Let’s be clear about freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not refer to the unlimited right to say what you want; it refers to the unlimited right to say what you want on your own time or property. There’s a difference.
As a case in point, consider what’s happening on college campuses.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions filed a statement of interest into a student’s free speech lawsuit against his school Tuesday.
The Department of Justice called Los Angeles Pierce College’s speech policies an “unconstitutional prior restraint,” according to a press release obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. Plaintiff Kevin Shaw sued the school in March for banning free expression outside a “Free Speech Area” of approximately 600 square feet.
Pierce College told Shaw he could not distribute copies of the Constitution outside of an area making up around 0.003 percent of the campus. Attorneys from the free speech-focused nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) are representing the student in his lawsuit.
The DOJ alleges that Pierce College’s “Free Speech Area” placed illegitimate restrictions on the place, time, and manner of student expression on campus.
“Students like Kevin go to college to learn and grow in conversation with their peers, but a free speech quarantine like Pierce’s threatens to punish students who speak their minds in the wrong place,” said Marieke Tuthill Beck-Coon, FIRE’s director of litigation. “The law is clear: Public colleges like Pierce can’t force students into tiny slices of campus to exercise their First Amendment rights.”
Is Pierce College a public college? If it receives public funds, yes. I don’t know if it does, but I assume it does, as most colleges do.
Free speech is very important. But getting government out of education is even more important, at least for colleges. Because if government money did not flow into education, educators and students would be free to work out – in the context of a free, private marketplace – what is and is not acceptable speech on a campus.
Rationally speaking, no institution claiming to be a university would limit open expression to narrowly defined “free speech zones”. It’s a parody of education, which implies freedom of thought and ideas at the root of free expression. However, such irrationality is the perverted byproduct of government funding of education. The type of people who seek government funding for education are, for the most part, the same sort of left-wing, socialist, Marxist, control-freak types (totalitarians at heart) who want to run every last detail of everyone’s life. They’re the ones responsible for the insane political correctness dominating academia at present. Of course they don’t want freedom of expression, because alternate ideas of reason, self-responsibility, objectivity and liberty – especially in the humanities, philosophy and social sciences – would potentially win out and put their ridiculous ideas out of business.
That said, we have to be careful about forcing private or semi-private campuses to do things that the owners or operators of those universities do not wish to do. There’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution requiring private colleges – and all colleges should be private – from forbidding the expression of certain thoughts or ideas on their own property. Why a rational university would want to restrain free thinking remains a valid question, but it’s still a private entity’s right to decide this. That’s why the real answer – and ultimately the only answer – for ensuring freedom of speech on college campuses is to withdraw government funding completely and, if possible, immediately.
We will always have irrational, Marxist, politically correct and otherwise anti-intellectual types in the field of academia. But we don’t have to force taxpayers to fund them. Let them convince people to fund their toxic and pernicious ideas voluntarily. That will keep them on the margins where they belong, and the only place where they can hope to survive or flourish.
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