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+Free speech is a pre-requisite to any rational moral system- without it self-realization is impossible. Eberle 94 |
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+Eberle, Law @ Roger Williams, 94 (Wake Forest LR, Winter) |
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+The Court's decision in R.A.V. reaffirms the preeminence of free speech in our constitutional value structure. n62 Theoretically, free speech is intrinsically valuable as a chief means by which we develop our faculties and control our destinies. n63 Free speech is also of instrumental value in facilitating other worthy ends such as democratic or personal self-government, n64 public and private decisionmaking, n65 and the advancement of knowledge and truth. n66 Ultimately, the value of free speech rests upon a complex set of justifications, as compared to reliance on any single foundation. n67 The majority of the Court in R.A.V. preferred a nonconsequentialist view, finding that speech is valuable as an end itself, independent of any consequences that it might produce. In this view, free speech is an essential part of a just and free society that treats all people as responsible moral agents. Accordingly, people are entrusted with the responsibility of making judgments about the use or abuse of speech. n68 From this vantage point, the majority saw a certain moral equivalency in all speech. Even hate speech merits protection under the First Amendment, because all speech has intrinsic value. This is so because all speech, even hate speech, is a communication to the world, and therefore implicates the speaker's autonomy or self-realization. Additionally, any information might be valuable to a listener who can then decide its importance or how best to use it. Accordingly, any suspicion or evidence of governmental censorship must be vigilantly investigated. |
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+Free speech facilitates the development of moral reasoning- restrictions should be prima facie rejected. Dwyer 01 |
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+(Susan, Phil@Maryland, Nordic Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2 ® Philosophia Press 2001) |
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+Direct Nonconsequentialism Let us return to the central topic: free speech. From the perspective just sketched, the value of a marketplace of ideas – that notion so central to the consequentialist justification of free speech – lies not so much in its long-term all-things-considered good consequences (the avoidance of dogmatism, democracy, truth, etc.) Rather, free speech is seen as a necessary condition for the realization of any human goods. Constraints on inquiry and expression are constraints on humanity itself. Echoing this thought, Nagel (1995) writes: That the expression of what one thinks and feels should be overwhelmingly one's own business, subject to restriction only when clearly necessary to prevent serious harm distinct from the expression itself, is a condition of being an independent thinking being. It is a form of moral recognition that you have a mind of your own: even if you never want to say anything to which others would object, the idea that they could stop you if they did object is in itself a violation of your integrity (96). A simple yet powerful fact both explains why speech is valuable in and of itself and justifies its stringent protection: when speech is threatened, we are threatened. Direct nonconsequentialism stands in stark contrast to consequentialist approaches which, as we have seen, make the value of speech contingent on its effects. And unlike indirect nonconsequentialism, it makes our status as language users, not our autonomy, the ground for limiting the state's attempts to interfere with our liberty. To repeat: direct nonconsequentialism asserts that speech is valuable because linguistic capacities are the expression of the essence of creatures (us) to whom we attribute the highest moral status. The way in which the direct nonconsequentialist makes explicit what is special about speech helps to make sense of a commonly experienced wariness regarding restrictions on speech we hate. We worry equally when the state seeks to prohibit the speech of sexists or Flat-Earthers. The consequentialist thinks this reaction is explained by attributing to us the belief that any state restriction of speech is the thin end of a wedge: we are discomforted by the thought of the muzzled sexist or Flat-Earther because we think our speech may be next. This may well be the right account of human psychology in these matters. But it is hardly an explanation of the prima facie wrongness of restrictions on lunatics' and sexists’ speech. Our discomfort is a moral discomfort. In bringing out the idea that speech is the expression of our essence, the direct nonconsequentialist is able to capture the true nature of our reaction to state restrictions on others' speech we do not particularly care for. Direct nonconsequentialism also gives substance to a powerful idea that some influential critics – notably, Catharine Mackinnon (1987) – find hopelessly abstract. This is the thought that “every time you strengthen free speech in one place, you strengthen it everywhere (164).” And seeing how direct nonconsequentialism does so will help illustrate some of the practical implications of this strategy for justifying free speech. Proponents of legislation designed to restrict or prohibit problematic speech and courts that rule on the constitutionality of such legislation, often reason in terms of how free speech interests are to be balanced with other interests. For example, proponents of speech codes argue that racist speech harms minorities’ interests in social and political equality; and in the United States, the constitutionality of restrictions on ‘fighting words’ is defended in light of the state’s interests in maintaining law and order. These arguments imply that the expressive rights of individual racists and troublemakers may sometimes be infringed in order to promote the good of some collective. But as the history of free speech debates reveal, once we admit that collective interests can trump individual rights, it is extremely difficult consistently to maintain the belief that a right to free speech imposes severe limits on what the state may do. The direct nonconsequentialist justification of free speech avoids this particular difficulty. Recall, we are working within the context of constitutional provisions – that is, we are thinking about rationales for stringent protections of speech, where these are understood as mechanisms for keeping the government out of some aspect of our lives. In this sense, such provisions express rights had by individuals against the state. But the direct nonconsequentialist’s account of the basis of these rights suggests that it is a mistake to think of them as radically individualistic. True, each of us has a right to free speech, but we have that right in virtue of our membership in a collective – the species H. sapiens – where every member has the same right for the same reason. Thus, in stressing that a universal feature of the species – language mastery – grounds protections on speech, the direct nonconsequentialist avoids individualizing the right to free speech in a way that makes it perpetually vulnerable to the assertion of some collective good. If we think of a person’s right to free speech as protecting just one aspect of his liberty among others, we run the risk of obscuring what is morally relevant about speech. The hatemonger and the pornographer each have a right to free speech, but this is not to be understood in terms of their being free to act on contingent desires they have. My occurrent desire to eat ice-cream holds no weight in the big scheme of things; even I would concede that it is permissible for the state to thwart my satisfying this desire, if doing so meant promoting some very important collective good. But speech is different. It is worthy of protection not because people want to say certain things, but (to repeat) because speech expresses our very nature. What someone wants to say is neither here nor there. Thus, in decoupling the value of free speech from individual desires, direct nonconsequentialism gives content to the idea that when we strengthen (protect) free speech in one place, we strengthen (protect) it everywhere. |
