What Happened to Free Speech on College Campuses?
About a year ago, I joined an alumni advisory board for my fraternity at Syracuse University. Sigma Chi is the largest and most respected college fraternity in the country. It was founded in 1855 at the University of Miami of Ohio by Benjamin Piatt Runkle around the enduring principles of courage, wisdom, integrity, high-ambition, self-control, courtesy, and fidelity. As pledges, we were all taught by older brothers about the Jordan Standard which we were required to memorize. The Jordan Standard represents the minimum requirements for all pledges and brothers to live by. The Standard was declared by Isaac M Jordan to be “that of admitting no man to membership in Sigma Chi who is not believed to be:”
· A Man of Good Character
· A Student of Fair Ability
· With Ambitious Purposes
· A Congenial Disposition
· Possessed of Good Morals
· Having a High Sense of Honor and
· A Deep Sense of Personal Responsibility
It is hard to argue with those principles. So it was that several of my 1983 Sigma Chi brothers and I felt the need to give back as active mentors and leaders to our undergraduate chapter of over 75 young men. These days, it’s not hard to imagine some might view these principles as old-fashioned or worse but we decided to dig-in and help our younger brothers live up to these principles and by doing so, join an illustrious group of over 350,000 alumni whose ranks include: Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th President of the United States, Barry Goldwater, David Letterman, Brad Pitt, Woody Harrelson, John Wayne and Drew Brees. Our alumni board told the undergrads our stories like when my brother and friend John Honis were hired at our first post-graduate job at JP Morgan on Wall Street. We thought that we were smart and well-qualified, but it didn’t hurt that one of our Syracuse Sigma Chi alumni brothers who graduated a few years earlier, was a rising star at the bank. John and I went from living at our 100-year-old chapter house in the Spring of 1983 to living on the upper west side of New York with a third older brother who also worked at the bank. Sigma Chi is a helluva network to have in a very competitive world.
Ok enough of promoting my fraternity. That’s not the point of this post. Rather, the point is to describe first-hand how our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms are under attack at our American colleges and universities. We were not thinking along those lines when we formed the alumni board because our focus was to upgrade our pledging and initiation processes where quality had slipped a bit over the years. Instead, after a few weeks in our alumni roles, the chapter received a notice of charges being filed for hazing the pledges. Apparently one of the pledges returned home to Long Island over Thanksgiving break last year and played ice hockey with some friends and got a black eye in the process. When he returned to classes, one of his professors asked him about the black eye to which he responded with the truth. Unfortunately, the professor didn’t believe the student and thought he was covering up for a fraternity hazing incident and he reported it to the university judicial board.
Now I know what some of you are thinking. Fraternity? Have you seen the movie Animal House? Well most fraternities and sororities are not like that, including Sigma Chi. We conducted our own investigation before the university even started theirs and it was rigorous. As alumni brothers, we were not going to put our reputations on the line defending bad behavior. Not only did we find the account of playing hockey completely truthful with tons of supporting evidence including airline tickets and corroboration from his parents and others, but we investigated the entire pledge process to ensure there wasn’t even a hint of hazing.
Now for a university that has a respected law school, you’d think the university judicial code would follow constitutional principles like due process. Think again. There is nothing resembling due process at Syracuse, or most university judicial systems for that matter. When a student and their parents sign their college contracts, they sign up for the university judicial process which, among other things includes that if you are accused, you must represent yourself and cannot hire a lawyer. The best you can do is find a university employee who can act as an advisor during the trial, although that person cannot speak at the trial. Another beauty is that, although the accused can call witnesses, the judicial board can unilaterally decide not to allow the witness to participate.
I could go on, but it is so ridiculous, I won’t bore you with the details. Luckily, we were able to the secure the help of a senior law professor, Greg Germain, who had a ton of experience representing fraternities and sororities. He was even more appalled than we were about this blatant institutional hypocrisy. After a lot of hard work by the Professor Germain, undergraduate brothers and the alumni team, we were able to show there was clearly no basis for the charges. Grudgingly, the judicial board agreed to drop the penalties which included expulsion from the university. However, this was conditioned on the undergrad leadership team admitting wrong-doing and agreeing to probation and “culture training.” Imagine that. Innocent but still guilty. As of this writing, we are considering suing the university for violation of a New York State statute (Article 78) to completely expunge the record of these innocent young men.
So, the university clearly does not care about due process, only the results of their policy which is decidedly anti-Greek. They are explicit about their animus towards fraternities and sororities whose numbers have decreased by two thirds since 1983 when we graduated. Strangely, most of these defunct Greek chapter houses have been razed with brand new university buildings in their place. And the Sigma Chi chapter house, which is owned by the alumni association, sits on a prime piece of real estate. I wish the reason for lack of due process was solely due to Syracuse wanting our land, but it is really more about not tolerating any competition with “official university culture.” Joining a fraternity or sorority is a form of speech and expressing your values. They are organizations that choose their own members who share those values. One of the great changes we observed as alumni is that our chapter was far more racially diverse than when we were there. In fact, Sigma Chi is the most diverse fraternity on campus.
