Around this time last year, leftist protesters at the University of California, Berkeley wreaked havoc, causing $100,000 worth of damage over the course of one night in February, all to silence a controversial speaker. The Berkeley protests, captured in striking cable news footage of fire and rioters, brought national attention to the culture of censorship on college campuses.
For many students, that culture remains their reality. Not every school is Berkeley, but students whose views deviate from progressive dogma grapple on a daily basis with their right to free speech, especially at public institutions.
In the hopes of providing those students with another resource, a new Washington-based group aimed at supporting free speech on campuses is set to launch Wednesday. Speech First says it plans to bring a broad coalition of “students, parents, faculty, alumni, and concerned citizens” together as a membership organization targeted at First Amendment concerns in higher education. Under the direction of president Nicole Neily, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, Speech First’s mission is “to support students who seek to protect their rights to free speech, expression, or association.”
“By joining together, the Speech First community is an assurance to students that they will not fight these battles alone—they will find support every step of the way: on campus, in the courts, and in the media,” the group contends in its mission statement.
Speech First joins a field of other organizations dedicated to tackling the issue, most of which are allied with or situated in the conservative youth movement.
In an email to the Washington Examiner, Neily explained she believes Speech First’s membership feature will foster a sense of community, filling what the group sees as a gap in the broader campus free speech movement. “There are a few groups working on this issue, but there’s no membership association currently in the space for members of the public to join to show their support for the free speech movement — like there is for the environmental movement and the Sierra Club, or for broader civil liberties movement and the ACLU,” she said. “We wanted to create something that would convey strength in numbers behind this issue — giving students who might want to stand up for their rights the confidence that they’re doing the right thing, while also conveying to universities that there is a groundswell of opposition to illegal restrictions on campus speech.”
In a Wednesday press release, Neily intimated the group’s focus will be on fighting legal battles, arguing that “a lone student doesn’t stand a chance against a school with a huge endowment and an army of lawyers.”
Whether Speech First’s approach gains traction remains to be seen. But there’s no question students need all the good help they can get.
