Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lynbrook AP | Judge: Erik Legried
Recognizing that the epistemology of capitalism manipulates our understanding of policy is a pre-condition to evaluating the resolution through moral fameworks. Marsh 95,
Marsh 95- Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, PhD from Northwestern University (James, Critique Action and Liberation, p 331-2)
Is it reasonable, therefore, even to talk about the possibility of a socialism that transcends this capitalistic system? Here at the very beginning of our discussion it is crucial to be clear about what "reason" is. If being reasonable means operating according to a scientistic, positivistic idea of reason such that any talk of transcending the current situation is irrational, then, of course, democratic socialism is not a rational possibility. However, such a conception of reason is highly questionable. Reason, as I have argued elsewhere and in this book, is dialectical and phenomenological, uniting within itself fact and possibility, "is" and "ought," subject and object. Reason is constitutive, not simply acquisitive or instrumental, and as such constitutes goals and values and reflectively chooses itself as an end in itself in a community of ends. Reason is relational, communal, processive, on the move from lower viewpoints to higher viewpoints and in this sense related creatively to a world developing through a process of emergent probability. According to the conception of reason, one attempting to fix human possibility by saying "this far and no further" is inhibiting human development and is profoundly irrational. Moreover, through a dialectical phenomenological critique made earlier in this book we have discovered late capitalism and state socialism to be profoundly irrational systemically and morally. They are irrational systemically insofar as both systems are susceptible to various kinds of crises, economic, rational, legitimating, or motivational, and both systems systematically repress democratic participation. Both systems exercise a domination, economic or political, that inhibits the free, rational unfolding of human potentiality in all of its fullness. In both systems is a tendency to ignore or repress the subjectivity of human beings and turn them into objects; in both systems is domination of nature and a resulting ecology problem. In such a context, it would be profoundly irrational not to try to think of alternatives to the status quo. In the face of systemic domination, fidelity to the life of reason calls on reason to become revolutionary in its approach to the world. A merely bourgeois or Stalinist rationality is an incomplete, truncated rationality. Moreover, if our model of a dynamic, progressive, developing world system on the move is correct, then such qualitative shifts from one epoch to another should have occurred in the past. One can imagine the Novaks or Kissingers or Friedmans of this world arguing in past centuries that political monarchy is the best human beings can do or that racism is inevitable or that a feudal relationship of lord to serf is the ultimate and best fate of human beings. Yet history has moved on, and there is no reason to think that such movement has stopped with capitalism or state socialism. The irrational, oppressive character of these structures indicates that we should move on; the progressive character of human beings in the world indicates that we can move on. Recent events in eastern Europe only confirm such a judgment.
Neoliberalism structures academic freedom in the status quo. It sets limits on what is acceptable behavior to quell dissent and any facult truly radical enough to challenge corporate hegemony are tossed out before they can pose a real threat. Chatterjee and Maira 14
Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira. "The Imperial University: race, war, and the nation-state." The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent (2014): 1-50.
Our geopolitical positions—of our immediate workplaces as well as trans- national work circuits—underscore the complex contradictions of our locations within the U.S. academy. These paradoxes of positionality and employment have seeded this project in important ways. We have both taught at the University of California for many years—in addition to other U.S. universities—and have been members of the privileged upper caste of U.S. higher education: the tenured professoriate. We have each used these privileges of class, education, and cultural capital to live and work transna- tionally and have organized around and written about issues of warfare, colo- nialism, occupation, immigration, racism, gender rights, youth culture, and labor politics, within and outside the United States. In fact, we first began working together when we collaborated in 2008 on a collective statement of feminist solidarity with women suffering from the violence of U.S. wars and occupation, during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israeli siege of Gaza.7 Yet our privileges of entry, of inclusion, and of outside-ness are also always marked by the “dangerous complicities” of imperial privi- lege and neoliberal capital, as the chapters by Julia Oparah; Sylvanna Falcón, Sharmila Lodhia, Molly Talcott, and Dana Collins; Vijay Prashad; and Laura Pulido powerfully remind us. Even as we have recognized the institutional privileges and complicities through which we can do this work, we have experienced at various moments and in different ways—as the chapters by Alexis Gumbs, Clarissa Rojas, Thomas Abowd, and Nicholas De Genova suggest—a keen sense of being “outsiders” within—in the university, in aca- demic disciplines, in different nations.8¶ As scholars and teachers located within “critical ethnic studies” and “women and gender studies,” we are also well aware of a certain politics of value, legitimacy, and marginality at play, especially as the dismantling of the public higher education system and attacks on ethnic studies around the nation accelerate. The struggles to build ethnic studies and women/gen- der/sexuality studies as legitimate scholarly endeavors within the academy, emerging from several strands of the civil rights and antiwar movements, are well chronicled and keenly debated. The precarious positions as well as increasing professionalization and policing of these interdisciplinary fields within the current restructuring of the university is a matter of deep con- cern; for example, in the wake of the assault on ethnic studies in Arizona, the dismantling of women’s studies programs, and in a climate of policing and criminalizing immigrant “others” across the nation.¶ The pressure on academics to fund one’s own research—following the dominant grant-writing models of science and technology—is now even more explicit in a time of fiscal crisis and deepening fissures between faculty in the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, education, and business who occupy very different positions in an increasingly privatized university.9 Prashad reminds us in his chapter of the consequences of the fiscal crisis for college students who bear a massive and growing burden of debt. We recognize these pressures on faculty and students as stemming from neolib- eral capitalism and the university’s capitulation to a global “structural adjust- ment” policy that is now coming “home” to roost in the United States, as astutely argued by Farah Godrej in her analysis linking the neoliberal uni- versity to militarism and violence. The academy has also tried to market the notion of “public scholarship,” transforming activist scholarship into a commodifiable form of knowledge production and dissemination that can affirm the university’s civic engagement—confined by the parameters of per- missible politics, as incisively critiqued by Salaita, Rojas, and Abowd. If we cannot—or choose not to—market our scholarship and pedagogies through these programs of funding and institutionalization, we find our work further devalued within the dominant terms of privatization in the academy. Given that neoliberal market ideologies now underwrite the “value” of our research and intellectual work, what happens to scholars whose writing directly tack- les the questions of U.S. state violence, logics of settler colonialism, and global political and economic dominance?¶ We know from stories about campaigns related to tenure or defamation of scholars, often shared in hallways during conferences and sometimes through e-mail listservs and the media, that there are serious costs to writing and speaking about these matters. For far too many colleagues who confront the most taboo of topics, such as indigenous critiques of genocide and settler colonialism or especially the question of Palestine, the price paid has been extraordinarily high. It has included the denial of promotion to tenure, being de-tenured, not having employment contracts renewed, or never being hired and being blacklisted, as this book poignantly illustrates. Coupled with the loss of livelihood or exile from the U.S. academy, many scholars have been stigmatized, harassed, and penalized in overt and covert ways. There are numerous such cases, sadly way too many to recount here—most famously those of Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, David Graeber, Joel Kovel, Terri Ginsberg, Marc Ellis, Margo Nanlal-Rankoe, Wadie Said, and Sami Al- Arian—but it is generally only the handful that generate public campaigns that receive attention while many others remain unknown, not to mention innumerable cases of students who have been surveilled or harassed, such as Syed Fahad Hashmi from Brooklyn College, while again there are countless other untold stories.10 These are the scandals and open secrets, we argue, that need to be revealed and placed in broader frames of analysis of labor and survival within the U.S. university system.11
Free speech is an illusion propagated by corporatists – their model of rights assumes an equal playing field analogous to free market economists view of capital. The promotion of free speech perpetuates the idea that speech is a commodity, which strengthens neoliberalism’s hold on the academy. Brown 15
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution. MIT Press, 2015.
At times, kennedy raises the pitch in Citizens United to depict limits on corporate funding of PAC ads as “an outright ban on speech”;19 at other times, he casts them merely as inappropriate government inter- vention and bureaucratic weightiness.20 But beneath all the hyperbole about government’s chilling of corporate speech is a crucial rhetorical move: the figuring of speech as analogous to capital in “the political marketplace.” on the one hand, government intervention is featured throughout the opinion as harmful to the marketplace of ideas that speech generates.21 Government restrictions damage freedom of speech just as they damage all freedoms. on the other hand, the unfettered accumulation and circulation of speech is cast as an unqual- ified good, essential to “the right of citizens to inquire...hear... speak...and use information to reach consensus itself a precondi- tion to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.”22 not merely corporate rights, then, but democracy as a whole is at stake in the move to deregulate speech. Importantly, however, democ- racy is here conceived as a marketplace whose goods—ideas, opinions, and ultimately, votes—are generated by speech, just as the economic market features goods generated by capital. In other words, at the very moment that Justice kennedy deems disproportionate wealth irrele- vant to the equal rights exercised in this marketplace and the utili- tarian maximization these rights generate, speech itself acquires the status of capital, and a premium is placed on its unrestricted sources and unimpeded flow.¶ What is significant about rendering speech as capital? economiza- tion of the political occurs not through the mere application of market principles to nonmarket fields, but through the conversion of political processes, subjects, categories, and principles to economic ones. This is the conversion that occurs on every page of the kennedy opinion. If everything in the world is a market, and neoliberal markets con- sist only of competing capitals large and small, and speech is the capital of the electoral market, then speech will necessarily share cap- ital’s attributes: it appreciates through calculated investment, and it advances the position of its bearer or owner. Put the other way around, once speech is rendered as the capital of the electoral marketplace, it is appropriately unrestricted and unregulated, fungible across actors and venues, and existing solely for the advancement or enhancement of its bearer’s interests. The classic associations of political speech with freedom, conscience, deliberation, and persuasion are nowhere in sight.¶ How, precisely, is speech capital in the kennedy opinion? How does it come to be figured in economic terms where its regulation or restriction appears as bad for its particular marketplace and where its monopolization by corporations appears as that which is good for all? The transmogrification of speech into capital occurs on a number of levels in kennedy’s account. First, speech is like capital in its tendency to proliferate and circu- late, to push past barriers, to circumvent laws and other restrictions, indeed, to spite efforts at intervention or suppression.23 speech is thus rendered as a force both natural and good, one that can be wrongly impeded and encumbered, but never quashed.¶ second, persons are not merely producers, but consumers of speech, and government interference is a menace—wrong in prin- ciple and harmful in effect—at both ends. The marketplace of ideas, kennedy repeats tirelessly, is what decides the value of speech claims. every citizen must judge the content of speech for himself or herself; it cannot be a matter for government determination, just as govern- ment should not usurp other consumer choices.24 In this discussion, kennedy makes no mention of shared deliberation or judgment in politics or of voices that are unfunded and relatively powerless. He is focused on the wrong of government “commanding where a per- son may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, using censorship to control thought.”25 If speech generates goods consumed according to individual choice, govern- ment distorts this market by “banning the political speech of millions of associations of citizens” (that is, corporations) and by paternal- istically limiting what consumers may know or consider. Again, if speech is the capital of the political marketplace, then we are polit- ically free when it circulates freely. And it circulates freely only when corporations are not restricted in what speech they may fund or promulgate.¶ Third, kennedy casts speech not as a medium for expression or dialogue, but rather as innovative and productive, just as capital is. There is “a creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expres- sion” that intersects in a lively way with “rapid changes in technol- ogy” to generate the public good.26 This aspect of speech, kennedy argues, specifically “counsels against upholding a law that restricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers.”27 Again, the dynamism, innovativeness, and generativity of speech, like that of all capital, is dampened by government intervention.¶ Fourth, and perhaps most important in establishing speech as the capital of the electoral marketplace, kennedy sets the power of speech and the power of government in direct and zero-sum-game opposition to one another. Repeatedly across the lengthy opinion for the majority, he identifies speech with freedom and government with control, cen- sorship, paternalism, and repression.28 When free speech and govern- ment meet, it is to contest one another: the right of speech enshrined in the First Amendment, he argues, is “premised on mistrust of gov- ernmental power” and is “an essential mechanism of democracy because it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people.”29 Here are other variations on this theme in the opinion:¶ The First Amendment was certainly not understood by the framers to condone the suppression of political speech in society’s most salient media. It was understood as a response to the repression of speech.30¶ When Government seeks to use its full power, including criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought.... The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.31 This reading of the First Amendment and of the purpose of political speech positions government and speech as warring forces parallel to those of government and capital in a neoliberal economy.

