The Limit of Free Speech on College Campuses

Once again the presenters of odious and hate-filled speech on college campuses claim the mantle of freedom fighters implying that the first amendment's guarantee that congress will make no law "abridging the freedom of speech" covers all form of speech in every context (for the last major emergence of this strain of thinking see). This time, controversy has returned to the Pacifica Forum that periodically hosts speakers in the student center on the University of Oregon campus.

Although the Pacifica Forum presents itself as an informational organization that seeks to clarify issues surrounding "war and peace, militarism and pacifism, violence and non-violence," a look at their website and list of past speakers belies this facade. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies the forum as a white nationalist hate group.

From the forum's homepage, one finds links such as the article "A Jew Speaks" in which a writer identified only as "Barry" defends the organization's right to host an American National Socialist leader on Oregon's campus to discuss the symbolism of the Swastika. On a previous occasion the same speaker repeatedly gave a Nazi salute and shouted "Seig heil!" at protesters. On this occasion a crowd of 300 protesters entered the hall and disrupted the proceedings with signs and apparently some foot stomping. Discussing this protest "Barry" compares the protesters themselves to Nazis and event to Kristallnacht:

"Free speech was supposed to be on display that night but I felt as if it was 1938 Germany. The students and protesters, when they were in the midst of their foot-stomping, profanity-laced tirade became, for me a precursor to Kristallnacht, that infamous episode where Jewish businesses, and their owners faced the wrath of Nazi prejudice and hatred. This meeting/debate was nothing more than a Nuremburg rally held on UofO campus."

During the previous week's forum titled "“Everything You Wanted to Know About Pacifica Forum But Were Afraid to Ask,” a speaker who described himself as a “white separatist and racialist,” insisted that Andrea Dworkin a feminist "known for her views that pornography can lead to violence against women, was 'too ugly to rape.'"

So, we return to the question at hand: what are the appropriate limits of free speech on college campuses? First, it is important to clarify that colleges and the learning spaces they contain and the newspapers they publish, even if they are "public institutions" are not obliged by any law, including of course the constitution to provide a platform for all speech. Just as college newspapers can and must select what content is appropriate for them to publish, universities can and I argue must select what types of speech they allow within their buildings. Not giving someone a forum is not the same thing as stopping them from speaking.

As one commentator phrased it in a blog comment "People on the left and right have a tendency to think that the free speech is some sort of right to convenience, which it isn’t."

Is it reasonable that the right to spread hate on college campuses should usurp the right of students to feel safe?

** UPDATE: At a meeting last night (Jan. 20th) University of Oregon administrators announced that the "Pacifica Forum is no longer allowed to hold meetings within the EMU for the rest of the year....The new resolution stated that the Pacifica Forum should remove themselves from the UO’s campus."

"Deniers are not a point of view"

Dr. Deborah Lipstadt spoke two weeks ago at the Harvard Hillel addressing the recent controversy surrounding the University's Crimson newspaper. In early September, the Harvard Crimson ran an ad bought by longtime Holocaust denier Bradley Smith. The advertisement challenged readers to "provide, with proof, the name of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz."

In her talk, Lipstadt emphasized that “Deniers are not a point of view ...They are liars and falsifiers of history. Deniers take the data and twist it and turn and distort it.”

She also focused on the various insidious ways that deniers spread their message, pointing to "soft-core denial" as a particularly poignant example. According to the Crimson write up of her talk:

Lipstadt also discussed what she called “soft-core Holocaust denial,” a new form of denial in which the Holocaust “gets mixed up with other things” and is “used as a misrepresentation.” As an example, she cited the comparison of George W. Bush to Hitler, which she said suggested an implicit denial of the Holocaust.

“To compare [Bush] to Hitler is to turn history on its head,” said Lipstadt.

Just a week earlier and 20 miles outside Harvard, in the Boston suburb of Framingham, an infamous immigrant-basher named Jim Rizoli demonstrated Lipstadt's point in spectacular fashion. Long a racist and bigoted critic of Brazilian immigrants in Framingham, Jim showed that xenophobia, antisemitism and Holocaust denial are two sides of the same coin when, he took 10 minutes out of his hour-long public access show to praise Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and to minimize the numbers of Holocaust dead.

According to an ADL report, Rizoli defended Ahmadinejad, claiming that "he has never read anything where the Iranian leader denied that the Holocaust happened, that he only 'has some issues with the way the whole thing went down.' Rizoli then commented, 'Just like I do.'" What "thing" went down in a way that Rizoli takes issue with? This type of oblique reference to an unidentified manipulation of history is typical of "soft-core denial," in that it attempts to minimize the Holocaust through slander rather then historical argumentation.

Yet Rizoli did not stop there. After announcing his intention to launch into a "controversial topic," Rizoli told his viewers that they'd "been brainwashed for the last 50 years on the [Holocaust] propaganda." A summary of Rizoli's diatribe on Boston.com, has him parroting one of the most persistent deniers claims, he insisted that "more Christians lost their lives than Jews, only around 300,000 people died, not six million, and that the majority were not killed but 'died of sickness and disease.'"

This association of xenophobia, antisemitism and Holocaust denial relates perhaps to the same hatred of the other. In today's world, this is often expressed as an insistence that one's own group, in Rizoli's case white Christians, has suffered more than any other group and therefore deserves to be appeased, left alone, left unchallenged. Yet, the oft-repeated Holocaust mantras "never forget" and "never again" mean nothing if not that we must remain vigilant in the face of intolerance and hatred. Rizoli reminds Jews (as if any reminder was necessary) that in almost every case, hatred of the other is accompanied by or birthed from the hatred of Jews.

*******Update*********
A local Framingham paper reported today that Rizoli claims to have lost 70% of his carpet-cleaning clientele, and an important membership in a client referral service since this story broke. He insists that his business is being ruined by "the Zionists in the Jewish community. They spread their little rumors. The Zionists are radical crazy, hysterical people." He added that "This is how they deal with you."