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+Consequentially, Free speech is a gateway to every other impact. D’Souza 96 |
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+(Frances, Prof. Anthropology Oxford, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/hearings/19960425/droi/freedom_en.htm?textMode=on) |
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+In the absence of freedom of expression which includes a free and independent media, it is impossible to protect other rights, including the right to life. Once governments are able to draw a cloak of secrecy over their actions and to remain unaccountable for their actions then massive human rights violations can, and do, take place. For this reason alone the right to freedom of expression, specifically protected in the major international human rights treaties, must be considered to be a primary right. It is significant that one of the first indications of a government's intention to depart from democratic principles is the ever increasing control of information by means of gagging the media, and preventing the freeflow of information from abroad. At one end of the spectrum there are supposedly minor infringements of this fundamental right which occur daily in Western democracies and would include abuse of national security laws to prevent the publication of information which might be embarrassing to a given government: at the other end of the scale are the regimes of terror which employ the most brutal moves to suppress opposition, information and even the freedom to exercise religious beliefs. It has been argued, and will undoubtedly be discussed at this Hearing, that in the absence of free speech and an independent media, it is relatively easy for governments to capture, as it were, the media and to fashion them into instruments of propaganda, for the promotion of ethnic conflict, war and genocide. 2. Enshrining the right to freedom of expression The right to freedom of expression is formally protected in the major international treaties including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In addition, it is enshrined in many national constitutions throughout the world, although this does not always guarantee its protection. Furthermore, freedom of expression is, amongst other human rights, upheld, even for those countries which are not signatories to the above international treaties through the concept of customary law which essentially requires that all states respect the human rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by virtue of the widespread or customary respect which has been built up in the post World War II years. 3. Is free speech absolute? While it is generally accepted that freedom of expression is, and remains the cornerstone of democracy, there are permitted restrictions encoded within the international treaties which in turn allow for a degree of interpretation of how free free speech should be. Thus, unlike the American First Amendment Rights which allow few, if any, checks on free speech or on the independence of the media, the international treaties are concerned that there should be a balance between competing rights: for example, limiting free speech or media freedom where it impinges on the individual's right to privacy; where free speech causes insult or injury to the rights and reputation of another; where speech is construed as incitement to violence or hatred, or where free speech would create a public disturbance. Given that these permitted restrictions are necessarily broad, the limits of free speech are consistently tested in national law courts and, perhaps even more importantly, in the regional courts such as the European Commission and Court of Human Rights. In recent years several landmark cases have helped to define more closely what restrictions may be imposed by government and under what circumstances. In particular, it has been emphasised by the European Court that any restriction must comply with a three-part test which requires that any such restriction should first of all be prescribed by law, and thus not arbitrarily imposed: proportionate to the legitimate aims pursued, and demonstrably necessary in a democratic society in order to protect the individual and/or the state. 4. Who censors what? Despite the rather strict rules which apply to restrictions on free speech that governments may wish to impose, many justifications are nevertheless sought by governments to suppress information which is inimical to their policies or their interests. These justifications include arguments in defence of national and/or state security, the public interst, including the need to protect public morals and public order and perfectly understandable attempts to prevent racism, violence, sexism, religious intolerance and damage to the indi-vidual's reputation or privacy. The mechanisms employed by governments to restrict the freeflow of information are almost endless and range from subtle economic pressures and devious methods of undermining political opponents and the independent media to the enactment of restrictive press laws and an insist-ence on licensing journalists and eventually to the illegal detention, torture and disappearances of journalists and others associated with the expression of independent views. 5. Examples of censorship To some the right to free speech may appear to be one of the fringe human rights, especially when compared to such violations as torture and extra-judicial killings. It is also sometimes difficult to dissuade the general public that censorship, generally assumed to be something to do with banning obscene books or magazines, is no bad thing! It requires a recognition of some of the fundamental principles of democracy to understand why censorship is so immensely dangerous. The conditon of democracy is that people are able to make choices about a wide variety of issues which affect their lives, including what they wish to see, read, hear or discuss. While this may seem a somewhat luxurious distinction preoccupying, perhaps, wealthy Western democracies, it is a comparatively short distance between government censorship of an offensive book to the silencing of political dissidents. And the distance between such silencing and the use of violence to suppress a growing political philosophy which a government finds inconvenient is even shorter. Censorship tends to have small beginnings and to grow rapidly. Allowing a government to have the power to deny people information, however trivial, not only sets in place laws and procedures which can and will be used by those in authority against those with less authority, but it also denies people the information which they must have in order to monitor their governments actions and to ensure accountability. There have been dramatic and terrible examples of the role that censorship has played in international politics in the last few years: to name but a few, the extent to which the media in the republics of former Yugoslavia were manipulated by government for purposes of propaganda; the violent role played by the government associated radio in Rwanda which incited citizens to kill each other in the name of ethnic purity and the continuing threat of murder issued by the Islamic Republic of Iran against a citizen of another country for having written a book which displeased them. 6. The link between poverty, war and denial of free speech There are undoubted connections between access to information, or rather the lack of it, and war, as indeed there are between poverty, the right to freedom of expression and development. One can argue that democracy aims to increase participation in political and other decision-making at all levels. In this sense democracy empowers