Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern) and Me, Moderated by Judge Stephanos Bibas, on "Freedom of Thought on Campus"

I much enjoyed this Federalist Society discussion (sponsored by the Georgetown Law Student Chapter and by the Free Speech & Election Law Practice Group) and hope you do, too! Here's their summary:

Is open discussion and debate essential to the function of the university?

Many universities, including Georgetown, have adopted strong policies on academic freedom, affirming that deliberation or debate may not be suppressed because ideas put forth might be offensive, unwise, immoral or ill conceived.

But when controversy arises on campus, concrete complaints about offensive speech can displace these abstract principles of academic freedom.

What does an environment conducive to learning require? What kinds of limits should govern the ideas that students are exposed to by their teachers and classmates? Should students be exposed to ideas or opinions that are offensive? Should students have recourse to administrative action when faced with an offensive opinion? What kind of harm does offense entail?

On the other hand, when administrators step in to punish offending speech, does that decision come with consequences? And who bears the resulting harm attendant on limiting who can speak or what opinions can be expressed? Who measures what kind of opinions or statements are harmful or not?

Comments

[Cal Cetín]

If you ask me, any limits on a university’s professors or students should be imposed by the trustees and enforced by the administration – at the initiative of the trustees or administration, not based on crisis-management mode of getting a complaint of offended students.

And within the limits, if you ask me, students shouldn’t just be “exposed” to a variety of viewpoints, but should be required to defend diverse viewpoints in public disputations, demonstrating their research, reasoning and persuasive skills.

[DaivdBehar]

Stop talking lawyer idiots. Start mandamusing the Non-Profit Office to de-exempt offending schools. Then sieize their assets, including the entire endowment, for tax fraud. They promised education. They delivered indoctrination. Imprison the hierarchies of these schools for tax fraud. They are treason indoctrination camps, and should be destroyed.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I remember when I first learned (well after school) that debates (at least some of them) didn’t assign pro/con sides until the debate began, so both teams had to be ready and willing to argue both sides. (I wonder if any debates ever followed up by immediately switching sides and debating again.)

I doubt 1% of politicians today could do that.

I haven’t watched a TV political debate in ages, other than a few highlight / gaf compilations for the lols. If TV debates did follow the classic debate format, I’d watch for sure, even though voting is meaningless. I’d actually donate money if they’d argue the same question three ways:
* pro/con, randomly selected by a coin flip on stage
* con/pro, switching sides immediately after
* actual, immediately after, where they’d argue their own personal political opinion

[DaivdBehar]

That is what law school is about, prostitution. Say to me, Dave, for $10000, tell us why the American lawyer profession is the best on earth and greatly contributed to the success and prosperity of the country. I can do that. I became a total hooer after attending law school.

[DaivdBehar]

Not only a total hooer, but a cheap hooer.

[Krayt]

“Remember when card-carrying members of the ACLU defended the most outrageous of speech under tenure? I’m beginning to think they did it less out of principle than to stick it in the craw of the outrage police.”

Now that the shoe is on the other foot, and firing professors for speech “our side” (former defenders of speech and tenure) doesn’t like is cool, Resolved: An asteroid cannot turn the Earth into a smear fast enough.

[DaivdBehar]

Krayt. Please, no asteroid. Humans are a tenth as aggressive as chimps. Fault evolution for crass human behavior.

Don’t kill the earth. Round up the lawyer hierarchy, around 25000 traitors to this country in open insurrection against the constitution. Try them an hour. The sole evidence would be their legal utterances. On reading of the verdict, shoot them in the court basement.

[bernard11]

Plenty of shoes, Krayt, plenty of feet.

[ragebot]

Some random thoughts about the concept of debate.

As a high school student who was considered a “star” on the debate team I carried a two drawer portable file cabinet with one side full of negative 3X5 cards with quotations and the other side affirmative cards with quotations. It was common to walk into a debate round in a tournament and not know if I was going to be on the affirmative or negative side, same for the opposing team.

One thing often not mentioned about a “formal” debate is the first thing I was taught to do as an affirmative team was offer a ‘definition of terms to facilitate a more lucid debate’. Of course the negative team could not accept those definitions and propose their own; but the point was that unless there was agreement on what terms mean (CRT is a great current example) the debate would simply go off the tracks and as my coach described it be like ‘two great ships passing in the night’ lacking any clashing of opposing ideas.

To carry the concept of defining terms in more dept I will again use CRT as an example. The dems claim the definition of CRT is limited to courses taught in graduate level courses at universities while the pubs say it also includes concepts like white guilt elementary school students are sometimes exposed to. So any debate between pubs and dems on the topic of CRT (used as an example but terms like “ending democracy”, “illegal alien”, “socialism”, and maybe the all time champ “NAZI” all suffer from the same problem) is doomed to failure because both sides wind up talking past the other’s arguments.

This is also a problem with 1A (and probably 2A) stuff there is no universally accepted definition of what those rights mean. Until there is a better agreement of the definition of what the Bill of Rights really means arguments over what those rights include will continue.

[DaivdBehar]

Its great you were a good debater. The problem is debating deniers is a waste of time. They have an agenda. Facts and logic are denied to further a tyrannical agenda. Only ass kicking remains for deniers. Beat them with a stick twice, then kill them, if they do not stop their attack on the humanity of the other side.

[DaivdBehar]

Would you like to debate Vlad Putin about invading Ukraine? He wants its gas fields to further enrich himself and his oligarchs. Nothing you can say will overcome that reality. He and they need to be taken out. Ukarainian teams should get into Russia and destroy these oligarchs and their families to the last kitten. Stop killing peasants and working people who just want to go home.

[Archibald Tuttle]

I agree about defining terms. But it is not just angry parents who misuse the term CRT. Some teachers too are pushing very offensive stuff about whiteness. They mislabel it as CRT to conceal the truth.

It is also unhelpful to characterize the CRT disputes as dems versus reps, left versus right. Issues in dispute can be used as wedges to divide this country and thus harm it. I abhor both Russian disinformation and wedge issue disinformation.

[Brett Bellmore]

The thing that makes me doubt that it’s two ships passing in the night, and suspect more of a motte and bailey defense, is that the CRT defenders will say, “That stuff you’re complaining about in K-12 isn’t CRT!”, but when a state passes a law banning specifically, not CRT by name, but that stuff, the CRT defenders are enraged.

Why, if CRT isn’t “that stuff”?

Maybe it IS “that stuff”, and the CRT defenders are just motte and bailey’ing us.

[Archibald Tuttle]

Its a trap. If the state bans CRT by name, and doesn’t define what that means, it is invalid. If they do name what it means, and the teacher changes it slightly, it is not applicable.

The short version, laws should not talk about labels, but about principles.