To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
Jan Feb AC
Tournament: University of Houston Cougar Classic | Round: 1 | Opponent: Alan George | Judge: Tyler Gamble Framework Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech.
I value morality.
First, to evaluate ethical judgments we must interrogate ontologies of exclusion to filter out ethical biases. Butler 09. Judith Butler, “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?” Jan 1st 2009, Pg.138, http://books.google.com/books/about/Frames_of_War.html?id=ga7hAAAAMAAJ We ask such normative questions as if we know what we mean by the subjects even as we do not always know how best to represent or recognize various subjects. Indeed, the “we” who asks such questions for the most part assumes that the problem is a normative one, namely, how best to arrange political life so that recognition and representation can take place. And though surely this is a crucial, if not the most crucial, normative question to ask, we cannot possibly approach an answer if we do not consider the ontology of the subject whose recognition and representation is at issue. Moreover, any inquiry into that ontology requires that we consider another level at which the normative operates, namely, through norms that produce the idea of the human who is worthy of recognition and representation at all. That is to say, we cannot ask and answer the most commonly understood normative questions, regarding how best to represent or recognize such subjects, if we fail to understand the differential of power at work that distinguishes between those subjects who will be eligible for recognition and those who will not.
Morality mandates expression of all voices, which necessarily prohibits structural oppression. Young 74. Iris Marion Young, Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago since 2000, masters and doctorate in philosophy in 1974 from Pennsylvania State University. “Justice and the Politics of Difference”. Princeton University Press, 1990, Digital Copy. Group representation, third, encourages the expression of individual ¶ and group needs and interests in terms that appeal to justice, that transform an "I want" into an "I am entitled to," in Hannah Pitkin's words. In ¶ Chapter 4 I argued that publicity itself encourages this transformation ¶ because a condition of the public is that people call one another to account. Group representation adds to such accountability because it serves as an antidote to self-deceiving self-interest masked as an impartial or general interest. Unless confronted with different perspectives on social relations and events, different values and language, most people tend to assert their perspective as universal. When social privilege allows some group perspectives to dominate a public while others are silent, such universalizing of the particular will be reaffirmed by many others. Thus the test of whether a claim upon the public is just or merely an expression of self interest is best made when those making it must confront the opinion of ¶ others who have explicitly with different, though not necessarily conflicting, ¶ experiences, priorities, and needs (cf. Sunstein, 1988, p. 1588). As a person of social privilege, I am more likely to go outside myself and have ¶ regard for social justice when I must listen to the voice of those my privilege otherwise tends to silence.
Thus the standard is combatting structural violence. Prefer consequence-based frameworks because only naturalism is epistemically accessible Papinaeu 11 David Papineau, “Naturalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007 Moore took this argument to show that moral facts comprise a distinct species of non-natural fact. However, any such non-naturalist view of morality faces immediate difficulties, deriving ultimately from the kind of causal closure thesis discussed above. If all physical effects are due to a limited range of natural causes, and if moral facts lie outside this range, then it follow that moral facts can never make any difference to what happens in the physical world (Harman, 1986). At first sight this may seem tolerable (perhaps moral facts indeed don't have any physical effects). But it has very awkward epistemological consequences. For beings like us, knowledge of the spatiotemporal world is mediated by physical processes involving our sense organs and cognitive systems. If moral facts cannot influence the physical world, then it is hard to see how we can have any knowledge of them.