people. The poor are denied access to information on decisions which deeply affect their lives, are thus powerless and have no voice; the poor are not able to have influence over their own lives, let alone other aspect of society. Because of this essential powerlessness, the poor are unable to influence the ruling elite in whose interests it may be to initiate conflict and wars in order to consolidate their own power and position. Of the 126 developing countries listed in the 1993 Human Development Report, war was ongoing in 30 countries and severe civil conflict in a further 33 countries. Of the total 63 countries in conflict, 55 are towards the bottom scale of the human development index which is an indicator of poverty. There seems to be no doubt that there is a clear association between poverty and war. It is reasonably safe to assume that the vast majority of people do not ever welcome war. They are normally coerced, more often than not by propaganda, into fear, extreme nationalist sentiments and war by their governments. If the majority of people had a democratic voice they would undoubtedly object to war. But voices are silenced. Thus, the freedom to express one's views and to challenge government decisions and to insist upon political rather than violent solutions, are necessary aspects of democracy which can, and do, avert war. Government sponsored propaganda in Rwanda, as in former Yugoslavia, succeeded because there weren't the means to challenge it. One has therefore to conclude that it is impossible for a particular government to wage war in the absence of a compliant media willing to indulge in government propaganda. This is because the government needs civilians to fight wars for them and also because the media is needed to re-inforce government policies and intentions at every turn. |
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+Plan Text: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected journalist speech. |
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+Advantage 1: Stop The Press |
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+Censorship of student journalism is increasing at the worst possible time. Censorship discourages questioning the government. Schuman 12-8 |
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+(Rebecca, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2016/12/student_journalists_are_under_threat.html) |
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+Well, here’s some great news to cheer you up: The American student press is under siege! Apparently, we’ve been too busy blowing gaskets over professor watch lists and “safe spaces” to recognize the actual biggest threat to free speech on college campuses today. According to a new report by the American Association of University Professors, in conjunction with three other nonpartisan free-speech advocacy organizations, a disquieting trend of administrative censorship of student-run media has been spreading quietly across the country—quietly, of course, because according to the report, those censorship efforts have so far been successful. The report finds that recent headlines out of Mount St. Mary’s University, for example, may be “just the tip of a much larger iceberg.” Indeed, “it has become disturbingly routine for student journalists and their advisers to experience overt hostility that threatens their ability to inform the campus community and, in some instances, imperils their careers or the survival of their publications.” The report chronicles more than 20 previously unreported cases of media advisers “suffering some degree of administrative pressure to control, edit, or censor student journalistic content.” Furthermore, this pressure came “from every segment of higher education and from every institutional type: public and private, four-year and two-year, religious and secular.” It gets worse. In many of the cases in the report, administration officials “threatened retaliation against students and advisers not only for coverage critical of the administration but also for otherwise frivolous coverage that the administrators believed placed the institution in an unflattering light,” including an innocuous listicle of the best places to hook up on campus. In many cases, the student publications were subject to prior review from either an adviser who reported directly to the administration or the administration itself. Prior review means getting what’s in your newspaper signed off on by someone up top before it can be published. It is—to use the parlance of my years of professional journalistic training that began with my time as features editor of the Vassar College Miscellany News in the mid-’90s—absolute bullshit. (At public universities, it’s also illegal.) First, and most obviously, this is because a free student press is a hallmark of the American higher education system, and any threat to that freedom is on its face worrying. But there’s also this: The last thing we need right now, in the creeping shadow of American authoritarianism, is an entire generation of fledgling journalists who’ve come up thinking censorship is acceptable. |
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+The legal justification for newspaper censorship is a 7th circuit decision that applied Hazelwood to universities-this allows unchecked arbitrary censorship by administrators. Goodman 05 |
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+( S. Mark Goodman, Michael C. Hiestand, Student Press Law Center 2005 WL 2736314 (U.S.) (Appellate Petition, Motion and Filing) Supreme Court of the United States. Margaret L. HOSTY, Jeni S. Porche, and Steven P. Barba, Petitioners, v. Patricia CARTER, Respondent. No. 05-377. October 20, 2005. On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Brief of Amici Curiae Student Press Law Center, Associated Collegiate Press, College Media Advisers, Community College Journalism Association, Society for Collegiate Journalists, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, American Society of Newspaper Editors, National Newspaper Association, Newspaper Association of America, Society of Professional Journalists, Associated Press Managing Editors, College Newspaper Business and Advertising Managers, National Federation of Press Women, National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and the Independent Press Association/Campus Journalism Project in Support of Petition of Margaret L. Hosty, Jeni S. Porche, and Steven P. Barba for Writ of Certiorari Of Counsel: S. Mark Goodman, Michael C. Hiestand, Student Press Law Center, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Ste 1100, Arlington, VA 22209-2211, (703) 807-1904. Richard M. Goehler, (Counsel of Record), Frost Brown Todd LLC, 2200 PNC Center, 201 East Fifth Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202, (513) 651-6800, Counsel for Amici Curiae.) |
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+In contrast to many high school censorship incidents, public college administrators today are less likely to be successful in their efforts to restrict the student press. This is usually (and perhaps only) because of the First Amendment protections that courts have consistently accorded college journalists. That circumstance would surely change were Hazelwood extended to limit the rights of college student journalists. Among some of the stories in college student publications that could be subject to censorship under the Hazelwood standard: • An opinion piece opposing an upcoming referendum that would have provided the college with revenue collected from property taxes. University officials, claiming the paper contained typographical and grammatical errors, confiscated and destroyed 10,000 copies of the paper. After students threatened legal action, the school agreed to reprint the newspaper.14 • An article detailing the incoming university president’s expenditure of state funds, including more than $100,000 spent to remodel the president’s home and pay for *17 his inauguration. Following publication, the president transferred the newspaper’s adviser to another position at