Your constitutional right to free speech doesn’t end when you step foot on a university campus.
It’s bizarre that universities seem to think it does, as they create speech codes that, if applied to the letter, could punish students for freedom of speech.
This is why we are delighted that some of the speech codes at the University of South Florida and, ultimately, USF St. Petersburg have been amended (for our story on the codes, see the front page).
These codes still have a ways to go to protect the speech of students, and we hope that USF continues to amend their codes in support of the First Amendment rights of their students. Universities have the duty to support their students’ education, and telling students that constitutionally protected speech is prohibited on campus does not help them prepare for the future.
The truth is, we will encounter offensive speech wherever we go. We are blessed in the U.S. because we do not need to worry about legal repercussions for our speech. We can say what we want without punishment. This means we may be highly offended by the speech of others.
This week, an American university did a poor job of upholding the First Amendment rights of their students. You may know the story.
Last week, a video depicting the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter at the University of Oklahoma performing a racist chant was posted on the internet. What followed was a firestorm of criticism across the nation. Two leaders from the group were expelled from the university.
The news of this likely disgusted you. It definitely disgusted us. Perhaps you cheered a little when the president expelled the two leaders.
But let’s back up a second. The things the fraternity said, as horrible as they may be, are protected by the First Amendment.
You may object: The speech used by the students referred to violence.
“Speech doesn’t lose its constitutional protection just because it refers to violence,” according to Eugene Volokh, a free speech law professor at the UCLA School of Law and columnist at The Washington Post.
In some instances, speech truly threatening violence won’t be protected. The chant at the University of Oklahoma was protected by the First Amendment, Volokh says.
The University of Oklahoma had no business kicking these students out, especially without a formal hearing. This denied due process to the students, who were expelled by the university president and did not receive a hearing from the conduct board, as the University of Oklahoma’s code procedures clearly state, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
To be clear: If the speech of these students upset you, you should speak out against it. But the answer is not silencing the students and kicking them out of their university.
In the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