Advantage 1: Oppression Free speech eliminates structures of oppression –
It allows us to identify racists so that we can persuade them otherwise; this solves the root cause of oppression. ACLU 16. American Civil Liberties Union. For almost 100 years, the ACLU has worked to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States., “Hate Speech on Campus”, ACLU, 2016. https://www.aclu.org/other/hate-speech-campus//AD Many universities, under pressure to respond to the concerns of those who are the objects of hate, have adopted codes or policies prohibiting speech that offends any group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. That's the wrong response, well-meaning or not. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content. Speech codes adopted by government-financed state colleges and universities amount to government censorship, in violation of the Constitution. And the ACLU believes that all campuses should adhere to First Amendment principles because academic freedom is a bedrock of education in a free society. How much we value the right of free speech is put to its severest test when the speaker is someone we disagree with most. Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible: When one of us is denied this right, all of us are denied. Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has fought for the free expression of all ideas, popular or unpopular. That's the constitutional mandate. Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech -- not less -- is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance. College administrators may find speech codes attractive as a quick fix, but as one critic put it: "Verbal purity is not social change." Codes that punish bigoted speech treat only the symptom: The problem itself is bigotry. The ACLU believes that instead of opting for gestures that only appear to cure the disease, universities have to do the hard work of recruitment to increase faculty and student diversity; counseling to raise awareness about bigotry and its history, and changing curricula to institutionalize more inclusive approaches to all subject matter. 2. Restrictions on hate speech fail – they’ll just repackage the message using a dog-whistle. Malik 12 (Kenan Malik, I am a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. My latest book is The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, “why hate speech should not be banned”, April 12, 2012, https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/) Kenan Malik: I am not sure that ‘hate speech’ is a particularly useful concept. Much is said and written, of course, that is designed to promote hatred. But it makes little sense to lump it all together in a single category, especially when hatred is such a contested concept. In a sense, hate speech restriction has become a means not of addressing specific issues about intimidation or incitement, but of enforcing general social regulation. This is why if you look at hate speech laws across the world, there is no consistency about what constitutes hate speech. Britain bans abusive, insulting, and threatening speech. Denmark and Canada ban speech that is insulting and degrading. India and Israel ban speech that hurts religious feelings and incites racial and religious hatred. In Holland, it is a criminal offense deliberately to insult a particular group. Australia prohibits speech that offends, insults, humiliates, or intimidates individuals or groups. Germany bans speech that violates the dignity of, or maliciously degrades or defames, a group. And so on. In each case, the law defines hate speech in a different way. One response might be to say: Let us define hate speech much more tightly. I think, however, that the problem runs much deeper. Hate speech restriction is a means not of tackling bigotry but of rebranding certain, often obnoxious, ideas or arguments as immoral. It is a way of making certain ideas illegitimate without bothering politically to challenge them. And that is dangerous. 3. Spillover effect – challenging oppression in everyday discussions is key to shaping larger cultural landscapes. Malik 2 (Kenan Malik, I am a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. My latest book is The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, “why hate speech should not be banned”, April 12, 2012, https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/) Much of what we call hate speech consists, however, of claims that may be contemptible but yet are accepted by many as morally defensible. Hence I am wary of the argument that some sentiments are so immoral they can simply be condemned without being contested. First, such blanket condemnations are often a cover for the inability or unwillingness politically to challenge obnoxious sentiments. Second, in challenging obnoxious sentiments, we are not simply challenging those who spout such views; we are also challenging the potential audience for such views. Dismissing obnoxious or hateful views as not worthy of response may not be the best way of engaging with such an audience. Whether or not an obnoxious claim requires a reply depends, therefore, not simply on the nature of the claim itself, but also on the potential audience for that claim. This solves – empirics prove you can’t eliminate bigotry by banning it. Malik 3 (Kenan Malik, I am a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. My latest book is The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, “why hate speech should not be banned”, April 12, 2012, https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/) And in practice, you cannot reduce or eliminate bigotry simply by banning it. You simply let the sentiments fester underground. As Milton once put it, to keep out ‘evil doctrine’ by licensing is ‘like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his Park-gate’. Take Britain. In 1965, Britain prohibited incitement to racial hatred as part of its Race Relations Act. The following decade was probably the most racist in British history. It was the decade of ‘Paki-bashing’, when racist thugs would seek out Asians to beat up. It was a decade of firebombings, stabbings, and murders. In the early 1980s, I was organizing street patrols in East London to protect Asian families from racist attacks. Nor were thugs the only problem. Racism was woven into the fabric of public institutions. The police, immigration officials – all were openly racist. In the twenty years between 1969 and 1989, no fewer than thirty-seven blacks and Asians were killed in police custody – almost one every six months. The same number again died in prisons or in hospital custody. When in 1982, cadets at the national police academy were asked to write essays about immigrants, one wrote, ‘Wogs, nignogs and Pakis come into Britain take up our homes, our jobs and our resources and contribute relatively less to our once glorious country. They are, by nature, unintelligent. And can’t at all be educated sufficiently to live in a civilised society of the Western world’. Another wrote that ‘all blacks are pains and should be ejected from society’. So much for incitement laws helping create a more tolerant society. Today, Britain