the school, an act that generated considerable public attention. The president later resigned after being questioned by state legislators regarding the spending that had been reported in the student newspaper. The adviser was remstated.15 • A yearbook story reporting that members of the school’s volleyball team were removed for bringing alcohol on a team trip and a feature spread on sex and relationships. Following publication, the yearbook editor lost his job. After the editor sued, the school agreed to a settlement in which it paid the editor $10,000 and agreed to a publications policy that prohibited administrative interference with the content of student publications.16 • An editorial cartoon, featuring cartoon figures as university officials, commenting on a U.S. Department of Education report that found the school had misused public funds when it paid for a trip to Disney World by students and school officials. One of those portrayed, the vice president of student affairs, temporarily halted printing of the issue - but released them after students objected.17 If Hazelwood is allowed to determine the level of First Amendment protection to which America’s college student media are entitled, there is no doubt university administrators are poised to take advantage of their new *18 censorship powers. Word has already begun to spread that the standard “hands-off student media” policies recognized by college officials in the past may no longer be required. In California, for example - 2,000 miles west of the Governors State University campus and far beyond the jurisdiction of the Seventh Circuit - administrators at California State University system schools received a memo from the system’s legal counsel on June 30, 2005 - ten days after the Seventh Circuit handed down its decision - informing them that “Hosty appears to signal that CSU campuses may have more latitude than previously believed to censor the content of subsidized student newspapers….”18 Extending Hazelwood to the university setting is a recipe for encouraging censorship that would dramatically hinder the production of good journalism and the training of good journalists. Amici do not believe this Court intended the censorship of college and university student newspapers to be the legacy of Hazelwood. |
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+Regulation of newspapers is a crucial precedent used to justify widespread campus censorship-it uniquely empowers and protects administrators to censor. Lukianoff 05 |
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+(George, Samantha Harris, Foundation for Individual, Rights in Education, 2005 WL 2736313 (U.S.) (Appellate Petition, Motion and Filing) Supreme Court of the United States. Margaret L. HOSTY et al., Petitioners, v. Patricia CARTER, Respondent. No. 05-377. October 19, 2005. On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Brief Amici Curiae of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; The Coalition for Student and Academic Rights; Feminists for Free Expression; The First Amendment Project; Ifeminists.Net; National Association of Scholars; Accuracy in Academia; Leadership Institute; The Individual Rights Foundation; The American Council of Trustees and Alumni; and Students for Academic Freedom in Support of Petitioners) |
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+Commentators from across the political spectrum, while often disagreeing on the source, the scale, and the cause of the chilling of free speech on campus, have described the current campus environment as one where the “marketplace of ideas” is under siege.13 Whether in the name of “ tolerance,” *17 risk management, or merely peace and quiet, hundreds (if not thousands) of universities have enacted policies and engaged in practices hostile to free and open discourse over the past few decades.14 Starting in the 1980s, colleges enacted “speech codes” under a variety of creative legal theories. Despite numerous decisions ruling these codes unconstitutional15 and this Court's decision in R.A. E v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992), which indicated that viewpoint-based speech codes would be unconstitutional, the number of university speech codes actually increased through the 1990s, see Jon Gould, The Precedent that Wasn't, 35 Law and Soc'y Rev. 345 (2001). Over the past twenty years, numerous books have been written alleging an illiberal, intolerant, and/or partisan atmosphere on campus16 in which dissenting viewpoints and unpopular groups are repressed through a variety of measures. More recently, universities have adopted highly restrictive, and sometimes absurd “speech *18 zone” policies restricting speech from all but small comers of the university.17 Thus far, the law has served to protect the collegiate marketplace of ideas from overreaching administrations, requiring policies and practices in keeping with the First Amendment and academic freedom. For example, in Rosenberger, this Court granted religious student groups equal access to student fee funding. In Bait v. Shippensburg University, 280 F. Supp. 2d 357 (M.D. Pa. 2003), a federal court in Pennsylvania ruled Shippensburg University's speech code was unconstitutionally overbroad, and in Roberts v. Haragan, 346 F. Supp. 2d 853 (N.D. Tex. 2004), a federal court in Texas dismissed a speech zone policy as unconstitutionally overbroad. The Hosty decision, however, is a step in the opposite direction. College administrators have already demonstrated a tenacious will to censor even when the law clearly limited their ability to do so. The legal ambiguity that Hosty creates, the unparalleled discretion it grants college administrators, and the legal protection it provides to administrators who censor all threaten to dramatically worsen the campus free speech crisis. If allowed to stand, Hosty will have numerous, specific, predictable, and far reaching negative consequences for free speech and robust debate on America's college campuses. It is no exaggeration to say that the Hosty opinion threatens the existence of the independent collegiate media. Universities have not shown great tolerance for the free press. If there is no longer a presumption of independence or of public forum status when a public university establishes a student newspaper, *19 there should be no doubt that administrators who wish to censor will take advantage of this ambiguity. Public universities will be able to argue that any paper that receives any kind of benefit - whether financial support or simply the use of office space - from the university is subject to administrative control. If past experience is any guide, colleges will pay lip service to the importance of student press freedom, but they will quickly take advantage of any legal means available to punish or control student newspapers that anger or offend students or administrators. For example, in a memorandum to all California State University presidents written only ten days after the Hosty decision, California State University General Counsel Christine Helwick wrote that: while the Hosty decision is from another jurisdiction and, as such, does not directly impact the CSU, the case appears to signal that CSU campuses may have more latitude than previously believed to censor the content of subsidized student newspapers, provided that there is an established practice of regularized content review and approval for pedagogical purposes.18 In this same way, Hosty threatens the existence of independent student groups. If the primary question under Hosty is whether a student group is in some way “subsidized,” any group that receives any sort of benefit or student fees could be threatened with administrative control. The possibility that a court might later determine that the student group or publication was entitled to some form of public forum status would hardly protect the overwhelming majority of these groups that are neither willing nor affluent enough to mount a legal defense. *20 This case also re-opens issues relating to collegiate liability for student media and student groups formerly considered settled. It also allows administrators virtually unlimited freedom to experiment with censorship above and beyond even the broad discretion granted to them under Hosty. Finally, there is no reason to believe this holding will remain limited to public colleges - private colleges that promise free speech to their students tend to base their own speech policies on First Amendment standards.19 Hosty v. Carter will have reverberations from the community college to the Ivy League. Administrators will impose the “intellectual strait jacket” that this Court has long feared, and the consequences will be profound. As FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors once said, “A nation that does not educate in freedom will not survive in freedom, and will not even know when it is lost.”20 |