This turns the case – the commodification of speech reflects the capitalist illusion of freedom. It makes speech meaningless and kills value to life. Smith ‘14
R.C. Smith April 24, 2014 “POWER, CAPITAL and THE RISE OF THE MASS SURVEILLANCE STATE: ON THE ABSENCE OF DEMOCRACY, ETHICS, DISENCHANTMENT and CRITICAL THEORY” Heathwood Institute and Press http://www.heathwoodpress.com/power-capital-the-rise-of-the-mass-surveillance-state-on-the-absence-of-democracy-ethics-disenchantment-critical-theory/ JJN from file
One pressing issue, moreover, is that majority of the popular movements that have emerged in response to the Snowden leaks appear to be reformist in character. As a result, the discourse isn’t so much about fundamental system change; rather it becomes crafted into making mass surveillance less repulsive and more socially acceptable, even marketable. (Consider, for instance, the latest reforms proposed by President Barack Obama). For Adorno, this reformist inclination can be explained in part through an analysis of the logic of the system of capital. We read in Adorno how under modernity – i.e., capitalism – human beings are treated as commodities4 and the political-economy, which is principled on concentrations of power (i.e., ‘contradictory recognition’5), goes over the head of the individual, particularly as ‘coercive society’ aims to ‘shape people’ on behalf of the economic, social and political status quo.6 The system of capital, along with the instrumental use of Enlightenment ideals to promote a rational, efficient system7 have laid a foundation for society wherein the political-economy influences individuals and manufactures consent.8 Accordingly, people are seen as “substitutable entities valued merely for their instrumental uses or ability to command market resources,” and even where “commodification is resisted, the overriding pull of society is toward the status quo and those forms that are valued by society”. 9 As Kate Schick writes: The mind thus shapes itself into socially acceptable, marketable forms and freedom becomes an illusion, made all the more dangerous and difficult to resist because of the appearance of freedom. This is not the fault of Enlightenment ideals as such, but the instrumental use of these ideals in the promotion of a rational, efficient system: ‘The network of the whole is drawn ever tighter, modelled after the act of exchange’ (Adorno 1981: 21).10 Present in the logic of the system of capital itself is not an ‘emancipatory reason’ that aims toward universal guiding principles of an actually egalitarian democracy – i.e., Equality, Egalitarianism, Justice, Rights, etc. Rather, in modern capitalism, with its instrumental reason and positivist logic, such concepts lose their meaning.11 The social narrative no longer accommodates these fundamental principles or judges them to be delusions, because all concepts must be strictly functional in order to be considered “reasonable”.12 In turn, the ideals of a ‘good’ society, for example ideals toward an actual egalitarian democracy, become dependent on the “interests” of the dominant and governing system, which produces and reproduces the epistemic context of its own validity.13
The ballot represents a choice between competing visions of social change – elevating the aff above the individual endorsement of the aff debater is false. The debate round represents competing strategies for social change: the question is not who does the alt or plan, but of a world without capitalism vs. the affirmative. Agency questions are irrelevant—we don’t have to win the alternative spills over, just that rejection in this round is comparatively better than the aff—any other evaluation makes no sense because the judge isn’t in a position to do the aff either. Critiquing assumptions is the best way to leverage change.
Reinsborough, 03 (Organizer, Rainforest Action Network and Wake Up America Campaign) 03 (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, August 2003, Volume 1, Issue 2, Patrick). 

Direct action— actions that either symbolically or directly shift power relations— is an essential transformative tool. Direct action can be both a tactic within a broader strategy or a political ethic of fundamental change at the deepest level of power relations. Every direct action is part of the larger story we are re-telling ourselves about the ability of collaborative power to overcome coercive power. As we endeavor to link systemic change with tangible short term goals we must seek out the points of intervention in the system. These are the places where when we apply our power— usually through revoking our obedience — we are able to leverage change. Direct action at the point of production was one of the original insights of the working people’s labor union movement. Labor radicals targeted the system where it was directly effecting them and where the system was most fetishisticly concerned to make its profits at the expense of the dignity and rights of working people. Modern resistance movements have continued to target the system at its most blatant— the “point of destruction”. We become the frontline resistance by placing our bodies in the way of the harm that is happening. Whether its plugging the effluent pipes that dump poison on a neighborhood, forest defenders sitting in trees marked for cutting or indigenous peoples defending their ancestral homelands, direct action at the point of destruction embodies values crisis. It polarizes the debate in an effort to attract the spotlight of public attention to a clear injustice. But tragically the point of destruction is often times far out of the public eye and the values confrontation is made invisible by distance, imbedded patterns of bias or popular ignorance. Frequently the impacted communities have little political voice so in order to provide support we must find other points of intervention. Inspiring “point of consumption” campaigns have been used by many movements as ways to stand in solidarity with communities fighting at the point of destruction. This is the realm of consumer boycotts, attacks on corporate brand names and other campaigns which target the commercial sector as a way to shut down the markets for destructive products. Activists have confronted retailers selling sweatshop products and forced universities to cancel clothing contracts. Likewise forest activists have forced major chains to stop selling old growth forest products by doing direct actions aimed at companies media profiles and market share. Attacking the point of consumption expands the arena of struggle to mobilize consumers made complicit in the injustice of the globalized economy by their own purchasing decisions. These strategies can be based on a very shallow analysis of “ethical shopping” or a more profound rejection of the consumer identity altogether. The “point of decision” has always been a common and strategic venue for direct action. Whether its taking over a slumlord’s office, a corporate boardroom or the state capital many successful campaigns have used direct action to put pressure on the decision makers they are targeting. Much of the mass action organizing of the past few years has been largely aimed at re-defining popular perceptions of the “point of decision”. The actions at WTO and World Bank meetings, G8 summits and Free Trade negotiating sessions have helped reveal the corporate take-over by showing that it is these new institutions of corporate rule that have usurped decision making power. All of these points of intervention in the system are important and the best strategies unite efforts across them. Increasingly as the global financial sector has becoming the “operating system” for the planet the pathological logic of doomsday economics has replaced specific points of decision in driving the corporate take over. We aren’t just fighting acts of injustice or destruction but rather we are fighting a system of injustice and destruction. In recognizing this we must expand our efforts to intervene in physical space with similar initiatives in cultural and intellectual space. How can we side step the machine and challenge the mentality behind the machine? In other words we need to figure out how to take direct action at the “point of assumption”. Targeting assumptions— the framework of myths, lies, and flawed rationale that normalize the corporate take over— requires some different approaches from actions at the other points of intervention.  “Point of assumption” actions operate in the realm of ideas to expose pathological logic, cast doubt and undermine existing loyalties. Successful direct action at the point of assumption identifies, isolates and confronts the big lies that maintain the status quo. A worthy goal for these types of actions is to encourage the most important act that a concerned citizen can take in an era defined by systematic propaganda – QUESTIONING! Direct action at the point of assumption is a tool to de-colonize people’s revolutionary imaginations by linking analysis and action in ways that re-frame issues and create new political space. Whether we’re radically deconstructing consumer spectacles, exposing the system’s propaganda or birthing new rhetoric we need actions that reveal the awful truth— that the intellectual underpinnings of the modern system are largely flawed assumptions. Direct action at the point of assumption is an effort to find the rumors that start revolutions and ask the questions that topple empires.
Our critique independently outweighs the case -  neoliberalism causes extinction and massive social inequalities – the affs single issue legalistic solution is the exact kind of politics neolib wants us to engage in so the root cause to go unquestioned. Farbod 15
 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.

Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lynbrook AP | Judge: Erik Legried
CP Text: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought to ban handguns on campus.

