SILENCE IN THE SOUTH? What Happens on Campus Doesn't Stay on Campus
Part 4 of 4: Our institutions are being transformed by a wave of recent college graduates who are openly hostile to the concept of free speech
(This is part four of a four-part series, “Silence in the South?” covering the Young Americans for Liberty v. the University of Alabama System. Here’s parts one and two and three. )
There’s a powerful instinct to dismiss this whole campus free speech thing as much ado about nothing.
Why should working men and women care if some college kid has to stand on a certain patch of grass to fuss about the outrage of the day?
Because, as writer Bari Weiss recently observed, what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus.
People have wrongly assumed that all of the recent craziness at our universities would stay there, isolated in the ivory tower of higher education, while college graduates moved-on into the real world. They’d grow up and grow out of their immature thinking as they met with the responsibilities and opportunities of life.
America’s strong institutions — our families, our churches, our schools, our industries, our government — would then refine and shape them into the next generation of leaders.
“This isn’t at all what happened,” Weiss wrote on her Substack, Common Sense. “Rather than those institutions shaping young people in their image, it’s the young people who are fundamentally reshaping those institutions in their own.”
Every new generation thinks it’s going to change the world. This one just might do it, but it won’t be for the better.
A full third of college students support “instituting speech codes, or codes of conduct that restrict potentially offensive or biased speech,” according to a recently released Knight Foundation-Ipsos survey.
Now they’re bringing that hostility towards the First Amendment into our workplaces, where rather than CEOs laughing at their demands to fire employees with the “wrong view,” their hollow, social media-fueled campaigns are being taken seriously, even agreed to.
And regular people are getting the message.
They’re shutting up.
They’re not talking. They're not sharing.
And if this continues long enough, they’ll even stop thinking.
Where are these woke mobs learning this sort of intolerance?
Pretty much everywhere these days, but a great deal of the time they’re learning it on college campuses.
That’s doubly concerning because universities were established to ensure knowledge was collected, improved upon, and passed on. Its graduates were supposed to be the antidote to the illiterate and ignorant book burning mob. They weren’t supposed to form the mob themselves.
The University of Alabama System defends its right to establish free speech zones by writing in their brief to the state’s high court that there isn’t “a single allegation that anyone has ever been prevented from speaking on campus.”
(That may be technically accurate, but I also don’t think Kim Jong-un has never heard a single allegation from one of his subjects about being prevented from speaking in Pyongyang. That surely must mean North Koreans believe they can speak freely, right?)
The university’s decision to make that argument reveals how little their leadership and lawyers understand the people’s concern.
It’s the lesson.
It’s the lesson these policies are teaching.
The university is telling students that it’s entirely proper for a public, tax-payer supported institution to implement a speech code that:
Requires members of its community to complete a detailed application within three business days of the time they wish to speak somewhere outside,
Makes approval of that application subject to at least 24 different conditions,
Reserves special areas of the community for “spontaneous activities of expression” where people may speak without making an application … so long as the subject “generally” entered their mind less than 48-hours previously, and
Applies to all speech, even a single member of their community speaking alone.
Graduates then take that lesson out into the real word, where they’re seeking to institute the same level of control.
The university should have known the people would react to such a threat by demanding that their lawmakers take action, by demanding a law like the Alabama Campus Free Speech Act.
And now, they’re demanding that the university obey it.
Who Decides, Anyway?
During a free speech debate in 2006 at the University of Toronto, the late writer Christopher Hitchens asked a telling question to the audience, many of whom supported government regulation of speech.
“To whom would you delegate the task of deciding … what you could read? Who would relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone to whom you would give this job? Does anyone have a nominee? You means there’s no one in Canada good enough to decide what I can read or hear? But there’s a law that says there must be such a person, or there’s a subsection of some piddling law that says it. Well, to hell with that law then.”
If, after having read all of the legal arguments in Young Americans for Liberty v. The University of Alabama System, one happens to agree with the university’s position, then one must ask the same question “Hitch” asked those many years ago:
Who decides?
Who decides if a student’s wish to speak his or her mind outside of the humanities building on Tuesday morning is reasonable?
Who decides if the topic that a student is speaking about in one of those “Spontaneous Activities of Expression” zones has the appropriate mental time-stamp, that it indeed entered his or her mind less than 48-hours ago?
I’m sure the University of Alabama System is filled to the brim with smart people, but I wouldn’t trust any of them — nor myself — with such a job.
And neither have the courts.
Speech First, an advocacy group that defends First Amendment rights nationwide, filed a brief with the Alabama Supreme Court that references a Chicago ordinance that prohibited people from selling books on the sidewalk without a license.
The city claimed it wasn’t violating anyone’s free speech rights because the ordinance was a “mere formality in which officials simply determine whether the applicant has conformed to applicable provisions in the ordinance.”
A federal appeals court disagreed and said that it was unconstitutional because there wasn’t anything in the ordinance that “curtails the discretion of city officials in granting a license.”
And there isn’t anything in the university’s policy that curtails the discretion of school officials in granting permission to speak outside, either.
Going Forward
We would do well to remember that every idea that is useful or beautiful or true was once new. Its very utterance challenged orthodoxy, and often brought scorn, sometimes even death.
But those ideas also brought us to where we are today — a world that, despite what you see in the news, is more peaceful and prosperous than ever before.
Just imagine where we’d be if those ideas had never been thought of, or spoken about, or put to paper.
Imagine where we’d be if generation upon generation hadn’t built upon those ideas, one thought at a time, creating the massive edifice of human knowledge that supports our lives, but that we take for granted.
Imagine where we’d be if our ancestors hadn’t the courage and wisdom to strike out from the old and into the new, creating a place apart from all others, a different place, a place designated for people to freely express and share their ideas — a zone of free speech.
Thankfully, they did.
It’s called the United States of America.
And Alabama is one of them.
(J. Pepper Bryars is Alabama’s only reader-supported conservative journalist. You can support his writing by subscribing at https://jpepper.substack.com/subscribe.)