Colleges and universities often are touted as places where ideas flow freely. But just how free is the speech on North Carolina’s college campuses? Jenna Ashley Robinson, campus outreach coordinator for the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, wrote a report on campus speech codes that asks “Do North Carolina Students Have Freedom of Speech?” Robinson discussed the report with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: Speech codes across North Carolina on college campuses — why is this an important topic for us to look into?
Robinson: It’s important for students to have free speech on campus so they can actually debate and discuss the ideas that are so important for liberal learning, without being afraid of repercussions from professors, ridicule from other students, or simply being shut down entirely. If we want to discuss the ideas that are important, we have to have the freedom to do so.
Kokai: I think a lot of people would probably expect on a college campus that you’re hearing lots of viewpoints, some of them good, some bad, some crazy, some very intelligent. But a lot of these campuses do put the brakes on certain types of speech.
Robinson: They absolutely do, and I think people’s conceptions of college are left over from the ’60s, when protests were kind of the daily event. And now what really happens is that certain viewpoints — even some very radical viewpoints — are common on college campuses, but viewpoints in the other direction are not necessarily accepted. For example, intelligent design has been unacceptable on many college campuses ever since it surfaced, and it’s something that really is just not allowed even to be studied at all because of the speech codes.
Kokai: Now, speaking of speech codes, you have this recent report. Let’s talk a little about the basics of the report. You look at all the colleges in North Carolina and basically assign them a green light, yellow light, or red light. What’s the distinction?
Robinson: Well, the speech code is actually from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). It’s something that they developed to objectively measure speech codes across college campuses. Basically, a green light occurs, very rarely, when a college does nothing to suppress speech from students or faculty. And actually they look at all other kinds of First Amendment rights as well, so they also look at religion. So, if a college does nothing to suppress those at all, then the college will get a green light. If they do some suppression of free speech but it is neither severe nor campuswide, then often that school will get a yellow light. But if there is any severe restriction, anything that can possibly be construed to suppress very reasonable speech, and if it’s campuswide, then that school will get a red light.
Kokai: And in looking at your report — which is set out with all the campuses and little lights next to each one of them — I don’t see much green. I see a lot of yellow and a lot of red. North Carolina is not doing that well.
Robinson: Not doing well at all. There are no green lights anywhere in North Carolina, but actually, after I found out that those were our rankings from the gentleman at FIRE who did the work with me, I went to their website to see if we were exceptional in North Carolina, and I found out that we weren’t. I went through the states alphabetically, and it took me until I was either at Iowa or Illinois before I found a college with a green light. So this is a problem that is pervasive.
Kokai: In putting together this report, what do you hope happens? Why should people know what these speech codes are on these various campuses?
Robinson: Well, the next step for me is to get this report into the hands of students so they can challenge their administrations to change the speech codes. And at North Carolina’s public universities, they can challenge them not only to the administrations but in court because these are, at public universities, violations of the First Amendment. Of course private schools, while they ought to protect free speech in order to preserve an environment for learning, they don’t have any constitutional imperative to do so. But students can still embarrass them or pressure them to change it so that the environment is just much more conducive to open debate.
Kokai: Do you get a sense that many people on these campuses really know that these codes are in place? Are they well-known, or is this something that you would only run into if you run afoul of the code?
Robinson: I think at some schools, people do know that the codes exist because there have been problems in the past. But I think that really is the only way that people get to know about them. Unless you are expressing an opinion that is somehow unpleasant to someone else, you don’t hear about it. It’s not something that they tout kind of openly because it’s not a very pretty picture to paint of a college.
Kokai: You mentioned, in specific, intelligent design and that some campuses won’t allow any discussion of that topic. But don’t the speech codes also address even things that have nothing to do with academics and more just how you would address certain groups of people — there are certain words or descriptions or phrases you can’t use, or you’re going to be stifled?
Robinson: Absolutely. The worst speech codes prevent students or prohibit students from saying anything that anyone could possibly construe as offensive. And I’m sure you’ve seen today that many people get offended at the drop of a hat, especially over debates that may be occurring about politics, about abortion, about health care. I mean there are many, many hot topics that can possibly be offensive. So there’s a huge problem with that. But then there are also problems that often conflict with people’s view of the world. For example, many of the speech codes say that if you do anything that will imply that you disapprove of someone else, that that will run afoul of the speech code. And so that is also something that can just happen in daily life and not necessarily anything to do with the classroom.
Kokai: In addition to that being a problem in and of itself — that you have this code saying you can’t be offensive — you’re also setting up the campus administrators to decide what is offensive and what isn’t. What kinds of problems is that creating?
Robinson: Absolutely. Basically it creates a problem where any particular minority on campus or any subgroup on campus can then kind of police what other people start to say because they have grievances with particular things. So you get the campus women’s center, for example, often complaining about fliers that seem to be overtly masculine in their language, or LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] centers saying that this is a heterosexist viewpoint to take. So you just set groups against each other, really, when you have these speech codes, and especially when you allow advocacy centers on campus to decide what “offensive” really means.
Kokai: Once this report is out and in the public domain and people have a chance to see it, what do you hope happens next?
Robinson: Well, I hope that people who should be proponents of free speech, like the media for example, will jump all over it and really show these campuses they’re doing a disservice to their students by having speech codes. And I also hope that students start pressuring the administrations to change the speech codes on campus to be more in keeping with what the universities are promising in their student handbooks and in all of their promotional materials — which is “Come here, learn, speak, debate, and become educated.” And that’s really not possible when you cut off what a person cannot or can say.
Kokai: How can they get a copy of [the report]?
Robinson: They can get a copy of it at www.popecenter.org.