I’ve posted on this type of thing before, but we can never be reminded enough of the role universities play in the suppression of free speech. To that end, here’s University of Alabama professor of English Diane Roberts, writing on “free speech zones” in The New Republic:

Free speech zones first emerged in the late 1980s. And since then they have grown increasingly common at America’s public universities. Berkeley, the cradle of student activism, now restricts where and how campus demonstrations take place. Kansas State, Iowa State, and the universities of Houston, Mississippi, Central Florida, Southern California, and West Virginia — to name but a few — also restrict and regulate the location of speech. At these schools, the administration has selected certain (usually small) places, often located in obscure corners of the campus–safely out of sight of deans, donors, and the general public — as free speech zones. The conduct code at West Virginia University, for example, provides students with two out-of-the-way patches of ground, each about the size of a small classroom, on which to demonstrate. At the University of Mississippi, only the limited space in front of Fulton Chapel is available for student assembly. ‘Used to be we had a sea of freedom with some islands of restriction,’ comments Rick Johnson, a Tallahassee civil rights lawyer who attended FSU in the 1960s. ‘Now the campus is a sea of restriction with some islands of free speech.’

University administrators generally don’t talk much about these free speech zones — until students try to protest outside of one. James Nussbaumer, a member of the Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation at USC, was cited by campus cops for passing out anti-sweatshop leaflets near the university bookstore in 2001. Until the policy was recently suspended pending review by the chancellor, students at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater were banned from “political activity” — distributing pamphlets, discussing candidates for office, signing petitions — in residence halls and classroom buildings. And it’s not just left-wing activism that gets muzzled. An anti-abortion student group recently filed suit in federal court against the University of Houston, accusing administrators of violating their First Amendment rights by refusing to permit them to display photos of aborted fetuses in a central location on campus.

One of the ironies of the move toward free speech zones is that many of the university administrators instituting them are themselves veterans of the protest movements of the ’60s. FSU President Talbot ‘Sandy’ D’Alemberte, for instance, has been called an ‘icon of the First Amendment’ for forcing Florida courts to allow cameras in courtrooms and for protecting reporters’ right to keep their sources confidential. (In the early 1970s FSU was known as ‘the Berkeley of the South.’) But today’s restrictions aren’t primarily about ideology; they’re primarily about fund-raising — the demands of which have grown steadily in recent years. FSU officials, for instance, initially said protesters could not congregate in front of the administration building because visiting alumni liked to take photos around the fountain there, so the university needed to keep the place ‘looking nice.’ Loud, public controversy on campus, whether about the Middle East, reproductive rights, or sweatshop-made merchandise, is bad for p.r. And it’s also bad for relations with state legislators — the other source of funds for public colleges. In 2001 state officials actually tried to cut Florida Atlantic University’s funding because its theater department staged Corpus Christi, a play by Terrence McNally that chronicles the coming of age of a Christ-like gay man in modern-day Texas.

Administrators insist that the courts have upheld their right to regulate the ‘time, place, and manner’ of speech. Says D’Alemberte about the FSU protesters, ‘The only thing hampered was their desire to set up tents wherever they darn well wanted.’ But in the ’60s, when today’s administrators were protesting, universities were generally far more tolerant of raucous speech anywhere on campus. Johnson demonstrated against U.S. involvement in Vietnam and censorship of the campus literary magazine (at one point camping out for three weeks) on the same patch of grass where the anti-sweatshop students [recently arrested at FSU for pitching tents and singing “We Will Overcome”] were charged with trespass. ‘We weren’t even threatened with arrest,’ he says

I know many people will disagree with me on this point, but I continue to maintain that at institutions holding predominantly “left-liberal” worldviews (such as universities and media outlets, whose members’ allegiances tilt decidedly left, as evidenced by their voting preferences), debate is often sacrificed on the alter of officially-sanctioned narratives — narratives wrapped in the semantic garb of “tolerance” and “neutrality” (code words, these days, for “no dissent” and “no judgment,” respectively). This is the what the PC culture has wrought.

Of course, you’re free to disagree with me — right here on the site, too!

I ain’t afraid of a little free speech…

—–