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+Universities are the most important site of first amendment activity- ignore negative evidence written about other contexts. Goodman 05 |
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+( S. Mark Goodman, Michael C. Hiestand, Student Press Law Center 2005 WL 2736314 (U.S.) (Appellate Petition, Motion and Filing) Supreme Court of the United States. Margaret L. HOSTY, Jeni S. Porche, and Steven P. Barba, Petitioners, v. Patricia CARTER, Respondent. No. 05-377. October 20, 2005. On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Brief of Amici Curiae Student Press Law Center, Associated Collegiate Press, College Media Advisers, Community College Journalism Association, Society for Collegiate Journalists, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, American Society of Newspaper Editors, National Newspaper Association, Newspaper Association of America, Society of Professional Journalists, Associated Press Managing Editors, College Newspaper Business and Advertising Managers, National Federation of Press Women, National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and the Independent Press Association/Campus Journalism Project in Support of Petition of Margaret L. Hosty, Jeni S. Porche, and Steven P. Barba for Writ of Certiorari Of Counsel: S. Mark Goodman, Michael C. Hiestand, Student Press Law Center, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Ste 1100, Arlington, VA 22209-2211, (703) 807-1904. Richard M. Goehler, (Counsel of Record), Frost Brown Todd LLC, 2200 PNC Center, 201 East Fifth Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202, (513) 651-6800, Counsel for Amici Curiae.) |
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+The University is the paradigmatic “marketplace of ideas,” rendering “the vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms…nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.” Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169, 180 (1972) (citation omitted). This Court has specifically recognized there is “no doubt that the First Amendment rights of speech and association extend to the campuses of state universities.” Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U.S. 263, 268-69. This Court’s restrictive First Amendment standard in Hazelwood sprung from the premise that the special circumstances of the secondary and elementary school environment permit school authorities to exercise more control over school-sponsored student expression than the First Amendment would otherwise permit. However, the judicial deference necessary in the high school setting and below - and in the factual context of Hazelwood - is inappropriate for a university setting. A high school is an entirely different environment from a university. This Court acknowledged such a difference when it explicitly reserved the question of whether the same level of deference to school officials expressed in Hazelwood would be “appropriate with respect to school-sponsored expressive activity at the college and university level.” Hazelwood, Id. at 273, n.7. In fact, every effort to justify censorship of college student media under Hazelwood has been rejected by the lower courts except by the Seventh Circuit in Hosty. As Justice Souter has noted, the “cases dealing with the right of teaching institutions to limit expressive freedom of students have been *8 confined to high schools, whose students and their school’s relation to them are different and at least arguably distinguishable from their counterparts in college education.” Board of Regents of the Univ. of Wisconsin System v. Southworth, 529 U.S. 217 (2000) (Sourer, J., concurring in the judgment) (citations omitted). This Court has explicitly recognized that where the “vital” principles of the First Amendment are at stake, “the first danger to liberty lies in granting the State the power to examine publications to determine whether or not they are based on some ultimate idea and, if so, for the State to classify them. The second, and corollary, danger to speech is from the chilling of individual thought and expression.” Rosenberger v. Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819, 835-36 (1995). These dangers are especially threatening in the university setting, where “the quality and creative power of student intellectual life to this day remains a vital measure of a school’s influence and attainment.” Id. Yet that right to review and censor a student publication is precisely what the Seventh Circuit has approved in Hosty. Such restrictions have no place at a public college or university. “For the University, by regulation, to cast disapproval on particular viewpoints of its students risks the suppression of free speech and creative inquiry in one of the vital centers for the Nation’s intellectual life.” Id. Lower courts have consistently struck down administrative attempts to limit free and robust student expression at the postsecondary level. Joyner v. Whiting, 477 F.2d 456 (4th Cir. 1973) (university withdrawal of funding to student publication at North Carolina State University based on editorial condemning integration rejected); Stanley v. Magrath, 719 F.2d 279 (8th Cir. 1983) (attempt by *9 University of Minnesota to change student newspaper funding mechanism after publication of controversial humor issue rejected); Bazaar v. Fortune, 476 F.2d 570 (5th Cir. 1973), aff’d with modification, 489 F.2d 255 (en banc per curiam) (University of Mississippi’s censorship of student magazine because of “coarse language” and story about interracial love affair rejected). In fact, two appellate courts have explicitly refused to apply Hazelwood to college student media. Student Government Association v. Board of Trustees of the University of Massachusetts, 868 F. 2d 473, 480 n. 6 (1st Cir. 1989); Kincaid v. Gibson, 236 F.3d 342, 346 n. 4-5 (6th Cir. 2001) (en banc). College student expression should be subject to no greater restrictions than those applicable to the public at large. Healy, 408 U.S. at 180. The driving force prompting the enactment of the First Amendment was the founders’ unwavering commitment to the freedom of the mind. Nowhere is the mind more provoked, more nurtured, more challenged to new levels of enlightenment than on the university campus. Hazelwood did not, and should not be interpreted to have taken these fundamental precepts of college education into account when it diluted high school students’ First Amendment rights. Nothing in Hazelwood or its progeny should be read to alter the venerated balance favoring free and independent thought on America’s college and university campuses. |
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+Campus free speech solves extinction. Lukianoff 05 |
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+(George, Samantha Harris, Foundation for Individual, Rights in Education, 2005 WL 2736313 (U.S.) (Appellate Petition, Motion and Filing) Supreme Court of the United States. Margaret L. HOSTY et al., Petitioners, v. Patricia CARTER, Respondent. No. 05-377. October 19, 2005. On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Brief Amici Curiae of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; The Coalition for Student and Academic Rights; Feminists for Free Expression; The First Amendment Project; Ifeminists.Net; National Association of Scholars; Accuracy in Academia; Leadership Institute; The Individual Rights Foundation; The American Council of Trustees and Alumni; and Students for Academic Freedom in Support of Petitioners) |