 CP is mutually exclusive-we advocate for banning handguns on campus, the aff specifically allows them under the plan text  
Campus Carry qualifies explicitly under the courts definition of constitutionally protected speech because it conveys a clear message
Blanchfield 14’
“What do Guns Say?” - The New York Times May 4 2014 - Patrick Blanchfield is a freelance writer with at a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University, and has completed four years of coursework in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute. He does critical writing on US culture, gun violence and politics AC 

Earlier this month, in Bunkerville, Nev., representatives of the Bureau of Land Management withdrew from a tense standoff with supporters of Cliven Bundy, a rancher who owes the federal government over $1 million in unpaid fees for allowing his cattle to graze on public land. The hundreds of self-appointed militia and “states’ rights” activists who flocked to support Bundy, many in full tactical gear and openly carrying assault rifles, blockaded a federal interstate and trained their weapons on B.L.M. employees who sought to negotiate with the rancher and his family. Fearful of a pitched gun battle, the B.L.M. departed, leaving Bundy and his supporters to celebrate, emboldened, with a barbecue. Toting a weapon in a demonstration gestures as close as possible to outright violence while still technically remaining within the domain of speech. Bundy, who does not “recognize the federal government as even existing,” has gone on to leverage his spotlight to air a variety of retrograde, racist views. But the ensuing media kerfuffle has deflected attention from the fact that his armed supporters remain, dug in. On one level, the affair in Bunkerville can be seen as a vestige of Old West range-war mentality, opportunistically remixed with overtones of the militia movements of the early 1990s and an identity-politics firestorm that’s very 2014. But as a transaction between the state and citizens decided not by rule of law, nor by vote or debate, but rather by the simple presence of arms, Bunkerville is deeply troubling. Guns publicly brandished by private individuals decided the outcome. For all Bundy’s appeals to constitutional justification, what mattered at the end of the day was who was willing to take the threat of gunplay the furthest. Bunkerville is simply the next step in a trend that has been ramping up for some time. Since the election of Barack Obama, guns have appeared in the public square in a way unprecedented since the turbulent 1960s and ’70s — carried alongside signs and on their own since before the Tea Party elections, in a growing phenomenon of “open carry” rallies organized by groups like the Modern American Revolution and OpenCarry.org, and in the efforts by gun rights activists to carry assault weapons into the Capitol buildings in New Mexico and Texas (links to video). According to open carry advocates, their presence in public space represents more than just an expression of their Second Amendment rights, it’s a statement, an “educational,” communicative act  — in short, an exercise of their First Amendment freedom of speech. (See this, from the group Ohio Carry, and this Michigan lawsuit.) This claim bears serious consideration.  The First Amendment has historically been much harder to limit than the Second, and so extending the freedom of speech to the open display of weapons raises several urgent questions about how we understand the relationship between expressing ideas and making threats, between what furthers dialogue and what ends it.But are guns speech?  Is carrying a weapon as an act of public protest constitutionally protected under the First Amendment? And if so, what do guns say? The courts have traditionally recognized “symbolic speech” — actions that convey a clear message — as deserving of First Amendment protection (by, for example, protecting the right of students in Des Moines to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War). As “the expression of an idea through an activity,” symbolic speech depends heavily on the context within which it occurs. Unlike pure speech, symbolic speech is more susceptible to limitation, as articulated by the Warren court’s 1968 ruling in United States v. O’Brien. The outcome of that case, the O’Brien test, establishes a four-pronged series of qualifications for determining when symbolic speech can be limited: (1) Any limitation must be within the state’s constitutional powers; (2) the limitation must be driven by a compelling governmental interest; (3) that countervailing interest must be unrelated to the content of the speech, touching solely on the “non-communicative aspect” of the act in question; and (4) any limitation must be narrowly tailored and prohibit no more speech than absolutely necessary. In practical terms, this litmus test suggests that you can carry a gun as symbolic speech, particularly in the context of a pro-Second Amendment demonstration. The state’s clear interest in maintaining public order can be narrowly satisfied by demanding that protesters either carry guns that are unloaded — at least with an open chamber — or which otherwise have the barrel or action blocked. Thus far, open carry protesters have largely followed this rule, notably by sticking tiny American flags into their guns. “If the SWAT team comes down and starts surrounding us with tactical gear, it only takes a minute to pull them out,” the organizer of one such event told reporters. “But that’s not going to happen.”

Guns are a form of symbolic free speech protected by the first amendment: Law Review Proves
McGoldrick 08
“Symbolic Speech: A message from Mind to Mind” Oklahoma Law Review Volume 61 Spring 2008 Number 1  - James M McGoldrick Jr. is a professor of law at Pepperdine law Prior to beginning his career as a law professor, Professor McGoldrick worked for the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and as a trial attorney for the Tulare County Legal Services. During his over forty-year career at Pepperdine School of Law, he served eight years as associate dean for academics. AC  

And then there is mere conduct that, though expressive, receives no protection as speech at all and can be regulated for any rational reason.14 Some expressive conduct is treated as speech, and some as just conduct, but there is no easy way to tell them apart. The Supreme Court has said persons attempting to draw attention to their opinions are “not to be justified in ignoring the familiar red traffic light.”15 On the other hand, the Court has found conduct that disrupts traffic—by marching, picketing or demonstrating —is protected by the First Amendment.16 Yet, it is incredibly difficult to define why some expressive conduct is speech and why other expressive conduct is not; why ignoring the red light is not speech but marching down the middle of the street may be.17 Some expressive conduct seems to be a form of pure speech every bit as much as words. AAgesture of a middle finger thrust into the air, directed from one driver to another driver, seems to be speech at its purest form, free of obstructive noise or tangible remains. The message moves effortlessly from enclosed metal and glass across lanes of traffic into the enclosed space of another, all with little difficulty, yet with great force and often psychic injury.18 Still, no one would think that all of the symptoms of road rage—tailgating, aggressive lane changes, and in some cases the use of guns—would be protected symbolic speech. There lies the essence of the problem. We accept some gestures as falling within free speech parameters, and others we simply classify as antisocial behavior that may be criminalized without regard to the constitutional protection of the freedom of expression.

Banning guns on campus works - violence usually happens in areas where guns are allowed and a college campus is a petri dish for violence
Webster et al 16
Daniel W. Webster – “Firearms on College Campuses: Research Evidence and Policy Implications” – Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School Of Public Health – Quals and other authors: http://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-gun-policy-and-research/_pdfs/GunsOnCampus.pdf AC

The best available research contradicts many claims and assumptions that underlie policies to allow civilians to bring firearms onto college campuses. Gun ownership and gun carrying in many states is common, but successful and warranted civilian defensive gun use is relatively rare. Concealed carry permit holders have passed criminal background checks and, as a group, commit crimes at a relatively low rate. But, in states with the most lax standards for legal gun ownership, 60of individuals incarcerated for committing crimes with guns were legal gun owners when they committed their crimes.  Some who are legally allowed to own and carry firearms in public places have histories of violence and recklessness. Many states relaxed restrictions on concealed and open carrying of firearms based on claims that such policies reduced violent crime. But the best available evaluations of these policies indicate that these right-to-carry laws increase violence. Some have blamed rampage shootings, including those on college campuses, on “gun free zones,” and they have claimed that the best deterrent to such shootings is to remove virtually all restrictions on civilian gun carrying. Indeed, much of the impetus for policies to allow guns on college campuses has been to reduce mass shootings or the number of casualties from those shootings by enabling armed civilians to intervene. Yet the number of people shot in mass shootings in the U.S. has increased dramatically during the past decade – a period that coincides with the removal of restrictions on public gun carrying and a push to make gun carrying in public more normative. New research on fatal mass shootings demonstrates that: 1) right-to-carry laws do not decrease mass shootings or the average number of people shot in those incidents; 2) the overwhelming majority of fatal mass shootings occur in places where guns are allowed; and 3) when rampage shootings do occur, very rarely are they stopped by gun-wielding civilians. While the net effect of right-to-carry gun policies have negatively impacted public safety broadly, their effects are likely to be far more deleterious when extended to college campuses. Risks for violence, suicide attempts, alcohol abuse, and risky behavior are greatly elevated among college-age youth and in the campus environment. The presence of firearms greatly increases the risk of lethal and near-lethal outcomes from these behaviors and in this context. Even if allowing more guns on college campuses did have some protective effect against rare mass shootings on campuses – and available evidence suggests that this is not the case – the net effect on the safety of college students, faculty, and staff is likely to be more deaths, more nonfatal gunshot wounds, and more threats with a firearm that are traumatizing to victims.
Guns on campus are a symbolic political tool to assert dominance over minorities and maintain status quo hierarchies
Kautzer 15
Kautzer Chad. Good Guys with Guns: From Popular Sovereignty to Self-Defensive Subjectivity. Law Critique (2015) 26:173–187 DOI 10.1007/s10978-015-9156-x. April 8, 2015. Chad Kautzer is a Philosophy Proffessor at Lehigh University Last year he was a Visiting Research Scholar in the Philosophy Department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has twice held fellowships at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Germany. His specialization areas are Critical Theory; Philosophy of Law and Right; Social and Political Philosophy; Race and Gender Theory; Marxism; and Hegel.
AC

My students bring guns to class. This is troubling, not only because it poses obvious health risks to others, and to the gun-toting students themselves, but because it is indicative of an emergent and pernicious form of political subjectivity in the United States—one which engenders equally problematic notions of freedom, security and sovereignty. I refer to this subjectivity as self-defensive. Its development has less to do with individual protection against criminality than with the defense of a raced and gendered form of autonomy and its ‘metaphysics of domination’ (Brown 1995, p. 6). The rapid liberalization of open- and concealed-carry laws, the proliferation of guns in public spaces and institutions, the reinterpretation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, and the abstraction and individuation of the Castle Doctrine in Stand Your Ground laws all contribute to the legalization of nonstate violence to defend extra-legal relations of domination. It is therefore not crime that threatens this autonomy, but the perceived failure of the state to protect extra-legal spaces of rule that are necessary for maintaining the social structures of race and gender against gains made by feminist and anti-racist social movements. The newfound urgency in the legislative expansion of the right to self-defense, as well as extremist interpretations of this right, is a response to the threatened collapse of these spaces of domination and thus the means of identity constitution.1 Since the state is accused of being unwilling to exercise its coercive powers to stabilize these relations of domination as it has in the past, individuals have sought to arrogate such powers to themselves; a privatization of state violence through the quasi-deputization of certain groups. While I argue that the self-defensive subjectivity supported by these developments is new, it did not arise ex nihilo, but rather represents a quantitative-turnedqualitative shift within a long tradition of popular sovereignty in the United States. Historically, popular sovereignty has been predicated on the existence of spaces of lawlessness or states of exception in which private ‘sovereign subjects’ can exercise domination and non-criminal violence, be it over women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, racial minorities, prisoners, or in its most extreme form, slaves. Popular sovereignty, understood as a universal and abstract equality (de jure) among ‘the people’ for self-rule, has always contradicted its (de facto) operations as a mechanism of domination, which divides ‘the people’ (as a fictional body) into actual sub-state relations of rule. The hallmark of this tradition is the disavowal of the social conditions of individual freedom through a process of objectification and naturalization. This facilitates the practical relations that constitute the ruler or sovereign subjects through subjugating violence beyond the law.

Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: 2 | Opponent: na | Judge: Michael OKrent
DA Shell

The media hype regarding hate crimes doesn’t see the full picture-Overall hate crimes are down in recent years. Bennett ‘16
Samuel Bennett. The State of Hate, in the US. 2016. http://www.samuelwbennett.com/the-state-of-hate/
This 2nd Annual State of Hate analysis has uncovered a few noteworthy trends. Firstly, from 2013 to 2015, an increase in hate crime rate was observed in only 3 states, which also means 47 states experienced a decline. Over the same time period, the average percent change in hate crime rate was -134, which suggests a dramatic reduction in hate crimes in the US. Lastly, in an analysis of the most hateful locations, only one place of higher education made the list, the North Carolina School of the Arts. Hate by State The Federal Bureau of Investigation released hate crime statistics for 2015 just a few weeks ago, Nov 14, 2016. The data represent the most comprehensive hate crime statistics in the world and allow the public a glimpse at trends in the world of hate. Hate crimes catalogued by the FBI are those offenses motivated by victim religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and disability. Using data from the FBI Uniform Crime Report (2015) the below figure shows the hate crime rate by state. Comparing hate crime rates by state from 2013 and 2015 we see that North Dakota moved up one spot from 2nd to 1st, displacing the 2013 Champ, D.C, to 2nd in 2015. Massachusetts remains the third most hateful state followed by a top 10 newcomer, Montana. Ohio moved up 4 places from 9th to 5th in 2015. Kentucky is holding steady as the 6th most hateful state, while Arizona displaces CT as the 7th most hateful state. In 2015, Tennessee moved up 2 places to 8th, while Washington slipped a few places to 9th. Mississippi rounds out the top 10 most hateful US states. The Top 10 Most Hateful States North Dakota District of Columbia Massachusetts Montana Ohio Kentucky Arizona Tennessee Washington Mississippi Although hate crimes are intolerable, the data shown below reflect an encouraging trend. As can be seen, in 47 of 50 states there was a decline in the hate crime rate. The most pronounced reductions were observed in AK, CA and IA. Mississippi, WY and AL were the only three states that saw an increase in hate crimes between 2013 and 2015. Using data from the Office of Post-secondary Education, the below figure shows the 30 public colleges with the most reported hate crime incidents reported during the 2014 school year (highlighted in dark blue). The figure also shows the hate crime rates at the two main University of Missouri Campuses (light blue). As can be seen, the University of Missouri hate crime rates are far above the national average of just 0.4 hate crimes per year. It is important to note that of the more than 11,229 colleges that were surveyed, only 865 reported hate crime incidents or 7.7 of college campuses saw one or more hate crime reports.
Allowing racist speech encourages hate crimes—the causality is empirically verified. Katel ‘9
Katel 9 (Peter, staff writer @ CQ Researcher, “Hate Groups”, https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/uploadedFiles/news/Hate.pdf?n=1599)
There is also hard evidence to back up the link between demonization and violence. According to FBI statistics, anti-Latino hate crimes were up 40 percent between 2003 and 2007- the very same period that saw a remarkable proliferation of nativist rhetoric. Experts agree that there is a link. 'Racist rhetoric and de- humanizing images inspire violence perpetrated against innocent human beings,' says Jack Levin, a nationally known hate crime expert at Northeastem University. 'It’s not just the most recent numbers. It's the trend over a number of years that lends credibility to the notion that we're seeing a very real and possibly dramatic rise in anti-Latino hate incidents.' Ignoring the role that demonization plays in such violence is a surefire way to generate more of it. Marcelo Lucero's murder is only the latest in a sad Iist of vioIent incidents inspired by ugly rhetoric that will certainly grow longer.
College age and profiles makes it a key breeding ground for hate groups—it’s the core demographic. SPLC ‘2k
SPLC 2k (Southern Poverty Law Center, “COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES SEE INCREASE IN HATE CRIMES”, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2000/colleges-and-universities-see-increase-hate-crimes)
While these kinds of attacks seem incredible to many, the fact is that most hate crimes nationwide are committed by youths under the age of 22 — precisely the age group of most college students. Adding to these young peoples' volatility is the fact that they are often in the midst of a youthful identity crisis, rebellion against their parents and taking control of their own lives for the first time. In this milieu, experts say, it is not so surprising that some students act in ugly ways.
Two Impacts: A) Race war in America. Alexander 12/2
Alexander 12/2 (Dean, professor/director of the Homeland Security Research Program at Western Illinois University, “Domestic Extremist Threats Face Trump Admin”, http://www.hstoday.us/briefings/daily-news-analysis/single-article/special-domestic-extremist-threats-face-trump-admin/ddfd86597d91bfa41f5cc394a795c499.html)
The term domestic extremism means individuals or groups that follow a variant of ideologies that support the threat and/or use of violence for political, religious, or social objectives. One type of domestic extremism includes those who disdain others due to a person’s immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity and disability. Such bias, as exhibited in criminal acts, has been termed hate crimes. Lone wolves and cabals inspired by hate-based ideology, as well as those formally linked to a hate group, perpetrate such crimes. Increasingly troublesome are recent attempts to ignite a “race war,” in the United States, among them: the June 2015 Dylan Roof murder of nine parishioners at an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina; October 2016 failed plot by a militia-hate aligned cabal that sought to bomb an apartment complex housing Somali immigrants in Garden City, Kansas; and the November 2016 planned attack by an African American couple to kill police in Trussville, Alabama.
That is an independent impact that must be rejected on face. Challenging racism is a prior ethical question. Memmi ‘2k
Memmi 2k MEMMI Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which person man is not themself himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
B) Causes terrorism- Growing hate groups risk terrorism – US linkages are key. Holloway 11/18
Holloway 11/18 (Kali, staff @ AlterNet, in Salon, “Feeling validated by Donald Trump’s win, German hate groups team up with right-wing American hate groups”, http://www.salon.com/2016/11/18/german-hate-groups-are-teaming-up-with-right-wing-american-hate-groups-feeling-validated-by-trump_partner/)
Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump exploited existing racist and xenophobic sentiments across his base. Since he launched his election bid 18 months ago, a number of hate crimes have carried out by whites who openly admitted being inspired by Trump’s rhetoric. Since the election, racial and religious minorities have reported being targets in an unprecedented number of attacks. Now the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has warned that right-wing terrorists in his country are likely networking internationally—including with hate group members in the United States—to carry out more race and religion-based attacks. Hans-Georg Maassen, who leads the Verfassungsschutz, talked to Reuters about concerns that groups sharing extremist views—in the U.S., this likely includes those emboldened by Trump’s run—may link, creating “right-wing terrorist cells.” “This is not just purely a German phenomenon,” Maassen told Reuters. “The right-extremist scene is networking on a European level, and in some cases, with connections in the United States.” This past June, the Verfassungsschutz released findings indicating far-right incidents of violence in Germany increased an astounding 42 percent in 2015. In the U.S., according to an FBI report released days ago, hate crimes increased 6 percent in 2015, with 57 percent of those against African Americans, while attacks on Muslims increased 67 percent over the year prior. A Southern Poverty Law Center investigation found the number of U.S.-based hate groups rose 14 percent in the single year between 2014 and 2015. “We have seen in a series of cases that there are numerous people in the far-right extremist scene who are ready to do anything and who have joined forces to create right-wing terrorist cells,” Maassen said. “We are trying to investigate these cells, if they exist, and to prevent any attacks.”
Currently, the biggest terrorist threat to the US is white supremacist lone wolves --- they kill more Americans than jihadists and show more desire to use WMDs
Blair 14 (Charles P. Blair, Senior Fellow on State and Non-State Threats for the Federation of American Scientists who teaches classes on terrorism and WMD technology at John Hopkins University and George Mason University, “Looking clearly at right-wing terrorism,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 9 June 2014, http://thebulletin.org/looking-clearly-right-wing-terrorism7232, *fc)
Five years ago the US Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division released an assessment of US far-right extremism. Initially intended for law enforcement and intelligence agencies only, the report—“Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”—was almost immediately leaked. The report warned that small cells practicing “leaderless resistance” and “white supremacist lone wolves posed the most significant domestic terrorist threat.” Significantly, it highlighted the likelihood of expanded attempts by far-right extremists “to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.” Overall, the report warned of trends similar to “the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence.” That far-right extremist rally reached a violent crescendo with the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Reflecting on the past five years, a leading far-right extremism expert I recently interviewed described the homeland security report as “prophetic.” Mark Pitcavage, the Anti-Defamation League’s director of investigative research, explained that most of the warnings in the 2009 report have become realities. Yet at the time of its release, the document was derided by many inside and outside of government as “ridiculous and deeply offensive,” an “inconceivable” assault on US veterans, and, in general, “a piece of crap.” Buckling under political pressure from conservatives, homeland security rapidly repressed the report. Promptly removed from department's website, the tabooed document also disappeared from the computer systems of state and local law enforcement divisions as well as federal intelligence agencies. The homeland security unit responsible for the report was virtually muzzled. The report essentially fell into obscurity. The report’s demise was an unfortunate loss for all levels of law enforcement. Since its release, credible plots and attacks by violent extremists have surged. As the report forewarned, responsibility for the vast majority of these events lies with far-right individual extremists and extreme groups. Moreover, veteran and active-duty military personnel, when compared to the general population, were disproportionally involved in far-right extremist incidents. In just the first two months following the report, significant attacks occurred via the hands of major components of far-right extremism. For example, in May 2009, a “soldier” in the Christian terrorist anti-abortion network Army of God assassinated Kansas late-term abortion provider George Tiller. One day earlier, members of an anti-immigrant vigilante group—the Minutemen American Defense—invaded the home of an Arizona Latino and his 9-year-old daughter. Both were killed as part of a plan aimed at securing money to fund the group’s anti-immigrant terrorist operations. Less than two weeks later an octogenarian white supremacist shot and killed a security guard at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Reflecting the conspiracy theories adhered to by many white supremacists, hand-written notes found in his car read, “The Holocaust is a lie… Obama was created by Jews… Jews captured America’s money. Jews control the mass media.” In the five years following the report’s release, far-right extremists have also plotted against and, at times, successfully attacked a wide-range of additional targets, including government buildings and leaders, law enforcement personnel, polling stations, courthouses and judges, a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade, anti-racist gatherings, a Mexican consulate, synagogues and other Jewish institutions, mosques, a Sikh temple, African-Americans and other minorities, and interracial couples and families. Despite this grim record—amid a political environment that often discounts warnings of far-right extremist threats and terrorism—the Department of Homeland Security remains reluctant to address the growing threat. One of the 2009 report’s primary authors noted that since “our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic domestic extremism—whether it's anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists … the whole gamut.” Only very recently have reports been released by the unit in question; the few that address far-right extremism do so parsimoniously and with clear caution. Far-right terrorism in the US is more common than other types of violent radicalism. A recent study by the New America Foundation found that since 9/11, far-right extremists “have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda's ideology.” And perhaps most important, far-right terrorists are more prone to seek unconventional weapons—that is, weapons that might generate mass casualties or mass disruption. The study found that while no “jihadists indicted or convicted in the United States” had obtained or employed chemical or biological warfare agents, 13 individuals motivated by far-right extremist ideology, “acquired or used chemical or biological weapons or their precursor materials.” In the recent past, far-right extremists have also plotted the use of radiological weapons. The threat of major acts of far-right terrorism—perhaps aided by people with military training—is real. It should not be exaggerated, but neither should it be suppressed for political or ideological reasons.