But don’t take my word about Syracuse University’s intolerance of free speech. According to a survey published by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Syracuse has been one of the nation’s worst colleges for free speech since 2011. It ranks 51st in the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings which evaluate campus environments for free and open discussion of controversial issues. Sixty one percent of students surveyed said there had been times when they felt they could not express an opinion on a subject because of how other students, a professor or the administration would respond. This reluctance to speak freely is even more pronounced among students who consider themselves conservative, according to the report. Eighty-three percent of conservative students said they have self-censored. Syracuse University said in a response to the FIRE survey, that it must “balance free expression with its obligations under state and federal law to maintain an environment devoid of discrimination or harassment aimed at certain protected groups.”
Free speech controversies throughout the American educational establishment (including secondary schools) have little effect on most Americans, and yet they get a lot of attention because schools traditionally have been forums of open debate. College students once ferociously guarded their free speech rights. It started with the first great student protests which erupted at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, when a former student was arrested by the university for distributing civil rights leaflets. Free speech was viewed as so important and vital to our democracy that over 4,000 students demonstrated on campus, and 800 went to prison.
To see how much things have changed, The University of California, Berkeley, erupted into near-riots in 2017 during protests against conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos. In that same year, when political scientist Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury College in Vermont, protesters got so rowdy that a professor accompanying him was injured. Last year, the ACLU filed an amicus brief arguing that Arkansas State University couldn’t restrict student speech to designated “free expression areas,” saying that such a policy “significantly burdens all speech” and is “intolerable on a public campus.”
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU):
“The First Amendment to the Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content. Restrictions on speech by public colleges and universities amount to government censorship, in violation of the Constitution. Such restrictions deprive students of their right to invite speech they wish to hear, debate speech with which they disagree, and protest speech they find bigoted or offensive. An open society depends on liberal education, and the whole enterprise of liberal education is founded on the principle of free speech.
How much we value the right of free speech is put to its severest test when the speaker is someone we disagree with most. Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible: When we grant the government the power to suppress controversial ideas, we are all subject to censorship by the state. Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has fought for the free expression of all ideas, popular or unpopular. The ACLU believes that more speech — not less — is the answer most consistent with our constitutional values.”
In a stark irony to illustrate the problem, when I searched Google using the search term “free speech college campus debate”, the ALCU article was in the top 10 results. Google provides what they consider a representative excerpt from the article as users decide which results to drill into. Here’s what they displayed for this ALCU piece.
“To be clear, the First Amendment does not protect behavior on campus that ... promotes a climate of robust and uninhibited dialogue and debate open to all.”
The article is rightfully supportive of free speech on college campus’ but the if you just read the excerpt, “To be clear, the First Amendment does not protect behavior on campus that,” someone may come away with the impression that the ALCU doesn’t support free speech on campus. This is just a subtle but powerful way that Big Tech conspires to suppress ideas that does not agree with. The 2020 political campaign was full of examples of how Twitter, Facebook and Google shut down voices that were contrary to their beliefs, including from the President of the United States.
Several weeks ago, I had my own experience with censorship on social media when Facebook prevented me from advertising a blog post titled, The Politics of COVID, because they deemed it to be too controversial. For those of you who have been reading and listening for this past year, you know that I try to be pretty middle ground and support my opinions with research and facts. In my opinion, Facebook was trying to silence my voice because I was questioning the so-called experts on government COVID policy. I would think that for an issue of such huge importance to the global economy, we would want more discussion not less. If this could happen to my little blog, I imagine how often it occurs across Facebook's vast social network, where sadly 43% of Americans get their news, according to Pew Research.
The United States has approximately 56.4 million kids attending K-12 schools in 2020 and another 19.7 million attending colleges and universities. That represents more than 23% of our population as students within our education bureaucracy, the vast majority of which is funded by government. If that bureaucracy is becoming less tolerant of free speech, how can we expect the adults that emerge from that system to be tolerant of free speech? As time goes by, it will feel increasingly normal for those adults to become intolerant of speech they don’t agree with, and that intolerance will begin to permeate every corner of society.
Ironically, that is exactly what we are seeing now. Whether it’s Big Tech censoring speech at scale, or a company policy supporting speech it likes and harassing speech is doesn’t like, or local shop owner posting a “This is a Black-owned business” sign on their storefront to hopefully ward off looters, the result is the same. A less tolerant and diverse society. These examples show what happens when our eagerness to take offense meets an organizations’ innate desire to avoid trouble. If hearing a different opinion feels like a personal assault, then any potentially controversial statement is equivalent to shouting fire in a crowded theater. It is much easier for a business or a school to avoid trouble, and potential liability, by shutting down discussion altogether. And when people are silenced in real life, where else can they go to exercise their free speech but the internet, where every grievance is welcomed and amplified.
This vicious circle can’t be broken by legislation, and the technology that set it in motion isn’t going away. The challenge facing Americans today is primarily cultural: We must relearn the role that speech plays in a diverse and free society. Declaring speech out of bounds in certain contexts, especially when it expresses views that are widely held, glosses over conflict without resolving it. When people are told that they can’t say what they think, rather than being presented with an argument for why it might be wrong, they may comply, but they won’t change their minds. In fact, they will probably become more resentful and suspicious. To overcome our current divide, Americans need to be confident enough to hear and express differences without succumbing to fear and rage, which history shows, eventually ends up with violence. Free speech represents the possibility that society can change peacefully, that today’s unpopular idea can become tomorrow’s consensus. We urgently need to stop the cancer of intolerance in our education system and with our children before it metastasizes into our broader society.