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+This Court has long emphasized and understood the importance of free and open expression on campus: The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation … Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die. Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234, 250 (1957). *6 In the nearly fifty years since Sweezy, this Court and lower courts have repeatedly reaffirmed the special importance of robust free expression in higher education.3 In Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169 (1972), this Court made clear that students are an important part of the collegiate marketplace of ideas when it ruled that a college, acting “as the instrumentality of the State, may not restrict speech … simply because it finds the views expressed by any group to be abhorrent.” Healy at 187-88. See also Papish v. Bd. of Curators of the Univ. of Mo., 410 U.S. 667, 670 (1973) (“the mere dissemination of ideas - no matter how offensive to good taste - on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’ ”). |
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+Advantage 2: Civic Engagement |
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+Censorship of college journalism guts civic engagement. LoMonte 12-1 |
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+(Frank D., http://www.splc.org/article/2016/12/college-media-threats-report-2016) |
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+Frank D. LoMonte, executive director of the SPLC, said, “It is hypocritical for colleges to claim they support civic engagement while defunding student news organizations, removing well-qualified faculty advisers, and otherwise intimidating journalists into compliance. Colleges are more obsessed with promoting a favorable public image than ever before, but a college that retaliates against students and faculty for unflattering journalism doesn't just look bad—it is bad. We need a top-level commitment from the presidents of America's colleges and universities to support editorially independent student-run news coverage, including secure funding and retaliation protection for students and their advisers.” Joan Bertin, NCAC executive director, said, “This report exposes restrictions on press and speech freedoms on campus and exhorts college and university administrators to educate students in the operation of our constitutional system by allowing students to engage in its most critical functions: seeking information, becoming engaged and informed, and speaking out on matters of importance.” Kelley Lash, president of CMA, said, “This issue impacts millions of educators and students. College Media Association emphatically supports the First Amendment freedoms of all student media at all institutions, both public and private, and agrees that these media must be free from all forms of external interference designed to influence content. Student media participants, and their advisers, should not be threatened or punished due to the content of the student media. Their rights of free speech and free press must always be guaranteed.” |
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+Civic engagement is the vital internal link to solving every existential problem- its try or die for the affirmative. Small 06 |
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+(Jonathan, former Americorps VISTA for the Human Services Coalition, “Moving Forward,” The Journal for Civic Commitment, Spring, http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/other/engagement/Journal/Issue7/Small.jsp) |
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+What will be the challenges of the new millennium? And how should we equip young people to face these challenges? While we cannot be sure of the exact nature of the challenges, we can say unequivocally that humankind will face them together. If the end of the twentieth century marked the triumph of the capitalists, individualism, and personal responsibility, the new century will present challenges that require collective action, unity, and enlightened self-interest. Confronting global warming, depleted natural resources, global super viruses, global crime syndicates, and multinational corporations with no conscience and no accountability will require cooperation, openness, honesty, compromise, and most of all solidarity – ideals not exactly cultivated in the twentieth century. We can no longer suffer to see life through the tiny lens of our own existence. Never in the history of the world has our collective fate been so intricately interwoven. Our very existence depends upon our ability to adapt to this new paradigm, to envision a more cohesive society. With humankind’s next great challenge comes also great opportunity. Ironically, modern individualism backed us into a corner. We have two choices, work together in solidarity or perish together in alienation. Unlike any other crisis before, the noose is truly around the neck of the whole world at once. Global super viruses will ravage rich and poor alike, developed and developing nations, white and black, woman, man, and child. Global warming and damage to the environment will affect climate change and destroy ecosystems across the globe. Air pollution will force gas masks on our faces, our depleted atmosphere will make a predator of the sun, and chemicals will invade and corrupt our water supplies. Every single day we are presented the opportunity to change our current course, to survive modernity in a manner befitting our better nature. Through zealous cooperation and radical solidarity we can alter the course of human events. Regarding the practical matter of equipping young people to face the challenges of a global, interconnected world, we need to teach cooperation, community, solidarity, balance and tolerance in schools. We need to take a holistic approach to education. Standardized test scores alone will not begin to prepare young people for the world they will inherit. The three staples of traditional education (reading, writing, and arithmetic) need to be supplemented by three cornerstones of a modern education, exposure, exposure, and more exposure. How can we teach solidarity? How can we teach community in the age of rugged individualism? How can we counterbalance crass commercialism and materialism? How can we impart the true meaning of power? These are the educational challenges we face in the new century. It will require a radical transformation of our conception of education. We’ll need to trust a bit more, control a bit less, and put our faith in the potential of youth to make sense of their world. In addition to a declaration of the gauntlet set before educators in the twenty-first century, this paper is a proposal and a case study of sorts toward a new paradigm of social justice and civic engagement education. Unfortunately, the current pedagogical climate of public K-12 education does not lend itself well to an exploratory study and trial of holistic education. Consequently, this proposal and case study targets a higher education model. Specifically, we will look at some possibilities for a large community college in an urban setting with a diverse student body. Our guides through this process are specifically identified by the journal Equity and Excellence in Education. The dynamic interplay between ideas of social justice, civic engagement, and service learning in education will be the lantern in the dark cave of uncertainty. As such, a simple and straightforward explanation of the three terms is helpful to direct this inquiry. Before we look at a proposal and case study and the possible consequences contained therein, this paper will draw out a clear understanding of how we should characterize these ubiquitous terms and how their relationship to each other affects our study. Social Justice, Civic