Dispersion of technology enables lone wolf terrorists to access chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons (CBURNs) – the impact will be mass casualties and unprecedented disruption of financial and social systems
Ackerman and Pinson 14 Gary A. ,Director of the Special Projects Division at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), University of Maryland, Lauren E., Senior Research/Project Manager at START and PhD student at Yale University, “An Army of One: Assessing CBRN Pursuit and Use by Lone Wolves and Autonomous Cells,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 26, Issue 1, 2014
The first question to answer is whence the concerns about the nexus between CBRN weapons and isolated actors come and whether these are overblown. The general threat of mass violence posed by lone wolves and small autonomous cells has been detailed in accompanying issue contributions, but the potential use of CBRN weapons by such perpetrators presents some singular features that either amplify or supplement the attributes of the more general case and so are deserving of particular attention. Chief among these is the impact of rapid technological development. Recent and emerging advances in a variety of areas, from synthetic biology 3 to nanoscale engineering, 4 have opened doors not only to new medicines and materials, but also to new possibilities for malefactors to inflict harm on others. What is most relevant in the context of lone actors and small autonomous cells is not so much the pace of new invention, but rather the commercialization and consumerization of CBRN weapons-relevant technologies. This process often entails an increase in the availability and safety of the technology, with a concurrent diminution in the cost, volume, and technical knowledge required to operate it. Thus, for example, whereas fifty years ago producing large quantities of certain chemical weapons might have been a dangerous and inefficient affair requiring a large plant, expensive equipment, and several chemical engineers, with the advent of chemical microreactors, 5 the same processes might be accomplished far more cheaply and safely on a desktop assemblage, purchased commercially and monitored by a single chemistry graduate student.¶ The rapid global spread and increased user-friendliness of many technologies thus represents a potentially radical shift from the relatively small scale of harm a single individual or small autonomous group could historically cause. 6 From the limited reach and killing power of the sword, spear, and bow, to the introduction of dynamite and eventually the use of our own infrastructures against us (as on September 11), the number of people that an individual who was unsupported by a broader political entity could kill with a single action has increased from single digits to thousands. Indeed, it has even been asserted that “over time … as the leverage provided by technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination—with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win.” 7 Nowhere is this trend more perceptible in the current age than in the area of unconventional weapons.¶ These new technologies do not simply empower users on a purely technical level. Globalization and the expansion of information networks provide new opportunities for disaffected individuals in the farthest corners of the globe to become familiar with core weapon concepts and to purchase equipment—online technical courses and eBay are undoubtedly a boon to would-be purveyors of violence. Furthermore, even the most solipsistic misanthropes, people who would never be able to function socially as part of an operational terrorist group, can find radicalizing influences or legitimation for their beliefs in the maelstrom of virtual identities on the Internet.¶ All of this can spawn, it is feared, a more deleterious breed of lone actors, what have been referred to in some quarters as “super-empowered individuals.” 8 Conceptually, super-empowered individuals are atomistic game-changers, i.e., they constitute a single (and often singular) individual who can shock the entire system (whether national, regional, or global) by relying only on their own resources. Their core characteristics are that they have superior intelligence, the capacity to use complex communications or technology systems, and act as an individual or a “lone-wolf.” 9 The end result, according to the pessimists, is that if one of these individuals chooses to attack the system, “the unprecedented nature of his attack ensures that no counter-measures are in place to prevent it. And when he strikes, his attack will not only kill massive amounts of people, but also profoundly change the financial, political, and social systems that govern modern life.” 10 It almost goes without saying that the same concerns attach to small autonomous cells, whose members' capabilities and resources can be combined without appreciably increasing the operational footprint presented to intelligence and law enforcement agencies seeking to detect such behavior.¶ With the exception of the largest truck or aircraft bombs, the most likely means by which to accomplish this level of system perturbation is through the use of CBRN agents as WMD. On the motivational side, therefore, lone actors and small autonomous cells may ironically be more likely to select CBRN weapons than more established terrorist groups—who are usually more conservative in their tactical orientation—because the extreme asymmetry of these weapons may provide the only subjectively feasible option for such actors to achieve their grandiose aims of deeply affecting the system. The inherent technical challenges presented by CBRN weapons may also make them attractive to self-assured individuals who may have a very different risk tolerance than larger, traditional terrorist organizations that might have to be concerned with a variety of constituencies, from state patrons to prospective recruits. 11 Many other factors beyond a “perceived potential to achieve mass casualties” might play into the decision to pursue CBRN weapons in lieu of conventional explosives, 12 including a fetishistic fascination with these weapons or the perception of direct referents in the would-be perpetrator's belief system.¶ Others are far more sanguine about the capabilities of lone actors (or indeed non-state actors in general) with respect to their potential for using CBRN agents to cause mass fatalities, arguing that the barriers to a successful large-scale CBRN attack remain high, even in today's networked, tech-savvy environment. 13 Dolnik, for example, argues that even though homegrown cells are “less constrained” in motivations, more challenging plots generally have an inverse relationship with capability, 14 while Michael Kenney cautions against making presumptions about the ease with which individuals can learn to produce viable weapons using only the Internet. 15 However, even most of these pundits concede that low-level CBR attacks emanating from this quarter will probably lead to political, social, and economic disruption that extends well beyond the areas immediately affected by the attack. This raises an essential point with respect to CBRN terrorism: irrespective of the harm potential of CBRN weapons or an actor's capability (or lack thereof) to successfully employ them on a catastrophic scale, these weapons invariably exert a stronger psychological impact on audiences—the essence of terrorism—than the traditional gun and bomb. This is surely not lost on those lone actors or autonomous cells who are as interested in getting noticed as in causing casualties.¶ Proven Capability and Intent¶ While legitimate debate can be had as to the level of potential threat posed by lone actors or small autonomous cells wielding CBRN weapons, possibly the best argument for engaging in a substantive examination of the issue is the most concrete one of all—that these actors have already demonstrated the motivation and capability to pursue and use CBRN weapons, in some cases even close to the point of constituting a genuine WMD threat. In the context of bioterrorism, perhaps the most cogent illustration of this is the case of Dr. Bruce Ivins, the perpetrator behind one of the most serious episodes of bioterrorism in living memory, the 2001 “anthrax letters,” which employed a highly virulent and sophisticated form of the agent and not only killed five and seriously sickened 17 people, but led to widespread disruption of the U.S. postal services and key government facilities. 16¶ Other historical cases of CBRN pursuit and use by lone actors and small autonomous cells highlight the need for further exploration. Among the many extant examples: 17¶ Thomas Lavy was caught at the Alaska-Canada border in 1993 with 130 grams of 7 pure ricin. It is unclear how Lavy obtained the ricin, what he planned to do with it, and what motivated him.¶ In 1996, Diane Thompson deliberately infected twelve coworkers with shigella dysenteriae type 2. Her motives were unclear.¶ In 1998, Larry Wayne Harris, a white supremacist, was charged with producing and stockpiling a biological agent—bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax.¶ In 1999, the Justice Department (an autonomous cell sympathetic to the Animal Liberation Front) mailed over 100 razor blades dipped in rat poison to individuals involved in the fur industry.¶ In 2000, Tsiugio Uchinshi was arrested for mailing samples of the mineral monazite with trace amounts of radioactive thorium to several Japanese government agencies to persuade authorities to look into potential uranium being smuggled to North Korea.¶ In 2002, Chen Zhengping put rat poison in a rival snack shop's products and killed 42 people.¶ In 2005, 10 letters containing a radioactive substance were mailed to major organizations in Belgium including the Royal Palace, NATO headquarters, and the U.S. embassy in Brussels. No injuries were reported.¶ In 2011, federal agents arrested four elderly men in Georgia who were plotting to use ricin and explosives to target federal buildings, Justice Department officials, federal judges, and Internal Revenue Service agents.¶ Two recent events may signal an even greater interest in CBRN by lone malefactors. First, based on one assessment of Norway's Anders Breivik's treatise, his references to CBRN weapons a) suggest that CBRN weapons could be used on a tactical level and b) reveal (to perhaps previously uninformed audiences) that even low-level CBRN weapons could achieve far-reaching impacts driven by fear. 18 Whether or not Breivik would actually have sought or been able to pursue CBRN, he has garnered a following in several (often far-right) extremist circles and his treatise might inspire other lone actors. Second, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released two issues of Inspire magazine in 2012. Articles, on the one hand, call for lone wolf jihad attacks to target non-combatant populations and, on the other, permit the use of chemical and biological weapons. The combination of such directives may very well influence the weapon selection of lone actor jihadists in Western nations. 19

Tournament: CPS | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake | Judge: 

T – "Any" (3:30)

Interpretation: The affirmative must defend that public colleges and universities in the Unites States ought to restrict NO constitutionally protected speech. To clarify they may not specify any one type of constitutionally protected speech that ought not be restricted.