is a very different place. Racism has not disappeared, nor have racist attacks, but the open, vicious, visceral bigotry that disfigured the Britain when I was growing up has largely ebbed away. It has done so not because of laws banning racial hatred but because of broader social changes and because minorities themselves stood up to the bigotry and fought back. Of course, as the British experience shows, hatred exists not just in speech but also has physical consequences. Is it not important, critics of my view ask, to limit the fomenting of hatred to protect the lives of those who may be attacked? In asking this very question, they are revealing the distinction between speech and action. Saying something is not the same as doing it. But, in these post-ideological, postmodern times, it has become very unfashionable to insist on such a distinction. In blurring the distinction between speech and action, what is really being blurred is the idea of human agency and of moral responsibility. Because lurking underneath the argument is the idea that people respond like automata to words or images. But people are not like robots. They think and reason and act on their thoughts and reasoning. Words certainly have an impact on the real world, but that impact is mediated through human agency. Racists are, of course, influenced by racist talk. It is they, however, who bear responsibility for translating racist talk into racist action. Ironically, for all the talk of using free speech responsibly, the real consequence of the demand for censorship is to moderate the responsibility of individuals for their actions. Having said that, there are clearly circumstances in which there is a direct connection between speech and action, where someone’s words have directly led to someone else taking action. Such incitement should be illegal, but it has to be tightly defined. There has to be both a direct link between speech and action and intent on the part of the speaker for that particular act of violence to be carried out. Incitement to violence in the context of hate speech should be as tightly defined as in ordinary criminal cases. In ordinary criminal cases, incitement is, rightly, difficult legally to prove. The threshold for liability should not be lowered just because hate speech is involved. 4. Perceived assault on free speech drives voters to the right wing – that’s how Trump got elected president. Soave 16 (Robby Soave, Associate editor at Reason.com, enjoys writing about college news, education policy, criminal justice reform, and television, “Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash”, Nov. 9, 2016, http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-leftist-political-corr Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness. More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness. I have tried to call attention to this issue for years. I have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the wrong thing. And ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP presidential primaries, I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man who stood in opposition to it. I have watched this play out on campus after campus. I have watched dissident student groups invite Milo Yiannopoulos to speak—not because they particularly agree with his views, but because he denounces censorship and undermines political correctness. I have watched students cheer his theatrics, his insulting behavior, and his narcissism solely because the enforcers of campus goodthink are outraged by it. It's not about his ideas, or policies. It's not even about him. It's about vengeance for social oppression. Trump has done to America what Yiannopoulos did to campus. This is a view Yiannopoulos shares. When I spoke with him about Trump's success months ago, he told me, "Nobody votes for Trump or likes Trump on the basis of policy positions. That's a misunderstanding of what the Trump phenomenon is." He described Trump as "an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness." Correctly, I might add. What is political correctness? It's notoriously hard to define. I recently appeared on a panel with CNN's Sally Kohn, who described political correctness as being polite and having good manners. That's fine—it can mean different things to different people. I like manners. I like being polite. That's not what I'm talking about. The segment of the electorate who flocked to Trump because he positioned himself as "an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness" think it means this: smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the throats of ordinary folks who aren't up-to-date on the latest requirements of progressive society. Example: A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe they should change that view. Maybe it's insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright. If you're a leftist reading this, you probably think that's stupid. You probably can't understand why someone would get so bent out of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it's not a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who's the delicate snowflake now, huh? you're probably thinking. I'm telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust your approach has delivered the country to Trump. There's a related problem: the boy-who-cried-wolf situation. I was happy to see a few liberals, like Bill Maher, owning up to it. Maher admitted during a recent show that he was wrong to treat George Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain like they were apocalyptic threats to the nation: it robbed him of the ability to treat Trump more seriously. The left said McCain was a racist supported by racists, it said Romney was a racist supported by racists, but when an actually racist Republican came along—and racists cheered him—it had lost its ability to credibly make that accusation. This is akin to the political-correctness-run-amok problem: both are examples of the left's horrible over-reach during the Obama years. The leftist drive to enforce a progressive social vision was relentless, and it happened too fast. I don't say this because I'm opposed to that vision—like most members of the under-30 crowd, I have no problem with gender neutral pronouns—I say this because it inspired a backlash that gave us Trump. My liberal critics rolled their eyes when I complained about political correctness. I hope they see things a little more clearly now. The left sorted everyone into identity groups and then told the people in the poorly-educated-white-male identity group that that's the only bad one. It mocked the members of this group mercilessly. It punished them for not being woke enough. It called them racists. It said their video games were sexist. It deployed Lena Dunham to tell them how horrible they were. Lena Dunham! I warned that political-correctness-run-amok and liberal overreach would lead to a counter-revolution if unchecked. That counter-revolution just happened. There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind. The presidency just went to the guy whose main qualification, according to his supporters, is that he isn't afraid to speak his.
