Transcripts For CSPAN3 Discussion Focuses On Free Speech On

President ial debates on cspan. Listen live on the cspan radio app or watch any time on demand at cspan. Org. Next, law professors discuss the constitution and free speech at colleges, including examples where the First Amendment was exercised. This is an hour and a half. Good afternoon and welcome to the George Washington University Law school. Im susan karamanian, the associate dean for international and comparative legal studies. Im delighted to introduce this distinguished panel on a topic that has been front and center in the news over the past year, and that is the issue of freedom of speech on campus. The idea for this panel came last year, when developments were breaking at Yale University and the university of missouri. Coincidentally, the book of my colleague, and one of our panelists, professor Catherine Ross, was just coming out. Professor rosss book is lessons in sensorship, how schools and court subvert students First Amendment rights, and it came out in 2015, under Harvard University press. We had hoped to do something last spring but time passed, and in some respect the passage of time was a good thing, because this issue is not going away. And so events that play themselves out to a certain extent, yet i think its appropriate, as we begin the Academic Year that we have the opportunity to examine the topic of freedom of speech, particularly in the context of a university. Universities typically have been considered places for the Broad Exchange of ideas, including unpopular ideas. Over the past year, the concept has been challenged on various university campuses. Last week, a dean at the university of chicago wrote incoming students and announced that trigger mornings had no place at that university. The dean cautioned against intellectual safe places and also raised questions about withdrawing invitations to speakers merely because the message of the speaker could be controversial. This panel will examine legal and other dimensions of whether and how speech and expression can be regulated on campus, consistent with the overall educational objective of the university. We have a very distinguished panel here today, but we also have in our audience a number of academics, scholars, practitioners that have worked in this area. I see my colleague, Professor John bansaf, who has been front and center on some of these issues throughout his life, while here at George Washington, and other universities, and we have individuals who have played an Important Role in shaping the jurisprudence. Today, we will first hear from my colleague, professor Catherine Ross. As i mentioned, her newest book is lessones in censorship. This book has been named the best book on the First Amendment of 2015 by concurring opinions. Professor ross has spoken on free speech on university campuses, at many places over the past year, including the university of chicago, stanford, harvard, and yale, as well as the Constitution Center with which were going to learn a little bit more in just a second with, also on the panel was dean fred lawrence, and jeffrey rosen. She has recently joined the board of advisers of the First Amendment Library Project of the foundation for individual rights in education, which will make key First Amendment documents online. Professor ross has a distinguished record having taught or visited at harvard, princeton, university of pennsylvania, boston college, and st. Johns school of law. Professor ross will give us an overview of the areas where there have been tension on campus, and attempt to try to make sense of the situations and how we can assess what has gone right and what has gone wrong. Then we will hear from fred lawrence, the former dean of the George Washington University Law school, and also the former president of brandeis university, who is the ceo and secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa society. First, welcome home, fred. [ applause ] second secondly, secondly, Dean Lawrence is a former assistant u. S. Attorney for the Southern District of new york, where he became chief of the civil rights unit. He was a professor at Boston University school of law before joining the George Washington University Law school, and he is the author of punishing hate biased crimes under american law published by Harvard University press in 2002. Dean lawrence will speak about the issue from the angle of a former academic administrator and in particular will focus on what does this mean for the future of universities . And then finally, well hear from g. W. Law professor jeffrey rosen, who is also the president and the chief executive officer of the national Constitution Center in philadelphia. Hes a contributing editor to the atlantic and nonresident senior fellow at the brookings institution. Professor rosens new book is titled louis d. Brandeis american prophet and came out earlier this year at yale press. The Los Angeles Times has called professor rosen one of the nations most widely read and influential legal commentators. Professor rosen will examine the issue of freedom of speech on campus in the broader, in a broader context, principally looking at public discourse, as well as politics. After the principal presentations, we will open the floor for questions and discussion. Please note that, if you wish to speak, we will have a microphone. Identify yourself and also note that, because this is being recorded today live by cspan, that, that information will be available to the public. So lets welcome the panel and professor ross, the floor is yours. [ applause ] thank you very