Free speech: Students, institutions and solutions

It’s often impossible to escape news of free speech being suffocated within colleges in the United States. We see the media portraying colleges as having lost their place in society as the last bastion of free speech and thought. And it’s true; administrations have been creating safe spaces on campuses, ideas from books that may elicit “triggers” from students–“The Great Gatsby” by Fitzgerald and “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf to name two–are now often deemed optional, and prominent speakers on both the political left and right have been disinvited from giving talks on campuses. Despite all the press attention, we see very few explanations on how we got to this state of tiptoeing with regards to free speech.

Let’s start with the current public sentiment towards the First Amendment. In a 2017 Newseum Institute survey, when asked if the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees, 31 percent of adult respondents agreed. 

But adults start to develop their opinions somewhere, and in a country where roughly 33 percent of the population has a college degree but 88 percent hold a high school diploma, most Americans initiate their formative thought processes in high school. Since 2004, the Knight Foundation has been collecting data on political values held by high school students and their data clearly shows the direction of the trend towards less freedom. 

The 2004 study gave insight in the minds of high schoolers and the extent to which they believed in the sanctity of the First Amendment. While 83 percent of students believed that unpopular opinions are allowed to be expressed, 30 percent believed that musicians shouldn’t be allowed to sing songs with lyrics others may find offensive. When comparing the 2004 results to those from 2016, mass media touts the results as “stronger support” for the First Amendment because 91 percent of respondents supported the First Amendment when asked the same question of whether or not unpopular opinions are allowed to be expressed. They didn’t look hard enough. Fifty-five percent of respondents believed that people shouldn’t have the right to express offensive speech in public and 57 percent believed against the right to exhibit offensive speech on social media platforms, signifying a growth in anti-free speech sentiment. 

While different high schools in different states have varying standards of civic education, all states do require coursework in civics or social studies to graduate. What remains the same between all is the mechanism by which students learn: teachers. The values that teachers impart on their students are what help define them and their political beliefs. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that high school teachers value other freedoms over freedom of speech, namely,  freedom of religion. 

Comparatively, when asked the same question of the most important freedom guaranteed in the first amendment, students overwhelmingly answered with freedom of speech as more important than of religion (65 percent vs. 25 percent).When values of teachers don’t highlight freedom of speech, important gaps in imparting critical American values to students become apparent, of which a defining example is the right to burn the American flag as a political statement. Regardless of our beliefs on the issue, Texas v. Johnson clearly defines flag-burning as a constitutional right, and yet, 75 percent of high schoolers believe that flag burning is illegal, from the 2004 study. From the same survey, 70 percent of teachers didn’t believe that the flag should be allowed to be burned. While I can’t say that teachers are imparting their own values on students (causation), I do think that implications of the First Amendment aren’t being communicated to students, namely the idea that while free speech isn’t an absolute (one can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater), it’s pretty damn close. 

Getting back to college campuses, if the analysis from high schools can glean anything, it’s that the burden to prioritize free speech doesn’t just fall on the students. Believe me, I’ll be the first to call out ignorant students who are quick to cry “cultural appropriation.” 

Take, for example, the ostracization of Bowdoin students who threw a tequila-themed party last spring and showed up all wearing sombreros. Instead of even addressing the students who claimed that the event “tainted the experiences of college students,” I take issue with the institutional response of administrators at the college establishing an “investigation” into a possible “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Are these actions indicative of an institution devoted to freedom of speech or of one without it? According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 33.9 percent of public universities use policies that “severely restrict” the right to free speech and 52.8 percent have policies that narrowly restrict free speech. If students do indeed [incorrectly] believe in limiting free speech, how are they supposed to amend their values in an environment that enforces their unlawful principles?

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