Counterplans by the negative that PIC out of specific kinds of constitutionally protected speech are illegitimate.

Violation:

Vote Neg

Textuality – repeated court rulings define "any" as "all" and explicitly rejected using "any" to refer to "some".

Elder ‘91(David S. Elder, October 1991, "Any and All": To Use Or Not To Use?" "Plain Language' is a regular feature of the Michigan Bar Journal, edited by Joseph Kimble for the State Bar Plain English Committee. Assistant editor is George H. Hathaway. Through this column the Committee hopes to promote the use of plain English in the law. Want to contribute a plain English article? Contact Prof. Kimble at Thomas Cooley Law School, P.O. Box 13038, Lansing, MI 48901, http://www.michbar.org/file/generalinfo/plainenglish/pdfs/91'oct.pdf | SP)
The Michigan Supreme Court seemed to approve our dictionary definitions of "any" in Harrington v Interstate Business Men's Accident Ass'n, 210 Mich 327, 330; 178 NW 19 (1920), when it quoted Hopkins v Sanders, 172 Mich 227; 137 NW 709 (1912). The Court defined "any" like this: "In broad language, it covers 'arl'v final decree' in 'any suit at law or in chancery' in 'any circuit court.' Any' means ,every,' 'each one of all."' In a later case, the Michigan Supreme Court again held that the use of "any" in an agency contract meant "all." In Gibson v Agricultural Life Ins Co, 282 Mich 282, 284; 276 NW 450 (1937), the clause in controversy read: "14. The Company shall have, and is hereby given a first lien upon any commissions or renewals as security for any claim due or to become due to the Company from said Agent." (Emphasis added.) The Gibson court was not persuaded by the plaintiff's insistence that the word "any" meant less than "all": "Giving the wording of paragraph 14 oJ the agency contract its plain and unequivocable meaning, upon arriving at the conclusion that the sensible connotation of the word any' implies 'all' and not 'some,' the legal conclusion follows that the defendant is entitled to retain the earned renewal commissions arising from its agency contract with Gibson and cannot be held legally liable for same in this action," Gibson at 287 (quoting the trial court opinion). The Michigan Court of Appeals has similarly interpreted the word "any" as used in a Michigan statute. In McGrath v Clark, 89 Mich App 194; 280 NW2d 480 (1979), the plaintiff accepted defendant's offer of judgment. The offer said nothing about prejudgment interest. The statute the Court examined was MCL 600.6013; MSA 27A.6013: "Interest shall be allowed on any money judgment recovered in a civil action...." The Court held that "the word 'any' is to be considered all-inclusive," so the defendants were entitled to interest. McGrath at 197 Recently, the Court has again held that "~alny means 'every,' 'each one of all,' and is unlimited in its scope." Parker v Nationwide Mutual Ins Co, 188 Mich App 354, 356; 470 NW2d 416 (1991) (quoting Harrington v InterState Men's Accident Ass'n, supra)

Outweighs:

Semantic Context – yes, any may have a bunch of different, more inclusive definitions, but only ours takes into consideration groups of words together. "security for any claim due or to become due to" is the passage analyzed in Gibson v Agricultural Life, which mirrors the structure of the words in the res, with "any" followed by a singular object (ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech).

Legal Context – Courts are the definitive interpreters of what a law and its words mean. Defer to courts over the slew of dictionary definition coming in the 1ar, they lack the context necessary to evaluate semantics in a legal setting. By defending a subsection of constitutional rights, they have literally inserted their own words into the resolution, which have fundamentally changed the policy they defend.

Semantics come prior to pragmatic considerations:

Decision Rule – The topicality rule is superior and non uniques your offense.

Nebel 15 Jake Nebel (debate coach his students have won the TOC, NDCA, Glenbrooks, Bronx, Emory, TFA State, and the Harvard Round Robin. As a debater, he won six octos-bid championships and was top speaker at the TOC and ten other major tournaments) "The Priority of Resolutional Semantics by Jake Nebel" VBriefly February 20^th 2015 http://vbriefly.com/2015/02/20/the-priority-of-resolutional-semantics-by-jake-nebel/ JW 2/20/15
One reason why LDers may be suspicious of my view is because they see topicality as just another theory argument. But unlike other theory arguments, topicality involves two "interpretations." The first is an interpretation, in the ordinary sense of the word, of the resolution or of some part of it. The second is a rule—namely, that the affirmative must defend the resolution.² If we don’t distinguish between these two interpretations, then the negative’s view is merely that the affirmative must defend whatever proposition they think should be debated, not because it is the proposition expressed by the resolution, but rather because it would be good to debate. This failure to see what is distinctive about Topicality leads quickly to the pragmatic approach, by ignoring what the interpretation is supposed to be an interpretation of. By contrast, the topicality rule—i.e., that the affirmative must defend the resolution—justifies the semantic approach. This rule is justified by appeals to fairness and education: it would be unfair to expect the negative to prepare against anything other than the resolution, because that is the only mutually acceptable basis for preparation; the educational benefits that are unique to debate stem from clash focused on a proposition determined beforehand. The inference to the priority of semantic considerations is simple. Consider the following argument: We ought to debate the resolution. The resolution means X. Therefore, We ought to debate X. The first premise is just the topicality rule. The second premise is that X is the semantically correct interpretation. Pragmatic considerations for or against X do not, in themselves, support or deny this second premise. They might show that it would be better or worse if the resolution meant X, but sentences do not in general mean what it would be best for them to mean. At best, pragmatic considerations may show that we should debate some proposition other than the resolution. They are (if anything) reasons to change the topic, contrary to the topicality rule. Pragmatic considerations must, therefore, be weighed against the justifications for the topicality rule, not against the semantic considerations: they are objections to the first premise, not the second premise, in the argument above.

Jurisdiction – the ballot asks you to endorse the better debater in the context of the resolution issued by the tournament rules-if you don’t defend the topic then it’s impossible to vote for you, that’s the most important voter.

Limits – Free Speech is incredibly broad. Star this card, it literally says the only coherent way to conceive of the free speech debate is to consider its few exceptions, which is a comparison of the whole res with its converse.

Silvergate ’05 (Harvey A. Silvergate, attorney in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the co-founder, with Alan Charles Kors, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, for which he also serves as the current Chairman of the Board of Directors. January 2005, "FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus," https://www.thefire.org/pdfs/free-speech-2.pdf | SP)
The First Amendment declares that Congress shall make "no law…abridging the freedom of speech." Read quite literally, the amendment would seem to protect speech only—and not the various forms of conduct that can communicate a message. For many years, states and other governmental entities used the distinction between speech and conduct to argue, for example, that waving a flag was not protected "speech" or that wearing a jacket with a protest message was unprotected "conduct." However, the Supreme Court has consistently held the First Amendment to protect much more than mere "words." As the Court noted in the famous case of Cohen v. California (1971), the amendment protects not just speech but "communication." In that case, an antiwar protester wore a jacket in the Los Angeles County Courthouse that used a vulgar profanity to express his objection to the draft. The State of California prosecuted the protester for "maliciously and willfully disturb~ing~ the peace or quiet of any neighborhood or person …by…offensive conduct." The Court rejected California’s argument that it was merely regulating the protester’s conduct and noted that "the only ‘conduct’ which the State sought to punish is the fact of communication. Thus we deal with a conviction resting solely upon ‘speech.’" With the First Amendment understood in such terms, it should not be surprising that our courts have held that this amendment protects a dizzying array of communicative activities. Speech has been broadly defined as an expression that includes, but is not limited to, what you wear, read, say, paint, perform, believe, protest, or even silently resist. "Speech activities" include leafleting, picketing, symbolic acts, wearing armbands, demonstrations, speeches, forums, concerts, motion pictures, stage performances, remaining silent, and so on. Further, the subject of your speech (or communication) is not, contrary to widespread misunderstanding, confined to the realm of politics. The First Amendment protects purely emotional expression, religious expression (see box), vulgarity, pornography, parody, and satire. (Some of these forms of expression, of course, can constitute political speech.) Your speech, to enjoy constitutional protection, does not have to be reasoned, articulate, or even rational, much less polite. Although the distinction between pure speech and conduct is vital, the law always has recognized that there are circumstances where the expression of words for certain purposes is prohibited. In fact, there is some speech that can be prohibited precisely because it coerces or causes specific conduct. For example, statements such as "Sleep with me or you’ll fail this course," when made by professor to student, or "Your money or your life," when made by an armed individual, are not constitutionally protected. Despite being "speech" within the common meaning of the term, these statements are considered to be merely an incidental part of the commission of an illegal act, such as a threat. Indeed, the speech protections of the First Amendment are so very broad that it is much easier to grasp the full scope of the First Amendment by noting the limited exceptions to its rule—areas of speech (expression) that are not protected by it— than by attempting to list all of the conceivable communications that the First Amendment protects. In the sections that follow, this Guide will briefly describe the limited categories of so-called "unprotected speech."