Engagement, Service Learning and Other Commie Crap Social justice is often ascribed long, complicated, and convoluted definitions. In fact, one could fill a good-sized library with treatises on this subject alone. Here we do not wish to belabor the issue or argue over fine points. For our purposes, it will suffice to have a general characterization of the term, focusing instead on the dynamics of its interaction with civic engagement and service learning. Social justice refers quite simply to a community vision and a community conscience that values inclusion, fairness, tolerance, and equality. The idea of social justice in America has been around since the Revolution and is intimately linked to the idea of a social contract. The Declaration of Independence is the best example of the prominence of social contract theory in the US. It states quite emphatically that the government has a contract with its citizens, from which we get the famous lines about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Social contract theory and specifically the Declaration of Independence are concrete expressions of the spirit of social justice. Similar clamor has been made over the appropriate definitions of civic engagement and service learning, respectively. Once again, let’s not get bogged down on subtleties. Civic engagement is a measure or degree of the interest and/or involvement an individual and a community demonstrate around community issues. There is a longstanding dispute over how to properly quantify civic engagement. Some will say that today’s youth are less involved politically and hence demonstrate a lower degree of civic engagement. Others cite high volunteer rates among the youth and claim it demonstrates a high exhibition of civic engagement. And there are about a hundred other theories put forward on the subject of civic engagement and today’s youth. But one thing is for sure; today’s youth no longer see government and politics as an effective or valuable tool for affecting positive change in the world. Instead of criticizing this judgment, perhaps we should come to sympathize and even admire it. Author Kurt Vonnegut said, “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president.” Maybe the youth’s rejection of American politics isn’t a shortcoming but rather a rational and appropriate response to their experience. Consequently, the term civic engagement takes on new meaning for us today. In order to foster fundamental change on the systemic level, which we have already said is necessary for our survival in the twenty-first century, we need to fundamentally change our systems. Therefore, part of our challenge becomes convincing the youth that these systems, and by systems we mean government and commerce, have the potential for positive change. Civic engagement consequently takes on a more specific and political meaning in this context. Service learning is a methodology and a tool for teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement, and deepening practical understanding of a subject. Since it is a relatively new field, at least in the structured sense, service learning is only beginning to define itself. Through service learning students learn by experiencing things firsthand and by exposing themselves to new points of view. Instead of merely reading about government, for instance, a student might experience it by working in a legislative office. Rather than just studying global warming out of a textbook, a student might volunteer time at an environmental group. If service learning develops and evolves into a discipline with the honest goal of making better citizens, teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement, and most importantly, exposing students to different and alternative experiences, it could be a major feature of a modern education. Service learning is the natural counterbalance to our current overemphasis on standardized testing. Social justice, civic engagement, and service learning are caught in a symbiotic cycle. The more we have of one of them; the more we have of all of them. However, until we get momentum behind them, we are stalled. Service learning may be our best chance to jumpstart our democracy. In the rest of this paper, we will look at the beginning stages of a project that seeks to do just that. |
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+Trump victory proves the case is a disad to every K- failure to prioritize civic engagement causes rightwing takeover. Rorty 98 |
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+(Richard, Stanford Philosophy Professor, Achieving Our Country, pp. 87-94) |
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+If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in the United States but in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an Orwellian world. In such a world, there may be no supernational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Party—namely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwell’s Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionals—Lind’s “overclass,” the people like you and me. The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues.7 The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere—to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created psuedo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear. Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated—and, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.8 The first response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to the marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements. Union members in the United States have watched factory after factory close, only to reopen in Slovenia, Thailand, or Mexico. It is no wonder that they see the result of international free trade as prosperity for managers and stockholders, a better standard of living for workers in developing countries, and a very much worse standard of living for American workers. It would be no wonder if they saw the American leftist intelligentsia as on the same side of the managers and stockholders—as sharing the same class interests. For we intellectuals, who are mostly academics, are ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization. To make things worse, we often seem more interested in the workers of the developing world than in the fate of our fellow citizens. Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone will assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salemen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make peace with the international superrich, just as Hitler made with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossesed? It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth century, no longer have a Left. Since nobody denies the existence of what I have called the cultural Left, this amounts to an admission that that Left is unable to engage in national politics. It is not the sort of the Left which can be asked to deal with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The first is that the Left should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and Whitman might be achieved. In support of my first suggestion, let me cite a passage from Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses his exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now going on under the rubric of “individualism versus communitarianism.” Dewey thought that all discussions which took this dichotomy seriously suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want is light upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another. Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociopolitical theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a rightist maneuver, one which supplies “the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order.”9 For such ascents are now more common on the Left than on the Right. The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique. When one of today’s academic leftists says that some topic has been “inadequately theorized,” you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan’s impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by “problematizing familiar concepts.” Recent attempts to subvert social institutitons by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worts. The authors of these purportedly “subversive” books honestly believe that the are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate or a political strategy. Even though what these authors “theorize” is often something very concrete and near at hand—a curent TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal—they offer the most absract and barren explanations imaginable. These futile attempts to philosophize one’s way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellec- tual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called "power." This is the name of what Edmund- son calls Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook |
