Liberal lawmakers were eager to offer assurances of their support for the First Amendment during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing convened Tuesday to tackle the issue of free speech on college campuses, but demonstrated an incomplete understanding of how the curtailment of speech rights actually plays out in higher education.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., opened by justifying the University of California, Berkeley’s recent handling of controversies regarding campus lecturers. “The fact of the matter is there are certain occasions in which individuals assemble not to act peaceably but to act as destructively as they possibly can,” Feinstein argued, pointing to the minority of campus free speech cases, horrifying as they are, where universities receive credible threats of violence.
That argument, recycled by Feinstein’s Democratic peers throughout the hearing, misses the point entirely. Why focus on defending schools faced with a security threat when the larger issue is that these lectures incite security threats in the first place? Or that far more speakers, most of whom don’t encounter violence and most of whom are not “hateful,” get shouted down, disinvited, and slandered? What about the students who never speak up in classrooms to offer alternative viewpoints for fear of retribution?
Though violent campus incidents may dominate media coverage, the issue is obviously much broader than that. I understand, in this instance, Feinstein was responding to the Berkeley case because Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, mentioned it in his opening statement, but every Democratic lawmaker who spoke during the hearing, with the exception of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., spent their allotted time making arguments for “balance,” as Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., did, or asking witnesses when it’s “appropriate to restrict speech,” as Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., did.
Why?
Because the liberal base is tied up with the campus censorship movement. And these Democrats either support those censorship efforts, despite all the lip service paid to the First Amendment, or questioning those efforts is not worth the political risk.
What these senators fail to understand is that the very hearing in which they participated, tame and civil as it was, would be threatened by liberal censors on many campuses. For two hours, senators from both parties engaged in discussion and questioned witnesses with perspectives as diverse as the Southern Poverty Law Center and Eugene Volokh. That is exactly the type of dialogue their supporters seek to silence on campuses.
When Heather MacDonald, a reasonable mainstream conservative, was invited to speak at Claremont McKenna College this spring, students wrote a letter to the university president arguing that “[Free speech] has given those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry.” A Duke University columnist argued last year that America’s “obsession” with the First Amendment is “an expression of white supremacy.”
Progressive students activists are regularly contemptuous of free speech as a larger concept. It is an unfortunate reality that, on some campuses, the simple act of convening a hearing on free speech, as the Senate did on Tuesday, would be deemed a threat to safety by student activists who associate the concept with white supremacy and believe the right to speech ends as soon as they feel offended or unsafe.
If Democratic senators valued the hearing in which they participated on Tuesday, they must broaden their focuses past the minority of cases where universities face credible threats of violence and confront the larger climate of censorship that their ideological allies enforce and justify.
But don’t hold your breath.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