Advantage 2: Sexual Assault Teachers are dissuaded from teaching rape law due to a culture of fear surrounding political correctness Fisher 16 (Anthony L. Fisher, Dec 13, 2016, “Opposition to “offensive” speech on campuses will ultimately burn dissidents”, http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship) PEN America, the literary and human rights association that lists as one of its core principles a commitment to "protect open expression in the United States and worldwide," set out to explore the state of free speech on the nation’s campuses — re-examining several high-profile incidents and controversies. While not comprehensive, the report, published this fall, is impressively thorough, treating much of its content as teachable case studies, rather than a set of self-affirming anecdotes. Some press coverage, however, suggested that the PEN America report — titled “And Campus For All: Diversity, Inclusion, and Freedom of Speech at U.S. Universities" — had exonerated campuses from the charge that they insufficiently protect free speech, and that it sided with students who think "cries of ‘free speech’ are too often used as a cudgel against them,” as the New York Times put it. The report itself contributes in a small way to this confused take, largely due to a single line in its conclusion which (improbably) asserts that there is no “pervasive ‘crisis’ for free speech on campus.” But that same report exhaustively details dozens of cases where certain speech was inappropriately muted on campus. More examples: Skidmore College’s Bias Response Group determined that the posting of Donald Trump's official campaign motto "Make America Great Again" in classrooms where women and people of color worked constituted "racialized, targeted attacks." A tenured associate professor at Louisiana State University, Teresa Buchanan, was dismissed for the offenses of using off-color language (including "fuck no”) in class, and off campus (where she said “pussy” in a conversation with another teacher). Like the University of Colorado’s Adler, Buchanan was deemed to have created a "hostile learning environment." The authors write of the "chilling effect" such administrative actions have on professors who fear reprisals for unintentional offense, and as a result, will avoid certain subjects, including rape law and even some aspects of Greek mythology, out of an abundance of caution. Two impacts:
Lack of rape law education hurts survivors of sexual assault – they won’t win court cases Soave 14 (Robby Soave, Dec. 16, 2014, “Profs Have Stopped Teaching Rape Law Now That Everything 'Triggers' Students”, http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/16/profs-have-stopped-teaching-rape-law-now) Students seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor. Student organizations representing women’s interests now routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic. These organizations also ask criminal-law teachers to warn their classes that the rape-law unit might “trigger” traumatic memories. Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well. One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word “violate” in class—as in “Does this conduct violate the law?”—because the word was triggering. Some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress. Suk—who is one of the signatories on this statement of opposition to Harvard's illiberal sexual assault policy—goes on to note that the very real, terrible consequence of not teaching rape law will be the proliferation of lawyers ill-equipped to deal with such matters. Victims of sexual assault deserve competent legal representation; the legal system needs prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges who have vigorously studied the nuances of rape adjudication. Social progress on all these fronts will be rolled back if law professors stop educating students about rape. That would be a travesty of justice. 2. Stunts sexual assault activism on campus and reduces awareness of the issue Baker 15 (Katie J.M. Baker, Apr. 3, 2015, “Teaching Rape Law In The Age Of The Trigger Warning”, https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/teaching-rape-law-in-the-age-of-the-trigger-warning?utm_term=.par3Gy4V7#.gcKwr03L4) One criminal law professor at the college was so upset that she told the administration she would rather not teach rape law at all than be forced to teach it in a manner based on one student’s “deeply held personal feelings.” The professor, who would only speak anonymously, has decades of experience studying rape law and said she planned to discuss everything from the effects of trauma to campus rape activism. Instead, she spent class time reassuring students that she would not treat rape differently than other sensitive subjects. Some of her students were thankful for the email, she said, but others were confused since it came out of nowhere and was endorsed by the school. One distraught student told the professor that she was a rape survivor and now had no idea if she would be able to handle whatever was coming next. Some professors told BuzzFeed News that they had no problem incorporating their students’ concerns. Brooklyn Law professor Bennett Capers said he begins his section on rape law by reminding students that it’s a particularly sensitive subject and providing them with sexual assault statistics. “On the first day, a lot of students are reluctant to engage on the subject, but by the second, we have some of the most rewarding conversation I’ve had all semester,” he said. Capers also tells his students that rape law is a particularly fascinating area because it’s currently evolving. “They can push the law in new directions as they become lawyers,” he said. Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former sex crimes prosecutor and professor at Northwestern Law School, said she believes it’s up to the professor to manage the class well. She’s never had any problems. “I think students can make comments that have the potential to be deeply upsetting, but that can be navigated,” she said. Other professors aren’t as quick to bend to students’ requests for sensitivity. Professor Suk told BuzzFeed News that she wrote her New Yorker piece because she was hearing about more students who objected to or absented themselves from the classroom discussion on rape law than ever before. “I wanted to reflect on why, just at a time when sexual assault, particularly on campus, is getting so much attention, we might see a shrinking away from classroom discussion of these topics,” she told BuzzFeed News. Suk said she thinks the shift is indicative of a new form of “social suffering” as classroom experience that goes beyond the pain of individual victims of sexual violence. “The social designation of topics and forms of discussion as ‘traumatic’ has real consequences for classroom intellectual exploration,” she said.