Outweighs:

Fairness – There’s just too many affs for the negative to reasonably prep out. You can specify other things like subsets of public universities, or question the scope of constitutionally protected in the 1AC, which grants you a reasonably large case list without the explosion outlined in the Silvergate evidence. This means the affirmative always has a significant advantage because they only have to prepare and frontline one position. Disclosure and solvency advocates don’t solve, even if we could perfectly predict every aff, there’s just too many for the neg to reasonably prepare for in the world of their interpretation.

Clash – Theirs is a model of debate that reduces each debate to the negative trying to apply generics to cases where they probably don’t usually apply. Ours is one where we engage in the actual debate that’s taking place in the literature. It’s the most important form of education because its most real world and is also key to opinion formation because detailed disagreement is better than vacuous monologues. The level of depth their interpretation seeks to reach in each policy can only ever be reached by one side, which makes the discussion useless.

Voters (Short): Drop the debater since the round is irreversibly skewed because their advocacy excluded my ability to structure 1NC offense. Dropping the argument means dropping the debater, b/c no aff advocacy means presume neg —- ALSO it’s critical to setting a precedent.

Topicality is competing interps since 1~ reasonability is 100 arbitrary with definitions that carry subjective interpretations, which forces intervention, 2) T is about the correct interpretation of the topic so out-of-round impacts matter, and 3) you can’t be reasonably topical since T functions so that either the aff is topical or isn’t. —- also this shell functions as a disad to the brightline they choose – b/c indicates the brightline justifies including these affs – which are abusive.

Tournament: CPS | Round: 1 | Opponent: La Reina AM | Judge: Arjun Tambe

State cuts have led tuition to spike harming the ability to students to enter college, especially those who come from low income backgrounds or are people of color – The impact is a blow to the national economy because a college degree is a crucial internal link to working in a skilled job, decreasing health care costs, and bringing greater wealth to local communities

