Friday, May 9, 2008

Is there a solution for Campus Speech Codes?

Organizations such as FIRE aim to diminish the ambiguity that inhabits this topic:
The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America's colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity. FIRE's core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them

http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/4851.html?PHPSESSID=6a2ef7539c7a4a2b78d222055d64c8ab

The on going debate is highlighted in the following headlines:

On campus: Free speech for you but not for me?
Where Mary Beth Marklein, of USA TODAY explores the underlying debate that claims Colleges “seek to privilege one predominantly leftist point of view,” says Thor Halvorssen of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a Philadelphia-based non-profit founded four years ago. “Universities should welcome all perspectives, no matter where on the political spectrum.”

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-11-02-free-speech-cover_x.htm


The Unmentioned
"It is always the unreadable that occurs." -- Oscar Wilde
Posted by ChrisU on September 21, 2005
I agree with the decision of the courts on this particular speech code – “The Supreme Court has consistently held that statutes punishing speech or conduct solely on the grounds that they are unseemly or offensive are unconstitutionally overbroad.” After all, it's hardly constitutional to punish people for simply holding certain beliefs or opinions of others.

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/coursework010891.html

University of Delaware: On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes

Freedom of thought and expression is essential to any institution of higher learning. Universities and colleges exist not only to transmit existing knowledge. Equally, they interpret, explore, and expand that knowledge by testing the old and proposing the new. This mission guides learning outside the classroom quite as much as in class, and often inspires vigorous debate on those social, economic, and political issues that arouse the strongest passions. In the process, views will be expressed that may seem to many wrong, distasteful, or offensive. Such is the nature of freedom to sift and winnow ideas. Where banning speech often avoids consideration of means more compatible with the mission of an academic institution by which to deal with incivility, intolerance, offensive speech, and harassing behavior:

1. Institutions should adopt and invoke a range of measures that penalize conduct and behavior, rather than speech, such as rules against defacing property, physical intimidation or harassment, or disruption of campus activities. All members of the campus community should be made aware of such rules, and administrators should be ready to use them in preference to speech-directed sanctions.

2. Colleges and universities should stress the means they use best -- to educate -- including the development of courses and other curricular and co-curricular experiences designed to increase student understanding and to deter offensive or intolerant speech or conduct. Such institutions should, of course, be free (indeed encouraged) to condemn manifestations of intolerance and discrimination, whether physical or verbal.

3. The governing board and the administration have a special duty not only to set an outstanding example of tolerance, but also to challenge boldly and condemn immediately serious breaches of civility.

4. Members of the faculty, too, have a major role; their voices may be critical in condemning intolerance, and their actions may set examples for understanding, making clear to their students that civility and tolerance are hallmarks of educated men and women.

5. Student personnel administrators have in some ways the most demanding role of all, for hate speech occurs most often in dormitories, locker-rooms, cafeterias, and student centers. Persons who guide this part of campus life should set high standards of their own for tolerance and should make unmistakably clear the harm that uncivil or intolerant speech inflicts.

http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/freedom/aaup.html

American Civil Liberties Union: Hate Speech on Campus (12/31/1994)
In recent years, a rise in verbal abuse and violence directed at people of color, lesbians and gay men, and other historically persecuted groups has plagued the United States. Among the settings of these expressions of intolerance are college and university campuses, where bias incidents have occurred sporadically since the mid-1980s. Outrage, indignation and demands for change have greeted such incidents -- understandably, given the lack of racial and social diversity among students, faculty and administrators on most campuses. Many universities, under pressure to respond to the concerns of those who are the objects of hate, have adopted codes or policies prohibiting speech that offends any group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

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