A progressive case for campus free speech

Campus speech controversies are nothing new, but in 2013, First Amendment advocates noticed a shift. Instead of provosts and deans cracking down, the students themselves were increasingly calling for censorship. An aversion to opposing views became medicalized, with undergrads reporting their peers for making them feel unsafe or triggering anxiety and stress disorders.

The prevailing sentiment, particularly at elite liberal arts colleges, holds that voicing conservative views on social issues like transgender rights and affirmative action is harmful to marginalized groups. Yet there’s a convincing progressive case to be made for free expression.

Liberal students who opposed the Vietnam War spearheaded the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, bucking a ban on campus political activism to hold protest rallies and sit-ins in the mid-1960s. Mario Savio, a grad student regarded as one of the movement’s key leaders, was an avowed socialist.

Comedian and liberal pundit Bill Maher blames President Donald Trump’s election on a national backlash against political correctness. While he skewers the president from his perch as host of HBO’s “Real Time,” he also calls out the left’s censorious impulses, correctly labeling the trend regressive rather than progressive.

For those who say free speech is merely a convenient excuse for far-right firebrands to target minorities with impunity, First Amendment lawyer Adam Goldstein offered a prescient warning.

“Here’s some wisdom for everyone who wants to impose speech restrictions to defend disadvantaged people: you will come to realize, in the fullness of time, that rules are enforced by the powerful,” Goldstein wrote on Twitter last year. “No matter how you rationalize it, you cannot benefit the oppressed by creating stronger tools of oppression. The safest thing you can do for marginalized populations is create a power structure with as little authority over them as possible.”

It’s both a moral miscalculation and a tactical error to cede free speech to conservatives. The right to think, write and speak without fear of punishment ought to be nonpartisan. The left must reclaim its legacy as a champion of expressive rights, evacuate the ideological safe spaces and rejoin the great American debate.

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