High Schools: New Front Lines in Battle for Free Speech
By: Sanford J Ungar
Tags: Journalism, Free Speech

University of North Texas (Unsplash)

Free speech continues to be broadly under attack in the United States, and a new front in the struggle has emerged in America’s high schools.

But the threat to free speech does not always take the form imagined or described in much of the public dialogue on this issue. The challenges to free expression follow no particular political line and are far more ubiquitous than most people realize.

Since the fall of 2017, student researchers at Georgetown University have been building the Free Speech Tracker, an online tool for monitoring and documenting threats to political, social, and intellectual expression in education, civil society and government. After examining and publishing online the details of nearly 200 episodes of actual or possible infringement of speech, our Free Speech Project finds serious, ongoing reason to worry about the survival of this fundamental building block of American democracy.

Conventional wisdom holds that today’s colleges and universities are, for the most part, rigid enclaves where, in an ironic turn of events, a liberal, even radical, establishment allegedly tends to suppress all opposing conservative or centrist voices.

Our tracker suggests otherwise. Of the incidents now documented, more than half took place in an academic environment, many at private institutions, which — unlike public institutions — are not strictly bound by the First Amendment. The popular stereotype of conservative voices being ruthlessly shut down is true in some instances, but usually involving the same few well-known people, who tend to arrive on campus with disruption, rather than a serious debate, on their minds.More striking, and counter-intuitive, however, is the fact that liberal or progressive views are also being suppressed, albeit with less fanfare and often out of public view altogether.

As Donald Trump’s presidency wears on, the turmoil on many campuses mostly reflects the extreme polarization in national politics. Dissent is now at least as likely to be suppressed on the left as on the right.

To be sure, our latest documentation demonstrates that some conservatives are still subject to the hecklers’ veto. In one prominent example, Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who believes that American feminism has undergone a damaging radicalization was the target of intense disruption when she spoke at the law school of Lewis & Clark College in Portland last year. Throughout her talk, protesters chanted refrains opposing her views and sometimes drowned her out by singing.

But more instances of suppression on the other side continue to emerge:

As part of an initiative to create “pop-up” courses in social justice at the University of Southern Maine, a former full-time professor offered students one course credit for taking a bus to Washington, D.C., to lobby Republican Sen. Susan Collins during the hotly contested confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. After the university learned of the unconventional plan, it permanently barred her from teaching there.

In an echo of the Vietnam War era, during a career fair at California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo, a small contingent of student peace activists attempted to disrupt other students’ access to representatives of Raytheon, a defense contractor; they handed out leaflets, sang and filmed their own protest. Weeks later, organizers of the demonstration received emails from university administrators, informing them they would be investigated for “violating multiple codes of conduct.” Before long, however, disciplinary proceedings were dropped.

But the most notable phenomenon we have observed recently is that free speech is being aggressively challenged at the high school level, including in student publications. In some cases, school administrators are squelching views they find outlandish or disagreeable, but the complaints often have less to do with ideology than with avoiding controversy of any sort. Often, after acting harshly, they have second thoughts or outsiders step in to calm the situation:

In most of these cases, the students being silenced are headed for college, where they can expect more complicated challenges to freedom of expression. Educating high school principals and school boards may be a critical step to improving free speech on college campuses and beyond.