Top DOJ official: We don’t play favorites in protecting voices on college campuses

Acting Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio rejected the idea that the Justice Department is biased towards only protecting conservatives’ free speech rights on college campuses.

“Some of these instances, I mean look, let’s be honest about what’s going on on campus. Conservative voices typically are not the majority voice on campus … but not always,” Panuccio said at a Washington Post-hosted event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

Panuccio pointed to the the Justice Department’s recent filing of a statement of interest in a lawsuit that claims the University of Michigan is restricting free speech. He said that action regarded a policy that “applies to everybody.”

“Anyone — if it’s conservative speech and a liberal is offended, they might say well that’s biased, or vise versa. So it is not true that these cases involve students or speakers of only one political stripe,” Panuccio added. “We will get involved in any case where we think the First Amendment is implicated and violated.”

American Civil Liberties Union President Susan Herman, who was also on the panel, defended against claims that there is a “zero-sum game between speech and equality” and argued that the ACLU “wholeheartedly” defends cases both for equal treatment and free speech rights.

“It seems to me the primary job of schools right now should be not to censor and eliminate and prohibit people from talking about a subject, but to get people to talk to each other and to have people who may have a right to make a racist joke understand why its not a good idea and to make students who want not to have a conservative speaker on campus understand that its a much better idea to have them on campus and to think through their arguments and where they disagree,” she said.

“Schools have requirements under law and also, just as good stewards of their campus, to make sure that they have anti-harassment and anti-bullying policies, but there is well-trodden legal ground about when that deals with true harassment or it goes over into chilling protected speech,” Panuccio said.

“I’ll give you credit if you go to the ACLU’s website, they have a page I looked at one last night on campus speech, it lays this out very well about the difference between creating an appropriate learning environment for students while also allowing the robust free exchange of ideas and there is a balance there, but it’s one we’ve traditionally been able to strike on campuses, but one that seems in recent years to be waning unfortunately,” he continued.

[Opinion: A’s for liberal papers only: A conservative’s college experience]