The College Fix

We should be relentlessly vigilant against attempts to curtail it

Free speech is a bedrock constitutional right, perhaps the crown jewel among American civil liberties, and a necessary component to any free society—and so it makes perfect sense that so many people, campus radicals chief among them, would wish to curtail or destroy it. The latest such effort comes from the University of Maryland, where a student group, seizing upon the tragedy of a murdered young black man, have demanded that the school’s administration treat “hate speech” like “cult activity” and regulate it accordingly.

This is a by-now familiar type of demand: there is not a single pretext to which a certain kind of college student will not resort in order to quash free speech. Note, of course, the glaringly practical flaw to this proposal: even if the university were permitted to regulate “hate speech” (it’s not; see Constitution, United States, Amd. 1), there is no indication that “hate speech,” on or off campus, had anything to do with this murder, or that clamping down on it, however that would work, would have any genuine effect on preventing another such crime in the future.

But the point of anti-free-speech efforts isn’t to achieve some measurable outcome; it’s to stifle free speech. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that even the exercised and agitated student activists at the University of Maryland believe that “hate speech” is itself a genuine threat that must be treated like “cult activity.” Rather, they just wish to shut people up with whom they don’t agree. In a sense this is perfectly understandable; nobody wants to hear unpleasant things. But just because someone says something unpleasant doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to do so.

Once upon a time students might have known this. These days, it’s apparently not as clear. Nearly three-quarters of college students, for instance, believe that colleges should be able to restrict “slurs and other language on campus that is intentionally offensive to certain groups.” The failure of our students to grasp the basic precepts of free speech is staggering. It is a failure not just at the college level, but through high school on down: where our educational system might have once inculcated in the studentry a healthy civic respect for American speech freedoms, we now have seven out of every ten young adults believing that universities should be permitted to muzzle “offensive” language. Something has gone terribly wrong here.

It is likely that the University of Maryland will not, in fact, make any moves to classify any kind of “hate speech” as “cult activity.” But don’t worry: the university is looking to “strengthen sanctions for hate and bias.” So perhaps it will come to the same thing, in which case anti-speech student groups will be satisfied—and everyone else will be muzzled.

MORE: An inside look at the ‘Free Speech’ class UCLA blocked students from taking

MORE: Berkeley op-ed: ‘safety of marginalized’ more important than free speech

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