Advantage 3: Education A Rights Precedent: restrictions on free speech creates a dangerous slippery slope. Universities should not be the arbiters of communication. *Climate change NC, Sustainability Florida Fisher 16 (Anthony L. Fisher, Dec 13, 2016, “Opposition to “offensive” speech on campuses will ultimately burn dissidents”, http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship) In perhaps the most cogent line of the entire report, the authors write: “Overreaction to problematic speech may impoverish the environment for speech for all.” In the name of social justice, some students are demanding administrators become the arbiters of what speech is legitimate and what isn’t. These students don’t seem to grasp that by granting authority figures the power to adjudicate which speakers have the right to be heard, they will inevitably find their own speech silenced when opponents claim offense, fear, or discomfort. Calls for crackdowns on “offensive” speech inevitably boomerang It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have been deemed hate speech by a number of public universities, and whose future political activities could be endangered by an act of Congress. Just this month, the Senate unanimously passed the "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” which directs the Department of Education to use the bill's contents as a guideline when adjudicating complaints of anti-Semitism on campus. Among the speech-chilling components of the bill, the political (and subjective) act of judging Israel by an "unfair double standard" could be considered hate speech. To cite other examples of unintended consequences of the crackdown on “offensive” speech, a black student at the University of Michigan was punished for calling another student “white trash,” and conservative law students at Georgetown claimed they were “traumatized” when an email critical of deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia landed in their inboxes. The PEN America report also notes the Foundation for Individual Rights’ analysis of hundreds of campuses with “severely restrictive” speech codes. While a number of these campuses don't aggressively enforce their speech codes, the rules remain on the books; more than a dozen such codes have been overturned in the courts. What’s even more concerning is the increasingly popular notion that some ideas, such as opposition to abortion, should simply be “non-platformed" — that is, deemed unworthy of even being heard on campus. Although the trend of denying contentious speakers such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or refugee-turned-Dutch politician and critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali public platforms by "disinviting" them from campus is disconcerting, it is not censorship. However, a pro-choice group physically blocking the display of a pro-life group on the campus of the University of Georgia is a form of censorship. As is the case of University of California-Santa Barbara professor Mireille Miller-Young, who assaulted a young woman holding a pro-life placard including graphic imagery in a "free speech" zone on campus and stole her sign. When the young woman objected to the theft of her property, Miller-Young replied, "I may be a thief, but you're a terrorist." Like it or not, almost half of all Americans consider themselves pro-life. Banning their perspective from campus won't win over converts, and it’s both immoral and counterproductive to declare completely legitimate political perspectives beyond the pale. Think of anti-war protests or demonstrations in support of integration when both causes were broadly unpopular, and then try to consider a majority on campus declaring their school a "safe space" from such "offensive" expressions of free speech.
B Free speech prepares students for the real world by reducing academic insulation. Vivanco 16 (Leonor Vivanco, August 25th, 2016, “U. of C. tells incoming freshmen it does not support 'trigger warnings' or 'safe spaces'”, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-university-of-chicago-safe-spaces-letter-met-20160825-story.html3 "It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive," the report states. "Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community." The university is preparing students for the real world and would not be serving them by shielding them from unpleasantness, said Geoffrey Stone, chair of the committee, law professor and past provost at the U. of C. "The right thing to do is empower the students, help them understand how to fight, combat and respond, not to insulate them from things they will have to face later," Stone said. While the university doesn't support, require or encourage trigger warnings, it does not prohibit them, he added. Professors are still free to alert students to certain material if they choose to do so. Jane Kirtley, a media ethics and law professor at the University of Minnesota, called U. of C.'s move "refreshing." She said colleges should resist setting limits on what views and opinions are acceptable to air in open forum and should encourage students to discuss things they find uncomfortable. "If universities are not providing platforms for people to be offensive, then I don't think that they're doing part of their job," Kirtley said. "If listening to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is going to make your blood pressure go up 400 points, then fine, don't listen to them. But that doesn't mean you can say we can't have Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton speaking on campus because it would be offensive to even know they were talking." Another Midwestern institution has followed the University of Chicago's lead. In 2015, the board of trustees at Purdue University in Indiana endorsed the principles articulated in the U. of C. report. "Our commitment to open inquiry is not new, but adopting these principles provides a clear signal of our pledge to live by this commitment and these standards," board Chairman Tom Spurgeon said in a statement at the time. Three impacts:
