Winning over Vassar

By Bill Jacobson, founder and publisher of "Legal Insurrection" as well as a clinical professor of law and director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School

I was invited to speak at Vassar College on the issue of hate speech and free speech. I’d spoken there several years earlier against the academic boycott of Israel, and I was invited at that time by the Vassar Conservative Libertarian Union, which was like nine students on the campus. So a couple of them were either still there, and so I was invited to speak about free speech.

And Charlottesville had just happened, and I said, “My concern is that people are going to try to use that to clamp down on free speech on campuses.” People who want to clamp down on free speech anyway would do that. And so they schedule it and I said, “Why don’t we title it, ‘Hate Speech’ Is Still Free Speech Even After Charlottesville”? I felt that would get attention and would really focus the issue.

When they put up the posters, whatever it was, two weeks before, three weeks before, the campus completely melted down. When I say completely melted down, they had two campus-wide meetings attended, according to reports, by hundreds of students, faculty, and administrators about what to do with me coming to campus to talk about this.

The rumors were spread … not just rumors, emails, including from the student government that I was a white supremacist coming to campus with my white nationalist followers to target minorities.

The student government executive board sent a letter to the president demanding they terminate my appearance. And I’m sure you have many lawyers who listen. They had a great line in there which I loved. They said, “We demand that you breach the contract for him to appear.”

… I think she could have done better, but she didn’t. And so I appeared and they had me escorted onto campus. I had to meet at campus security off campus, very tight security, bags checked, all that sort of things. They had protesters show up dressed like Antifa in protest.

So we were in what I think is the largest classroom there, lecture hall. If it’s not the largest, it’s one of them. I think capacity was over 200. It was over capacity, students overflowing into the hallways. So we probably had close to 300 students, and as soon as I started speaking, they realized, I think, they’d been had, that I was not who I was portrayed to be.

I spent 45 minutes with a basic lecture about the First Amendment, the history, why it’s important, why historically it’s actually protected left-wing speech, that the anti-war movement and the other movements could not have developed if not for the protections.

And then I went through the rest of the Bill of Rights and I went through each of the rights of the Bill of Rights and I said, “While they may not technically apply here on campus, I’m sure you don’t want the college administration to take your stuff without some process by which you could contest it, some due process.” I said, “You don’t want to give up that right here.”

And I said, “Certainly you don’t want the dean … ” And the dean was sitting there. He’d been at my speech four years earlier. And I said, “I’m sure you don’t want the dean to come and just search you because he feels like it without some probable cause to believe that you’ve done something wrong.”

And I went through a bunch of other things. I went through my favorite one, which is the Third Amendment, which nobody seems to know, which is you cannot quarter a soldier in a private home in time of peace. I said, “You don’t want the administration quartering security to sleep in your room.”

I went through all of these and I said, “Why is it you want all of these rights in the Bill of Rights on this campus, even if it technically doesn’t apply, but the one right you’re so willing and eager to give up are your free speech rights?” I said, “Why is that?” I said, “Maybe it’s because on this campus, you have power and therefore your speech is not going to be stifled. But go outside those gates and guess what? That’s Trump country, and you wonder why the nation—or at least half the nation—voted that way even though you don’t know anybody who voted for him.”

I said, “So if you give up First Amendment rights on this campus and you are willing to suppress speech on this campus, you have no right to complain if somebody does it to you beyond the fence and beyond the gate.”

It was a great 45 minutes, no interruptions, although they came ready for a fight.

No interruptions, and then we had question-and-answer. [An] hour and 15 minutes, the students lined up to ask [questions], including someone dressed in black. There were mostly good questions. I mean, I think questions that reflected that they’d never really had to think about these things before, but they were, let’s say, good-faith questions.

One thing it taught me is that there is a hunger out there on behalf of students to learn about what you would think are basic civic lessons that they’ve never had. And they’ve never had anybody explain it to them, and why it’s important, and why even allowing speech you consider offensive is really important.

SOURCE