California liberals and Florida conservatives find a common cause: Censoring school speech
People have always felt a strong impulse to censor speech they don’t like, and schools have long been where controversies over expression arise. But recent attacks on school speech from both the left and the right have taken new and deeply troubling forms. Regardless of our politics, we must reaffirm that schools are places where all ideas should be able to be expressed and debated.
Law students on the left tried to silence speakers they found offensive on two recent occasions. At UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco last month, the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society attempted to host an event featuring Ilya Shapiro, the executive director of the Center for the Constitution at Georgetown Law. Students objected to Shapiro’s presence due to offensive tweets he posted about President Biden likely appointing a “lesser Black woman” to succeed Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court.
When Shapiro tried to speak, student protesters drowned him out with shouting, table banging and profanity. The disruption kept the event from happening.
A similar episode took place at Yale Law School last month. The Yale Federalist Society was hosting a panel that featured Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative nonprofit that promotes religious liberty. The students objected to Waggoner’s presence because of her positions and litigation against gay and transgender rights. Students disrupted the event, though Waggoner was ultimately able to speak.
The students who engaged in this behavior invoked freedom of speech as their defense: They said they were just engaging in speech, albeit speech that kept the featured speakers from being heard. But freedom of speech does not include a right to shout down others. Otherwise, the only speech that would be allowed would be that which no one finds controversial enough to silence.
It was completely appropriate for students to object to Shapiro and Waggoner, but they should have done so in a manner that wasn’t disruptive to their speech.
A few years ago, when an Israeli Supreme Court justice came to speak at UC Berkeley Law School, a group called Students for Justice in Palestine indicated that they were going to disrupt the event. I sent a letter to the school community saying that while all ideas and views could be expressed, disruption of any speaker would be punished. Fortunately, the student protesters decided to hand out leaflets and hold their own event instead.
It’s not just the left that is threatening free speech. Recently enacted legislation in Florida bars public colleges from adopting any instructional materials that espouse or promote certain ideas about race and gender. The law prohibits educators, including college faculty, from subjecting “any student or employee to training or instruction” about such ideas, including the relevance of past racial injustice.
Many states have now adopted laws banning the teaching of “critical race theory” in schools. Such laws violate the First Amendment in their vagueness and over-breadth. They are inconsistent with the central tenet of the First Amendment: All ideas should be able to be expressed.
Like the hecklers at UC Hastings and Yale, these laws attempt to silence views that some deem unacceptable. Even worse, they use the power of the government to do so.
The only way to ensure that our speech will be safe tomorrow is to protect the speech we don’t like today. We don’t need freedom of speech to protect the ideas we like; we need it to protect those we loathe.