Preparation for the real world gives students the tools necessary to fight oppression for life; that outweighs in the long run. 2. An atmosphere of academic openness is a prerequisite to knowledge. Jacobson 16 (Daniel Jacobson (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan). “Freedom of Speech under Assault on Campus.” Cato Institute. 30 August 2016. https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/freedom-speech-under-assault- campus#full Mill held that an atmosphere of intellectual freedom not only cultivates genius but is also a prerequisite for even commonplace knowledge. For our beliefs to be justified, we must be able to respond to the best arguments against them. Yet people naturally dislike what Mill called adverse discussion—that is, exposure to opposing arguments—and tend to avoid it. Hence, they are led to argue against straw men as much from ignorance as dishonesty. For those reasons and others, Mill defended freedom of speech in uncom- promising terms: “There ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine,” regardless of its falsity, immorality, or even harmfulness.4 Mill’s arguments for free speech anticipated several psychological phenomena that are now widely recognized: epistemic closure, group polarization, and confirmation bias, as well as simple conformism. Epistemic closure is the tendency to restrict one’s sources of information, including other people, to those largely in agreement with one’s views, thereby avoiding adverse discussion. Group polarization describes how like-minded people grow more extreme in their beliefs when unchecked by the presence of dissenters. (Whence Nietzsche: “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”5) Confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on evidence that supports what we already believe and to discount contrary evidence. These phenomena are widespread and well documented, and they all tend to undermine the justification of our beliefs. Hence, the toleration of unpopular opinions constitutes a prerequisite for knowledge. Yet such toleration amounts only to its immunity to punishment, not its protection from criticism. 3. Lack of counter-narratives produce echo-chambers that sustains existing power structures whilst deluding liberals otherwise. Sunstein 12 (Cass R. Sunstein. Sep 17, 2012. “Breaking up the echo”. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/opinion/balanced-news-reports-may-only-inflame.html?_r=0) It is well known that when likeminded people get together, they tend to end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. The same kind of echochamber effect can happen as people get news from various media. Liberals viewing MSNBC or reading leftofcenter blogs may well end up embracing liberal talking points even more firmly; Conservative fans of Fox News may well react in similar fashion on the right. The result can be a situation in which is that beliefs do not merely harden but migrate toward the extreme ends of the political spectrum. As current events in the Middle East demonstrate, discussions among likeminded people can ultimately produce violence. What explains this? The answer is called “biased assimilation,” which means that people assimilate new information selectively in a selective fashion. When people get endorsing information that supports what they initially thought, they give it considerable weight. When they get and dismissing information that undermines their initial beliefs, they tend to dismiss it. In this light, it is understandable that when people begin with opposing initial beliefs on, say, the death penalty, balanced information can heighten their initial disagreement. Those who tend to favor capital punishment credit the information that supports their original view and dismiss the opposing information. The same happens on the other side. As a result, divisions widen. This natural human tendency explains why it’s so hard to dislodge false rumors and factual errors. Corrections can even be selfdefeating, leading people to stronger commitment to their erroneous beliefs. The news here is not encouraging. In the face of entrenched social divisions, there’s a risk that presentations that carefully explore both sides will be counterproductive. And when a group, responding to false information, becomes more strident, efforts to correct the record may make things worse. Can anything be done? There is no simple term for the answer, so let’s make one up: surprising validators. However People tend to dismiss information that would falsify their convictions. But they may reconsider their views if the information comes from a like-minded source they cannot dismiss. People are most likely to find a source credible if they closely identify with it or begin in essential agreement with it. In such cases, their reaction is not, “how predictable and uninformative that someone like that would think something so evil and foolish,” but instead, they say “if someone like that disagrees with me, maybe I had better rethink.” Our initial convictions are more apt to be shaken if it’s not easy to dismiss the source as biased, confused, selfinterested or simply mistaken. This is one reason that seemingly irrelevant characteristics, like appearance, or taste in food and drink, can have a big impact on credibility. Such characteristics can suggest that the validators are in fact surprising — that they are “like” the people to whom they are speaking. It follows that turncoats, real or apparent, can be immensely persuasive. If civil rights leaders oppose affirmative action, or if wellknown climate change skeptics say that they were wrong, people are more likely to change their views. Here, then, is a lesson for all those who provide information. What matters most may be not what is said, but who, exactly, is saying it.
