By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD
In the wake of the election, which still isn’t over, there is obviously concern by conservatives about the future, not so much about the country but about the rights that we enjoy; rights we have received from God that the Bill of Rights is enshrined to protect.
But what has bothered me in the last few weeks is how the activists of the Left-Wing Party, including many Joe Biden staffers, have reacted. There were calls to ban Trump supporters from future government positions while others wanted them banned from life itself. There is talk of blacklists and banning others from speaking at public universities. Social media is already practicing shadow banning and closing accounts of people too outspoken in their conservative or religious beliefs.
And the darlings of the Left-Wing Party are now trying to expand their blacklists: Delaware Sen. Chris Coons is urging Facebook and others to take another look at climate change deniers.
So how did we get to this point? How did the proposition of curbing free speech apparently go mainstream?
I think much of it started, as all bad ideas often do, on college campuses. You know, those places where tenured left-wing professors have four years to shape and mold the young minds entrusted to their care by unwitting parents who have scrimped and saved to give their little ones an education that will allow them to lift themselves above the fray to a comfortable lifestyle.
And I hear the complaints from parents. One parishioner told me about his daughter, raised a devout Catholic, who after only two years away at college is now a committed atheist who is unwilling to engage in any sort of dialogue about it. You see, dad’s beliefs are out of touch with today’s reality and need not be considered any longer.
Our friends at FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, issued a report earlier this year that casts some light on the problem. FIRE, along with College Pulse, and RealClearEducation, surveyed some 20,000 students and made some interesting findings.
First and foremost, not all colleges are the same. FIRE publishes a list on its website listing good and bad schools for free speech and thought, which should be an aid to parents and families looking for appropriate educational opportunities for their offspring. According to the report, “Seven of the top 10 colleges for free speech are public, and only one of the top 10 is in the Northeast, while the bottom 10 include many schools that repeatedly make headlines for campus censorship.”
“These rankings provide proof that your choice of college can make a real difference in your ability to speak your mind,” said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. “Campus leaders no longer have an excuse for remaining ignorant about students who feel muzzled on their campuses. One thing is for sure: Colleges have a lot of work to do.”
On many college campuses, speakers whose views are considered offensive to some are finding that their invitations to speak on campuses are few and far between and many times when they are invited those invitations are rescinded.
Large pluralities of students, the report found, were willing to keep certain speakers off campus. For example, 87 percent of students reported that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders should be allowed to share his views on campus, but only 69 percent said the same for President Trump. “Students identifying as Republican or Independent were more tolerant of speakers than Democratic students: 71 percent of strong Republicans support Biden coming to campus, compared to 49 percent of strong Democrats reporting the same for Trump.”
It also reported that more than 60 percent of liberal students said it is “always” or “sometimes” acceptable to shout down a speaker. Only 15 percent of conservative students felt the same way. In the Ivy League the survey found that 20 percent of the students believe it is “always” or “sometimes” acceptable to block other students from entering a campus event. And: “Fully 60 percent of students reported feeling that they could not express an opinion because of how students, a professor, or their administration would respond. This number is highest among ‘strong Republicans’ (73 percent) and lowest among ‘strong Democrats’ (52 percent).”
Additionally 45 percent of the students said that they did not believe there could be an open and honest discussion of abortion on their college’s campus. Underscoring that feeling, a Christian medical student in Manitoba, Canada, was recently expelled for expressing his anti-abortion views.
Of course this column has repeatedly reported on students suspended or expelled from their colleges for violations of university enacted speech codes, or speaking outside of approved campus free speech zones which are often no larger than a phone booth, or articulating conservative or religious views anathema to the administration or to the Left-Wing Party.
At the University of Wisconsin — River Falls, a freshman, Sofie Salmon, walked around the campus trying to drum up interest in a conservative club. She was stopped and told by administrators that she needed their permission first. Students for Life at Georgia Tech were denied funding for a speaker, Alveda King, because she was “inherently religious” like her uncle, Martin Luther King Jr.
Two students at Georgia Gwinnett College tried to share their faith with other students, but were stopped by college officials because they had not reserved one of the two tiny free speech zones.
Other students, like Jack Denton at Florida State University, were personally attacked for private conversations in chat rooms. In Denton’s case he was removed from his position as student senate president after complaints about comments he made defending Catholic doctrine in a private Catholic chat room.
The College Fix reported last April that “the majority of top public colleges and universities use a blacklist of secret words, created by Facebook, to automatically censor comments on university social media pages.”
But what we sometimes miss is that these rules are often foisted upon unsuspecting professors. Some of the incidents were collected by Cabot Phillips, editor at Campus Reform:
After the death of George Floyd the dean of nursing at the University of Massachusetts, Leslie Neal-Boylan, sent out an email condemning violence against anyone, closing with: “Black lives matter, but also everyone’s life matters.” That was considered racist by the nimrods who run the school and she was summarily fired.
A lecturer at UCLA was suspended after he refused to lower grading standards for his black students in the wake of the George Floyd killing. Gordon Klein told them in an email that it would be wrong to give “preferential treatment” based on skin color: 20,000 people signed a petition calling for his ouster for “lack of empathy.”
At West Virginia University, the campus police chief was able to keep his job after a blue-lives-matter flag was visible in his office during an Internet meeting only after he wrote a letter of apology and removed the flag. One of the school’s learned professors had accused the chief of sharing “white supremacist” images.
A Winthrop University dean published an op-ed referring to COVID-19 as the Wuhan Virus and discussing China’s culpability in its spread. He was censored by the school for racism and xenophobia.
In some of the above cases, the affected person was later exonerated but only after legal action was threatened or commenced. But many were required to wallow in their silly beliefs that speech in America was, and always will be, free while campus speech codes continued to stifle it.
Naturally, one could write a book about this, and, indeed, several have already been written. The bottom line here is that one of the biggest culprits in the debate over free speech and First Amendment freedoms is the very institutions to which we look for academic quality and the free exchange of ideas. And, of course, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the teachers in your kid’s schools have been trained by the same individuals.
Looking forward to the possibility of a Biden administration? Don’t bet your free-speech chips on it.
(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and hear him every Thursday at 10 a.m. CT on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)
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