much, susan. Not only for those very gracious introductions, but for really being the motivating organizer of this event, and im just back from a sabbatical year, im really pleased to see so many old friends and some new faces as well. My initial research in this area, as susan mentioned, focused on Public Schools from grades k through 12, and i should note that nearly 90 of American Children receive their compulsory education in Public Schools. My work culminated in lessones in censorship and in that book, argued that learning to take freedom of speech seriously, to understand why we have it and what it means, and lookithe abi of that freedom is essential to xhokcy and the task of learning about that liberty has historically been assigned to our Public Schools. I show that our schools today failed to search or to honor free speech principals, the that he lower courts often let them get away with it, violating students constitutional rights. And i urge that schools teach the meaning of liberty by allowing students to live it, to exercise it. The Supreme Court has ruled that the strict scrutiny generally applicable to government regulation of speech doesnt apply in grades k through 12, though it does apply in almost every other context. Instead, a more relaxed legal doctrine governs students speech rights and the justification for that is the very important function that schools serve in our society, in preparing students to participate in democracy as citizens, and also to earn a living. They have messages they have to convey and they need a certain degree of order in order to do that, so students may not disrupt the functioning of schools, and then there are a few other particular guidelines and tests that the court has developed. So schools can control much more speech than the government can control elsewhere, web were talking about schools, and censorship both in school and elsewhere includes both silencing speech before it occurs, which we call prior restraint, which was the original free speech doctrine, no prior restraint of speakers, as well as punishing speech after the speaker has expressed his or her views. Lessones in censorship shows in grades k through 12, School Officials have pressed to expand the boundaries of each kind of speech that the court has allowed them to censor, and they often offer in excuse at all, no rationale for a weak or even laughable reason like a School Administrator had to spend ten minutes talking to the student and there were other things they didnt do, or some kids were whispering to each other, which one wise federal judge said, thats just the background noise of school, what are you talking about . And these attitudes have led at least one student to say my school is all about censorship. What are some of the other things that schools do that lead students to believe that censorship is the regime of the day . Schools violate expressive rights by silencing controversial ideas, in the classroom, where there should be robust debate, and outside the classroom, including criticisms and parodies of School Officials, even though the right to criticize the powerful is one of the things that distinguishes a free society from a totetalitarian societtalitariaa. Key to what is going on in college kaucampuses, public cens any speech that anyone finds offensive enough to complain about. By the time my book appeared last fall as dean karamanian pointed out, i was not working behind the scenes to arrange these distractions. Words like coddled have been applied to College Students who seek to be protected from offense, and some people have suggested this might be related to helicopter parenting, to a generation of young people who have never had to fend for themselves in the world, but i suspect theres something more pernicious going on. I see a link to what students learned and what they failed to learn in grades k through 12. Schools have failed to teach the meaning of free speech, have failed to demonstrate that we mean what we say when we talk about individual liberty, and they have given precisely the wrong message. They have taught students that its okay to suppress speech that offends someone or seems controversial. School rules too often outline, outlaw and punish harmful words or hurtful words between students that the constitution clearly protects from calling one a poopoo head on the playground, to racial and homophobic words essential to our age. I will come back to this because thats a key to whats going on, on our campuses, and i have to say one last thing about k through 12. And a doctrine of the First Amendment noticed the hecklers veto. It is actually kind of exactly the reverse of what the doctrine says. The doctrine says that when a speaker enrages a mom, the job of the state through the police is to control the mob and protect the speaker so that the speaker can continue to speak. Instead schools teach that the mob can, indeed, and will silence the speaker. Just one example. Young man in a high school in east hampton, new york, known as a playground to the rich and famous, Hillary Clinton is fundraising there this week, repeated something that hed heard someone else say that was a rude sentiment about hispanics. Over heard by hispanic students, very large part of that population, people who do the work during the summer, they believed that this young man was the originator of the sentiment and believed in it. And they threatened his life. He was whisked first to the nurses office, and then off campus, escorted by police, and he was suspended for the remainder of the Academic Year. This event took place in september. He