‘Free Speech Zone’ and Doublespeak Online at Vanderbilt U

We read:

"On Vanderbilt University’s Common Place, a blog maintained by the university for first-year students, a new feature named "Free Speech Zone" was recently added. This feature is essentially a forum in which students may post. However, there are three rules in this forum: "No hate speech," "No paid advertisements," and "No organized crime."

This new feature, while seemingly innocuous and a good idea as a place for students to post messages, poses a threat to students’ understanding of free speech. For starters, members of the public cannot, consistent with First Amendment rights, be punished by the government for "hate speech," because most speech that is hateful or derogatory toward a given individual or group is constitutionally protected. However, university administrators often use the ambiguous term "hate speech" to punish students for speech they deem insensitive about any person or group based on an immutable characteristic such as race, gender, ethnicity, and so forth.

It is doublespeak to claim that a "free speech zone" does not include "hate speech." Perhaps even worse, claiming that this particular forum is a "free speech zone" at Vanderbilt falsely suggests that there is no free speech on the rest of campus when, in fact, Vanderbilt has promised that its whole campus is essentially a forum for free speech.

The term "free speech zone" has become associated with the implementation of policies allowing students to exercise their free speech rights only on a tiny portion of a campus, allowing campus administrators to quarantine and thereby limit the expression of unpopular views. In the last decade, many universities have eliminated their free speech zone policies, including Tufts University, Appalachian State University, and West Virginia University. It is therefore disheartening that Vanderbilt has recently implemented one, albeit in electronic form.

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