Advantage 4: Democracy Restrictions on free speech threaten democracy and exposure of abuse of power Maloney 16. Cliff Maloney Jr Executive Director at Young Americans for Liberty, “Colleges Have No Right to Limit Students’ Free Speech”, TIME, 10/13/16, http://time.com/4530197/college-free-speech-zone///AD America is a free-speech zone, period In grade school, I learned that debate is defined as “a discussion between people in which they express different opinions about something.” Such open discourse was historically encouraged on our college campuses. Universities exemplified intellectual discussion and debate in America. No one voiced their opinions louder than students, professors and administrators. They pushed society’s limits by admitting women and people of color, and by encouraging diversity of thought amongst the college community. Historically, young people flocked to universities to learn more about the world around them, to encounter people from different backgrounds, to expand their minds and to form their own opinions. Unfortunately, things have changed. Recently on college campuses, our open discourse has been threatened, particularly when discussing politics. While the current presidential election represents polarizing wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties, we should be able to openly debate their policies and the direction in which they plan to take our country if elected. We should be able to discuss the abuse of power within our government and the consistent violations of our Bill of Rights. We should be able to participate in the free market of ideas. But our students are being silenced. University campuses are now home to a plethora of speech restrictions. From sidewalk-sized “free-speech zones” to the criminalization of microaggressions, America’s college campuses look and feel a lot more like an authoritarian dictatorship than they do the academic hubs of the modern free world. When rolling an inflated free-speech ball around campus, students at the University of Delaware were halted by campus police for their activities. A Young Americans for Liberty leader at Fairmont State University in West Virginia was confronted by security when he was attempting to speak with other students about the ideas he believes in. A man at Clemson University was barred from praying on campus because he was outside of the free-speech zone. And a student at Blinn College in Texas abolished her campus’ free-speech zone in a lawsuit after administrators demanded she seek special permission to advocate for self-defense. How have we let this happen in America, the land of the free? It’s because of what our universities have taught a generation of Americans: If you don’t agree with someone, are uncomfortable with an idea, or don’t find a joke funny, then their speech must be suppressed. Especially if they don’t politically agree with you. Instead of actually debating ideas that span topics from the conventional to the taboo, a generation of American students don’t engage, they just get enraged. In doing so, many students believe that they have a right to literally shut other people up. This is not only a threat to the First Amendment, but also to American democracy. In their manifestation, safe spaces and free-speech zones at public universities enable prejudice against unfavorable ideologies. Guised as progressive measures to ensure inclusion, these often unconstitutional policies exclude new and competing ideas, and are antithetical to a free academia. In excluding different ideologies, supposedly progressive campus speech codes do one thing: prevent the progression of ideas. Restrictive campus speech codes are, in fact, regressive. With over 750 chapters nationwide at Young Americans for Liberty, we are fighting against public universities that stifle free speech. We’ve launched the national Fight for Free Speech campaign to reform unconstitutional speech codes and abolish these so-called free-speech zones on college campuses. By hosting events such as large free speech balls, YAL chapters across the country are petitioning their campuses to adopt the University of Chicago’s principles on freedom of expression—the hallmark of campus speech policies. Our members have geared up with First Amendment organizations to ensure that their free speech rights on campus are protected. America is a land rooted in the ideas of a free society: the freedom to be who you are, to speak your mind and to innovate. By silencing our students and young people, we have started down a slippery slope. It is up to us to fight back to ensure that our First Amendment rights remain protected—not just on college campuses, but everywhere in America. Democracy prevents massive death, terrorism and ecological collapse – we need to protect the constitution at all costs *democratic openness - accountability *single violation creates a slippery slope – need rule of law to make deals Diamond 95 (Larry, Sr fellow at the Hoover instiution) A Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, “Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives,” pg. Online/ OTHER THREATS This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built
Discourse focus bad Restrictions on free speech open the door for section 1983 lawsuits Piper 16. Greg Piper, 6-9-2016, "RULING: Public universities can't yank funding from students in retaliation for their speech," College Fix, http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/27770/AD One of the surest ways for student government leaders, campus administrators and university boards to silence and intimidate student groups is by taking away the money they are budgeted. Such speech retaliation is the basis for two student newspapers’ lawsuits against their universities – The Koala‘s at the University of California-San Diego and the University Daily Kansan‘s at the University of Kansas. Thanks to an appeals-court decision last week, students’ right to speak without losing their funding “privileges” appears to be secure, at least in the case of the shock-rag Koala. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers California, ruled that the Arizona Students Association, which lobbies for students in the state’s three public universities, can continue suing the Arizona Board of Regents for First Amendment retaliation. The ASA had campaigned for a 2012 ballot measure to increase public-education funding, which upset the board enough that it voted to halt its collection of a per-student fee that funds the ASA. Later the board adopted an “opt-in” model under which students must explicitly state that they want to fund the ASA, and it started charging the ASA the cost of collecting those opt-in fees. The 9th Circuit rebuked the lower court for throwing out the case, saying the ASA’s main error was suing the board itself rather than its officers. While constitutionally it can’t get “retrospective relief” – namely, one semester’s collected fees that the board never handed over – the ASA can still obtain an injunction going forward, said the ruling. Board officials can be targeted under what’s known as a Section 1983 claim “alleging that public officials, acting in their official capacity, took action with the intent to retaliate against, obstruct, or chill the plaintiff’s First Amendment rights,” the appeals court said. All that’s needed for a plaintiff to prevail is to show that a defendant “intended to interfere” with its protected speech and that it “suffered some injury as a result.” The ASA has clearly alleged that it engaged in “core political speech” – the most protected category – by advocating for the ballot measure, and that the board’s “retaliatory policy modification” chilled its speech and continues to inhibit the ASA from participating in its prior advocacy. The appeals panel goes on at length about why this is so problematic, in language that will probably show up in The Koala‘s UCSD suit: Significantly, the ASA and ABOR’s the board’s dispute is more than a disagreement between similarly situated political rivals. ABOR represents the State’s most powerful authority in determining the policies, delivery, governance, management, and accessibility of Arizona’s public higher education. The ASA is composed entirely of public university students, and it represents the collective voice of those students. The disparity in power between ABOR and Arizona’s public university students is vast. According to the ASA, ABOR leveraged that power to punish the ASA for participating in core political speech and, further, to attempt to bankrupt the ASA to prevent it from exercising its free-speech rights in the future. Given the inherent power asymmetry between the Board and students, as well as the severe impact of ABOR’s actions on the ASA, it is highly likely that the Board’s alleged retaliation would chill and discourage a student or student organization of similar fortitude and conviction from exercising its free-speech rights. It doesn’t matter that the ASA has “no independent or affirmative right” to have the board collect and remit the fees that fund it – the board has allegedly attacked the ASA’s freedom of speech by denying it a “valuable government benefit” because of its speech activity: ABOR had no affirmative obligation to collect or remit the ASA fee, but having done so for fifteen years at no cost, ABOR could not deprive the ASA of the benefit of its fee collection and remittance services in retaliation for the ASA’s exercise of its First Amendment rights. Frank LoMonte of the Student Press Law Center sees this ruling as giving “additional legal ammunition” to student outlets that have been stripped of funding “because of unflattering content”: Had that lower-court ruling held up, student media organizations facing the removal of university financial support would have had an essentially impossible burden to challenge even the most blatant cause-and-effect cases of retaliation. LoMonte compares the yanking of funding in response to unflattering content to a governor sending “the highway patrol door-to-door to confiscate the driver licenses of people who give speeches opposing the governor just because ‘driving is a privilege, not a right.'” The University Daily Kansan is likely to cite this ruling, even though it’s in the wrong circuit, to defeat its university’s motion to dismiss the case, LoMonte says. (UCSD hasn’t yet filed a motion to dismiss, and it may have no grounds to do so now.) Whatever else might result from this ruling, you can be confident that “the worst in collegiate journalism” (The Koala‘s slogan) will continue publishing horribly offensive content that the easily triggered activists of UCSD keep reading for some reason.
Underview
Discourse focus trades off with and actively subverts a politics of substantive material resistance. Jay 16 (Scott Jay, Legendary analyst, Jan 5 2016, “The postmodern left and the success of neoliberalism”, http://libcom.org/library/postmodern-left-success-neoliberalism)YS 2.6.16 Simulation hits reality SYRIZA played out like a simulation of Marxist theory. The collapse of social democracy required a new electoral force to take its place. In stepped SYRIZA, an electoral alliance that assured everyone that they were actually going to take on the financial powers in Europe. Marxists around the world who have documented in detail how social democracy has flailed and decayed for decades suddenly believed that yes, this electoral reform project would succeed, and no, there was no reason why it was any different than the failures of the past. Without a “fake” Marxist Left–the Stalinists, reformists and other revisionists of the past–the “real” Marxist Left stepped in to take its place, heralding the dawn of a new age in Europe, for a few exciting months anyway. It can seem impossible at times to tell the difference between the real and the fake, the simulation and reality, but ultimately we do not live in a postmodern world. We simply live in a world where so many on the Left act as though it is. Nonetheless, all of these simulations do eventually confront the brute material forces of reality, and suddenly the complete inadequacy of the simulated Left–not just in SYRIZA but across the board–is laid bare for all to see. Eventually, a Ferguson or a Baltimore revolts and the irrelevance of the Postmodern Left to the project of organizing working class resistance is made completely clear. If there is any way out of this rut, it is to reject the spectacle and the simulation in favor of substantive material resistance. The feel good moment of triumph with a hollow center, the exuberant meetings and chants that people remember for the rest of their lives, just might be an obstacle toward building something with actual power. The image of revolt, and even talk of socialism and–hold onto your seats!–“political revolution” coming from the Bernie Sanders campaign for President will go nowhere. It is the courageous act of resistance and the rein of terror that it must face in response from the neoliberal state that transforms a class into a force for rebellion. In short, if social movements do not directly hurt the people in power–and not just mildly embarrass them–or empower the exploited and oppressed–and not just temporarily mobilize them–then it may not be a worthwhile strategy. It may simply feel like one. In other words, if it feels good, don’t do it. We may struggle to see past the illusions from our current vantage point. No doubt, we will find ourselves in the trenches of class war, only to look outside and realize that the entire spectacle has been constructed by a charlatan. This will continue to happen, so long as neoliberal capitalism provides career opportunities for charlatans, as it no doubt will. There is a great need, then, to breakdown the facade, to no longer allow the false images of resistance that surreptitiously enable neoliberalism and distract from the fundamental project of resistance. The SYRIZAs of the world They will insist that this is counterproductive to their project. And that is exactly the point.