was forced to stay home the entire school year, while he was threatened at home, at his parttime job, which he had to quit. Every time he left his house. He begged for an opportunity to explain himself to his peers either in writing, over the loud speaker or at an assembly and the school said no, you cannot speak. Seeing this, the hispanic students, im lumping them together. Of course, theyre not one group but the leaders said he was suspended. He hasnt explained himself. Clearly he is guilty. It took several years before he was cleared by a state inquiry and it became clear that his speech rights had been violated. Meantime, hed had to move to california in order to feel safe and be able to resume his education. That is a very dramatic example, but only one of many in which the hecklers veto rules in our nations schools. Speech expressly protected by the constitution, compared to only 24 of boomers and 12 of people over 70. So how does this all relate to what is going in the Nations College campuses . When i say colleges, im including community colleges, fouryear colleges, and universities with graduate programs. Lets start with the purpose of education, to be able to learn how to question perceived truth, how to evaluate it, and how to think critically. Two of the most influential and best statements about the centrality of free speech to the purpose of universities both came from the university of chicago. Another came from yale in the early 70s. Susan has explained why chicago is so relevant today because of this letter that has gotten a lot of attention in the news. And it first was written in 1967 by harry calvin, a professor of the law school, and one of the most eminent First Amendment scholars of his time. It says the mission of the university is the discovery, improvement and dissemination of knowledge and added a university cannot insist that all its members favor a given view of social policy, however compelling and appealing that view may be. It must respect free inquiry and a diversity of viewpoints, and this led to the pithy statement in brief a good university, like socrates, will be upsetting, a truth that seems to be missing in much of the debate today. In the 1960s students viewed that administrators would silence their speech when the students pressed for more personal liberty, liberty to challenge authority, to engage in political protests, to force razzi off campus and freedom to enjoy sex, drugs and rock n roll, a battle they largely won. But this time around the most vocal students are demanding that College Administrators silence their professors and their peers. Very odd turnaround for those of us who experience the first round of student activism. The students ask to be protected from hurtful words, sentiments, even gestures and they seek the coercive power of authority to enforce social norms that may well be laudable and may even have their genesis in the values of the 14th amendment respect, dignity and equality, regardless of race, ethnicity, jeb der, gender identity and so forth, laudable as the proclaimed goals are, the means some students advocate for fly in the face of First Amendment expressive rights of other students, faculty, and other people on campus. This Development Led to a second statement from the university of chicago and in 2014, the University President asked Jeffrey Stone, again, a Law School Professor and a leading scholar of the First Amendment, that came up with a new set of principles that sounded an awful lot like the calvin principles. That report said its not the proper role of the university to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Concerns about civility and Mutual Respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, because open and vigorous debate is an essential part of the universitys mission. And this is the context in which chicagos dean of students wrote to the freshmen about to metr metriculate last week in the letter distributed to all of you today and which made headlines around the country. The headlines focus on trigger warnings but the scope was much broader. In fact, we might think of the letter itself as a sort of gentle trigger warning. Being upset may be part of your education here at the university of chicago. And that may be part of our intent or it may be unavoidable, given what we do. And in response to questions the dean said nobody in chicago will be surprised we have quite a reputation for our support for Free Expression. Students coming to chicago, the dean said, should anticipate challenge and even discomfort, even discomfort, not so kimpb from the upsetting experience that socrates promised. There are several things chicago says it wont do, and i think these provide a very good model for other universities. No trigger warnings, no cancellation of inviting controversial speakers, classic hecklers, sorry, classic prior restraint, no condemnation of spell electule safe sprays spaces from individuals can retreat with perspectives at odds with their own. Members must have freedom to espouse and explore a wide range of ideas and the word explore is really important because one of the things that people are doing when theyre students, both because of their age and because of the process of education is theyre exploring. Theyre exploring ideas identities and may say things they will later disavow but how will they test whether they want to be different people than their parents. Look at other forms of culture, beliefs. Students coming from a religious home, want too think about a more secular life. Secular student may explore religious ideas. Its a period of growt