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+Underview |
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+Underview |
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+Censorship is based in PR/funding concerns, not student wellbeing. Protest solves NC offense |
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+Schuman, PhD, 12-8-16 |
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+(Rebecca, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2016/12/student_journalists_are_under_threat.html) |
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+My three years on the editorial board of Vassar’s weekly surely ran this gamut. There was the feature on heroin use on campus, complete with a diagram showing how to sterilize a syringe; there was the junior who stormed our meeting incensed that the headline “Student Convicted of Rape and Expelled” was not sufficient trigger warning for details of a sexual assault (and of a victim’s name, which was used with her explicit permission). We never heard a single word from the higher-ups. Then as now, in fact, it was students, rather than the administration, with demands to change our content. Indeed, as the result of the odd ill-conceived op-ed, or the accidental inclusion of a paid advertisement by an ovum donation company (whoops), the Misc., as we called it, was subject to outraged student “speak-outs.” But that was exactly the point—everyone got to speak out. Indeed, none of the five former editors in chief I worked with remembered a single instance when then-President Frances Daly “Fran” Fergusson subjected the Misc. to administrative reprimand, much less something as draconian as prior review. The closest thing we got came in the form of a letter “from” Fran’s two omnipresent dogs—on the dogs’ personalized letterhead—gently reprimanding us for misidentifying their breed. (Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, not Cocker Spaniels.) And plenty of what we published made the school look bad either because the news itself was bad—rape, suicide, drugs—or because we’d written it badly (ahem). We had no faculty adviser, received no course credit, and certainly enjoyed a mixed reputation on campus, but we loved every second of it, and some of us even grew up to be (more or less) journalists. The difference between then and now, of course, is the internet. Viral outrage—and chances are at least one of our foibles would have brought it—translates to fewer alumni donations, and that can pique the attention of the front office in a way nothing else can. It’s entirely possible that the shenanigans we got away with on our insular, 2,400-person campus in the ’90s were indeed only possible in a less-connected world. However, when I emailed Rhys Johnson, the Misc.’s current editor, he assured me the paper’s present-day relationship with the administration is still “quite peaceful,” and while he sometimes has to endure uncomfortable post-publication meetings with administrators, the newspaper under his leadership has never been subject to prior review or administrative censorship. I’d like to think that the Misc. represents the norm, and the disturbing cases the AAUP report chronicles the outliers. But as more universities gain success quashing poor PR from their student-run outlets—success that, by its nature, goes unnoticed by the public—the outliers may easily creep toward normalcy. I understand that many American institutions are in constant funding crises, and all it takes are a few scandalized alums to halt construction of the new rock climbing wall. But if our universities are not instructing students in both the power and responsibility of a free press, they are putting not only the next generation of journalists at risk, but all of us. There is little more frightening in a liberal democracy than a press under constant, vague threat of censorship by an authoritarian power figure. There is little more frightening, but there is something: a generation of journalists trained to submit to censorship without question. If the trend toward restricting the American university press continues, that is what will happen, at exactly the hour in the American experiment when democracy—and dissent—need vigorous protection. When more than half of the people who voted for the president-elect already do not believe the media when we uncover that individual’s blatant, terrifying lies—when Nazi terminology for the press returns to use in his supporters, when those supporters wear T-shirts suggesting journalists be hanged—the idea of a new generation of journalists trained in simpering acquiescence to the powerful is among the more worrying in a litany of worrying ideas about the direction of the United States. It’s not too late. American university administrations still have the power to put their own PR behind the survival of the republic and stop meddling in the student press. But it remains to be seen whether, in the coming years, universities will seek to distinguish themselves from a presidential administration that wants to destroy the free press—or act more in its image. |
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+Restrictions undermine effectiveness of 2ndary education- threatens innovation and science |
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+Lukianoff, JD Stanford, 05 |
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+(George, Samantha Harris, Foundation for Individual, Rights in Education, 2005 WL 2736313 (U.S.) (Appellate Petition, Motion and Filing) Supreme Court of the United States. Margaret L. HOSTY et al., Petitioners, v. Patricia CARTER, Respondent. No. 05-377. October 19, 2005. On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Brief Amici Curiae of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; The Coalition for Student and Academic Rights; Feminists for Free Expression; The First Amendment Project; Ifeminists.Net; National Association of Scholars; Accuracy in Academia; Leadership Institute; The Individual Rights Foundation; The American Council of Trustees and Alumni; and Students for Academic Freedom in Support of Petitioners) |
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+The Seventh Circuit, however, held that the rationale of Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988), applied to collegiate student newspapers. By placing the rights of adult university students, engaged in reporting as part of their extracurricular activities paid for out of fees extracted from them precisely for this purpose - on the same plane as the rights of high school students writing as part of a journalism class, the Seventh Circuit gravely discounted the *7 special status of colleges and universities. This Court has rightly never held that the nation relies on its high schools as the engines of intellectual innovation, scientific discovery and open debate, but in opinions like Sweezy, this Court has recognized that higher education plays precisely this role. By applying Hazelwood's weak speech protections to adult students and refusing to hold administrators accountable for brazen acts of censorship, the Seventh Circuit opinion threatens the vibrancy and effectiveness of our nation's colleges and universities. |