert Shibley recently discussed the situation with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find recent CJ Radio episodes.)

    Kokai: We've had you on this program before, and one of the main topics has been speech codes on campuses. Let's talk about that first. How do things stand in terms of the actual policies on these campuses that limit when, where, and how students could speak?

    Shibley: Well, the good news is that in terms of actual policies, there are fewer speech codes on campus now than there have been since we started measuring seven or eight years ago. ... We rate speech codes at 440 of the largest and most prestigious universities in America, and we re-rate those every year. And this last year was the first time that the percentage of "red-light" speech codes - those are the very worst speech codes -dropped below 50 percent. It was 49.9 percent, but it was below 50 for the first time. It was 75 the first year we were measuring.


    So there's definitely been progress along those lines. Unfortunately, most of the schools that are remaining are not "green-light" schools, the best schools - schools with no speech codes at all - but, rather, "yellow-light" schools, which are schools that have speech codes that can too easily be used to abuse free speech on campus, but which aren't as laughably unconstitutional or as laughably against the principles of free speech as "red-light" speech codes.

    Kokai: Do North Carolina schools compare favorably? Are we doing better or worse than the nation as a whole?

    Shibley: North Carolina is actually doing a little bit better than the nation as a whole and has one of the more recent conversions to a "green light" in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which just last year became a "green-light" school. I think there are less than 25 of those in the nation. So that's actually a really good distinction. We worked with UNC for a long time to get them there. I wish the rest of the system would do that, too, but so far that hasn't been the case.

    Kokai: Some relatively good news then on speech codes, but that isn't the only way that universities across the country are seeing some attacks on free speech. We've seen lots of cases in the news: Harvard, Yale, the University of Missouri. Sometimes even the attacks are not coming from the university itself, but from professors or even students. What are some of the main things that are striking you right now as red flags dealing with speech on campuses?

    Shibley: One of the real red flags that developed last year was an increase in hostility, and visible hostility, toward free speech from students, like you said - an increasing number of students who seemed dead set against free speech in a number of ways. Some would ban members of the press from attending their protests. There were some that flatly said that certain people weren't welcome at their protest. There were protests against free speech itself and the idea against free speech, probably most prominently at Harvard Law School.

    Free speech is beginning to be made a scapegoat for the other problems that campuses have. And that's something that, of course, FIRE wants to push back on because free speech is a solution to the problem, not the problem.

    Kokai: This has to be particularly disturbing. It's one thing for the campus officials, who don't like people complaining about what they're doing or saying bad things about them, to get up in arms and try to limit that. It's another thing for the students themselves to not want to engage in debate. That has to be of a special concern.

    Shibley: It is. It's a huge concern. Unfortunately, from what we can tell, obviously, colleges and universities are encouraging this kind of behavior by not only rewarding people who want to censor each other by agreeing to do it, and by sending the wrong messages, which they've been doing for decades about free speech.

    Frankly, students are coming into college with this idea that speech is something that's dangerous, something that should be limited, and something that the authorities should limit, even when it's them saying it.

    That is kind of a new development. It seems like a switch has kind of flipped in the last, probably, not more than two or three years. And whatever that's coming from, whether it's just simply a cultural shift, or whether it's something that's changed in K-12 education, it's certainly been a really disturbing development to see. Students used to be the most reliable advocates of their own rights. After all, it's their skin in the game. Unfortunately, that's less true than it has been.

    Obviously, you don't want to overstate the case, but I think a lot of the students who do support free speech - who support due process, who support the traditional rights that Americans enjoy - are being shouted down and basically shamed by people who want to blame other problems on the fact that these rights are out there. The very rights that make it possible for people to know about the problems they're talking about and to express their disapproval of it.

    Kokai: You work for a group that spends much of its time on the issues regarding free speech. So if we have this new problem, this flip being switched, as you mentioned, what do we do about it?

    Shibley: One thing that FIRE is doing is we are going further toward education efforts. We want to try to reach into the K-12 area educationally. We're not going to begin taking cases from high school students who are censored any time soon. FIRE has always been focused on higher ed. But the fact is if the ... people coming into higher ed don't believe in free speech, there's only so much that you can do to try to protect it, to try to defend it.

    So we need to be able to get to students earlier. And so we're working on ways to do that. We are also working on litigation that would help to further those goals because, thankfully, the court still largely supports free speech.

    Kokai: What happens to our campuses if we lose this support for free speech? What's going to be the downside for those who are listening and going, "Well, that sounds bad, but I'm not on a college campus, I don't have to worry about it"?

    Shibley: The huge downside, and it's going to be a visible downside, is that the wheels of progress are going to grind to a stop. And I don't just mean the wheels of social progress, which is how a lot of people think of progress. But the fact is this attitude is bleeding over into the sciences. It bleeds over into not just the social sciences, but also the hard sciences and a whole variety of different topics.

    You're going to start to see colleges be far less productive. You're going to see colleges get a reputation for not being places where people can do clear thinking. There are things that are unpopular with physicists or biologists or whatever. They may be right. They may be wrong. We have no idea. But if you have a culture where it's common to try to silence the opposition, if the opposition turns out to be right, you'll literally stop the advance of science.

    And that's going to be noticeable. And what's going to happen then is a huge decrease in the confidence that Americans have in institutions of higher education. You're going to see a decrease in funding, a decrease in popularity, and it's going to be quite visible.

    College is going to start to become considered a joke in many ways. Unfortunately, that's going to happen faster, I think, than a lot of people believe and certainly faster than colleges believe. They believe that they can consistently disregard and ignore these rights and nothing bad will happen. They're wrong about that.