Mitchell et al 16 (Report published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; authors were Michael Mitchell (State Budget and Tax), Michael Leachman (State Budget and Tax), and Kathleen Masterson, "Funding Down, Tuition Up: State Cuts to Higher Education Threaten Quality and Affordability at Public Colleges", http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/funding-down-tuition-up, EmmieeM)
Years of cuts in state funding for public colleges and universities have driven up tuition and harmed students’ educational experiences by forcing faculty reductions, fewer course offerings, and campus closings. These choices have made college less affordable and less accessible for students who need degrees to succeed in today’s economy. Though some states have begun to restore some of the deep cuts in financial support for public two-and four-year colleges since the recession hit, their support remains far below previous levels. In total, after adjusting for inflation, funding for public two-and four-year colleges is nearly $10 billion below what it was just prior to the recession. As states have slashed higher education funding, the price of attending public colleges has risen significantly faster than the growth in median income. For the average student, increases in federal student aid and the availability of tax credits have not kept up, jeopardizing the ability of many to afford the college education that is key to their long-term financial success. States that renew their commitment to a high-quality, affordable system of public higher education by increasing the revenue these schools receive will help build a stronger middle class and develop the entrepreneurs and skilled workers that are needed in the new century. Of the states that have finalized their higher education budgets for the current school year, after adjusting for inflation: Forty-six states – all except Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming – are spending less per student in the 2015-2016 yeah than they did before the recession. States cut funding deeply after the recession hit. The average state is spending $1,598, or 18 percent, less per student than before the recession. Per-student funding in nine states – Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina – is down by more than 30 percent since the start of the recession. In 12 states, per-student funding fell over the last year. Of these four states – Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, and Vermont – have cut per-student higher education funding for the last two consecutive years. In the last year, 38 states increased funding per student. Per-student funding rose $199, or 2.8 percent, nationally. Deep state funding cuts have had major consequences for public colleges and universities. States (and to a lesser extend localities) provide roughly 54 percent of the costs of teaching and instruction at these schools. Schools have made up the difference with tuition increases, cuts to educational or other services, or both. Since the recession took hold, higher education institutions have: Increased tuition. Public colleges and universities across the country have increased tuition to compensate for declining state funding and rising costs. Annual published tuition at four-year public colleges has risen by $2,333, or 33 percent, since the 2007-08 school year. In Arizona, published tuition at four-year schools is up nearly 90 percent, while in six other states – Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, and Louisiana – published tuition is up more than 60 percent. These sharp tuition increases have accelerated longer-term trends of college becoming less affordable and costs shifting from states to students. Over the last 20 years, the price of attending a four-year public college or university has grown significantly faster than the median income. Although federal student aid and tax credits have risen, on average they have fallen short of covering the tuition increases. Diminished academic opportunities and student services. Tuition increases have compensated for only part of the revenue loss resulting from state funding cuts. Over the past several years, public colleges and universities have cut faculty positions, eliminated course offerings, closed campuses, and reduced student services, among other cuts. A large and growing share of future jobs will require college-educated workers. Sufficient public investment in higher education to keep quality high and tuition affordable, and to provide financial aid to students who need it most, would help states develop the skilled and diverse workforce they will need to compete for these jobs. Sufficient public investment can only occur, however, if policymakers make sound tax and budget decisions. State revenues have improved significantly since the depths of the recession but are still only modestly above pre-recession levels. To make college more affordable and increase access to higher education, many states need to supplement that revenue growth with new revenue to fully make up for years of severe cuts. But just as the opportunity to invest is emerging, lawmakers in a number of states are jeopardizing it by entertaining tax cuts that in many cases would give the biggest breaks to the wealthiest taxpayers. In recent years, states such as Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Arizona have enacted large-scale tax cuts that limit resources available for higher education. And in Illinois and Pennsylvania ongoing attempts to find necessary resources after large tax cuts threaten current and future higher education funding. State and local tax revenue is a major source of support for public colleges and universities. Unlike private institutions, which rely more heavily on charitable donations and large endowments to help fund instruction, public two-and four-year colleges typically rely heavily on state and local appropriations. In 2015, state and local dollars constituted 54 percent of the funds these institutions used directly for teaching and instruction. While states have begun to restore funding, resources are well below what they were in 2008 – 18 percent per student lower – even as state revenues have returned to pre-recession levels. (See Figures 1 and 2.) In the states that have finalized their higher education budgets for the current 2015-16 school year compared with the 2007-08 school year, when the recession hit, adjusted for inflation: States spending on higher education nationwide is down an average $1,598 per student, or 18 percent. In only four states – Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming – is per-student funding now above its 2008 pre-recession levels. 26 states have cut funding per student by more than 20 percent. Nine states have cut funding per student by more than 30 percent. Arizona and Illinois have cut funding by more than half. Over the past year, most states increased per-student funding for their public higher education systems. (See Figures 3 and 4.) Thirty-eight states are investing more per student in the 2015-16 school year than they did in 2014-15. Nationally, spending is up an average of $199 per student, or 2.8 percent. The funding increases vary from $13 per student in Missouri to $1,730 in Wyoming. 15 states increased per-student funding by more than 5 percent. Five states – Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming – increased funding by more than 10 percent. But this trend is far from universal. In 12 states, per-student funding fell over the last year – declining, on average, 8.8 percent or by more than $516 per student. Funding cuts vary from $20 per student in New Jersey to $1,746 in Illinois. Six states – Alaska, Arizona, Illinois, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wisconsin – cut funding by more than $250 per student over the past year. Four states – Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, and Vermont – have cut per-student higher education funding for the last two years. Reductions in support for public colleges reflect in part the strategy that many states chose during the deep national recession and slow recovery. State tax revenues fell sharply during the Great Recession. The recession of 2007-09 led to record-breaking declines in state revenues, and the slow recovery continues to affect them. High unemployment and a slow recovery in housing values left people with less income and less purchasing power. As a result, states took in less from income tax and sales tax, their main sources of revenue for funding education and other services. By the fourth quarter of 2015, eight years after the recession hit, total state tax revenues were just 6.4 percent greater than they were at the start of the recession after adjusting for inflation. Many states chose to close their budget deficits through sizeable budget cuts rather than a more balanced mix of spending reductions and revenue increases. States relied disproportionately on damaging cuts to deal with declining revenue over the course of the recession Between fiscal years 2008 and 2012, states made up 45 percent of the loss in revenue through reducing support for public services – and only 16 percent through increases in taxes and fees. (They closed the remainder of their shortfalls with federal aid, reserves, and various other measures.) States would have lessened the deep cuts to higher education if they had been more willing to raise additional revenue. Meanwhile, college enrollment has risen. Public higher education institutions must educate more students, raising costs. Enrollment in public higher education was up by nearly 900,000 full-time-equivalent students, or 8.6 percent, between the beginning of the recession and the 2013-14 academic year (the latest year for which there are actual data). The recession played a large role in swelling enrollment numbers, particularly at community colleges, as many high school graduates chose college over dim employment prospects and older workers returned to retool and gain new skills. Other areas of state budgets also are under pressure. For example, an estimated 803,000 more K-12 students are enrolled in the current school year than in 2008. Long-term growth in state prison populations – with state facilities now housing nearly 1.56 million inmates – also continues to put pressure on state spending. In recent years states have modestly increased investment in two-and four-year colleges from their recession lows. As such, tuition hikes have been much smaller than they wee in the worst years of the recession. Published tuition – the "sticker price" – at public four-year institutions increased in 34 states over the past year, but only modestly. Average tuition increased $254, or 2.8 percent. Between last year and this year: Louisiana increased average tuition across its four-year institutions more than any other state, hiking it by more than 7 percent, or roughly $540. Nine states raised average tuition by more than 5 percent. In Washington State, tuition actually fell by nearly 4 percent. Nevertheless, tuition remains much higher than it was before the recession in most states. Since the 2007-08 school year, average annual published tuition has risen by $2,333 nationally, or 33 percent. (See Figures 5 and 6.) Steep tuition increases have been widespread, and average tuition at public four-year institutions, has increased by: more than 60 percent in seven states; more than 40 percent in 14 states; and more than 20 percent in 39 states. In Arizona, the state with the greatest tuition increases since the recession hit, tuition has risen 87.8 percent, or $4,978 per student. Average tuition at a four-year Arizona public university is now $10,646 a year. Tuition increases, while substantial in most states, have fallen far short nationally of fully replacing the per-student support that public colleges and universities have lost due to state funding cuts. In nearly half of the states, tuition increases between 2008 and 2015 have not fully offset cuts to state higher education funding. Because tuition increases have not fully compensated for the loss of state funding, and because most public schools do not have significant endowments of other sources of funding, many public colleges and universities have simultaneously reduced course offerings, student services, and other campus amenities. Data on spending at public institutions of higher learning in recent years are incomplete, but considerable evidence suggest that these actions by many public colleges and universities likely reduced the quality and availability of their academic offerings. For example, since the start of the recession, colleges and university systems in some states have eliminated administrative and faculty positions (in some instances replacing them with non-tenure-track staff), cut courses or increased class sizes, and in some cases, consolidated or eliminated whole programs, departments, or schools. Public colleges and universities continue to make these types of cuts, even as states have begun to reinvest in higher education. For example: The University of Alaska Fairbanks eliminated six degree offerings – including engineering management, science management, and philosophy. The University of Arizona cut 320 positions from its budget including layoffs, firings, and resignations, and increased class seizes for core undergraduate courses. In addition to laying off over 200 employees the university of Akron in Ohio eliminated its school baseball team. Facing large state funding cuts, the University of Wisconsin-Madison laid off or reduced staff and faculty vacancies by 400 slots and held faculty salaries level. Nationwide, employment at public colleges and universities has grown modestly since the start of the recession, but proportionally less than the growth in the number of students. Between 2008 and 2014, the number of full-time-equivalent instructional staff at public colleges and universities grew by about 7 percent, while the number of students at these institutions grew by 8.6 percent. In other words, the number of students per faculty member rose nationwide. Over time, students have assumed much greater responsibility for paying for public higher education. That’s because during and immediately following recessions, state and local funding for higher education has tended to fall, while tuition has tended to grow more quickly. During periods of economic growth, funding has tended to recover somewhat while tuition has stabilized at a higher level as a share of total higher educational funding. (See Figure 7.). In 1988, public colleges and universities received 3.2 times as much revenue from state and local governments as they did from students. They now receive about 1.2 times as much from states and localities as from students. Nearly every state has shifted costs to students over the last 25 years – with the most drastic shift occurring since the onset of the Great Recession. In 1988, average tuition amounts were larger than per-student state expenditures in only two states, New Hampshire and Vermont. By 2008, that number had grown to ten states. By 2008, that number had grown to ten states. In 2015 (the latest year for which there is data), tuition revenue was greater than state and local government funding for higher education in 22 states, with six – Colorado, Delaware, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont – requiring students and families to shoulder higher education costs by a ration of at least 2- to -1. The cost shift from states to students has happened over a period when absorbing additional expenses has been difficult for many families because their incomes have been stagnant or declining. In the 1970s and early-to mid-1980s, tuition and incomes both grew modestly faster than inflation; by the late 1980s, tuition began to rise much faster than incomes. (See Figure 8.) Since 1973, average inflation-adjusted public college tuition has increased by 274 percent while median household income has grown by only 7 percent. Over the past 40 years, the incomes of the top 1 percent of families have grown by almost 170 percent. This means that public college tuition has outpaced income growth for even the highest earners. The sharp tuition increases states have imposed since the recession have exacerbated the longer-term trend. Tuition jumped nearly 30 percent between the 2007-08 and 2014-15 school years, while real median income fell roughly 6.5 percent over the same time period. Rapidly rising tuition at a time of weak or declining income growth has damaging consequences for families, students, and the national economy. Tuition costs deter some students from enrolling in college. While the recession encouraged many students to enroll in higher education, the large tuition increases of the past few years may have prevented further enrollment gains. Rapidly rising tuition makes it less likely that students will attend college. Research has consistently found that college price increases result in declining enrollment. While many universities and the federal government provide financial aid to help students bear the price, research suggests that a high sticker price can dissuade students from enrolling even if the net price, including aid, doesn’t rise. Rising tuition may be harming students of color and reducing campus diversity. New research finds that rising tuition and fees jeopardize campus diversity at public four-year colleges as students of color are less likely to enroll as the cost of tuition goes up. "All else equal, a $1000 tuition increase for full-time undergraduate students is associated with a drop in campus diversity of almost 6 percent," New York University researchers found in a 2015 study. Another study, which examined tuition policy changes in Texas in the early 2000s, concluded that rising tuition rates limited enrollment gains for Hispanic students in the state. The share of students coming from communities of color at public two-and four-year colleges had risen significantly in the years leading up to these tuition increases. State cuts to higher education, made up for with higher tuition rates, jeopardizes this trend. Tuition increases likely deter low-income students, in particular, from enrolling. College cost increases have the biggest impact on students from low-income families, research further shows. For example, a 1995 study by Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane concluded that states with the larges tuition increases during the 1980s and early 1990s "saw the greatest widening of the gaps in enrollment between high-and low-income youth." The relative lack of knowledge among low-income families about the admissions and financial aid process may exacerbate these damaging effects. Students from families that struggle to get by – including those who live in communities with lower shares of college-educated adults and attend high schools that have higher student-to-counselor ratios tend to overestimate the true cost of higher education more than students from wealthier households in part because they are less aware of the financial aid for which they are eligible. These effects are particularly concerning because gaps in college enrollment between higher-and lower-income youth are already pronounced. In 2012, just over half of recent high school graduates from families with income in the lowest 20 percent enrolled in some form of postsecondary education, as opposed to 82 percent of students from the top 20 percent. Significant enrollment gaps based on income exist even among prospective students with similar academic records and test scores. Rapidly rising costs at public colleges and universities may widen these gaps further. Tuition increase may be pushing lower-income students toward less-selective public institutions, reducing their future earnings. Perhaps just as important as a student’s decision to enroll in higher education is the choice of which college to attend. A large share of high-achieving students from struggling families fail to apply to any selective colleges or universities, a 2013 Brookings Institution study found. Even here, research indicates that financial constraints and concerns about cost push lower-income students to narrow their list of potential schools and ultimately enroll in less-selective institutions. Another 2013 study found evidence that some high-achieving, low-income students are more likely to "undermatch" in their college choice in part due to financial constraints. Where a student decides to go to college has broad economic implications, especially for economically disadvantaged students and students of color. Students who had parents with less education, as well as African American and Latino students, experienced higher postgraduate earnings by attending more elite colleges relative to similar students who attended less-selective universities, a 2011 study by Stanford University and Mathematica Policy Research found. As tuition soared after the recession, federal financial aid also increased.  The Federal Pell Grant Program ― the nation’s primary source of student grant aid ― increased the amount of aid it distributed by just over 80 percent between the 2007-08 and 2014-15 school years.  This substantial boost has enabled the program not only to reach more students ― 2.7 million more students received Pell support last year than in 2008 ― but also to provide the average recipient with more support.  The average grant rose by 21 percent — to $3,673 from $3,028.^~44~ The increase in federal financial aid has helped many students and families cover recent tuition hikes.  The College Board calculates that the annual value of grant aid and higher education tax benefits for students at four-year public colleges nationally has risen by an average of $1,410 in real terms since the 2007-08 school year, offsetting about 61 percent of the average $2,320 tuition increase.  For community colleges, increases in student aid have more than made up the difference, leading to a drop in net tuition for the average student.^~45~Since the sticker-price increases have varied so much from state to state while federal grant and tax-credit amounts are uniform across the country, students in states with large tuition increases ¾ such as Arizona, Georgia, and Louisiana ¾ likely still experienced substantial increases in their net tuition and fees, while the net cost for students in states with smaller tuition increases may have fallen. Financial aid provided bystates, however — which was far less than federal aid even before the recession — hasfallen on average.  In the 2007-2008 school year, state grant dollars equaled $740 per student.  By 2014, the latest year for which full data is available, that number had fallen to $710, a drop of roughly 4 percent.~46~ Federal financial aid has certainly lessened the impact of tuition and fee increases on students from families with low incomes.  However, the overall average cost of attending college has risen for these students, because room and board costs have increased, too.  As a result, the net cost of attendance at four-year public institutions for low-income students increased 12 percent from 2008 to 2012.  For those at public community colleges, the increase over the same time period was 4 percent.^~47~ Because grants and tax credits rarely cover the full cost of college attendance, most students — students of color and low-income students in particular — borrow money.  In 2012, 79 percent of students from families whose incomes are in the lowest 25 percent graduating with a bachelor’s degree had student loans (compared with 55 percent of graduating students from families whose incomes are in the higher 25 percent).^~48~ In the same year, more than four of every five African American students borrowed at public institutions (compared with 64 percent of graduating students overall).^~49~Further, the overall share of students graduating with debt has risen since the start of the recession.  Between the 2007-08 and 2013-14 school years, the share of students graduating with debt from a public four-year institution increased from 55 percent to 60 percent.  At the same time, the average amount of debt incurred by the average bachelor’s degree recipient with loans at a public four-year institution grew to $25,500 from $21,200 (in 2014 dollars), an increase of $4,300, or 18 percent.  By contrast, the average level of debt incurred had risen only about 1 percent in the six years prior to the recession.^~50~ In short, at public four-year institutions, a greater share of students are taking on larger amounts of debt.  By the fourth quarter of 2015, students held $1.23 trillion in student debt — more than car loans and credit card debt combined.^~51~Yet, while college loan burdens have increased significantly for students at public four-year institutions, the significant run-up in debt levels has been driven in large part by a growing share of students attending private for-profit institutions — such as Corinthian and the University of Phoenix — and two-year community colleges.  In 2000, borrowers entering repayment on student loans from for-profit and two-year institutions made up roughly 30 percent of all borrowers overall, a study from the U.S. Treasury Department and Stanford University researchers found.  By 2011, these borrowers represented nearly half of all federal student loan borrowers entering repayment.  In fact, for-profit institutions have been such a driving force that in 2014, eight of the top ten and 13 of the top 25 institutions whose students owe (collectively) the most in federal student loan debt were for-profit institutions.  (See Table 1.)  In 2000, only one for-profit made the top 25 (the rest were either four-year public or private non-profit institutions).^~52~The reduced college access and graduation rates that research finds likely result from decreased state support for college hurt more than just students, because college attainment has grown increasingly important to long-term state and national economic outcomes. A college degree is increasingly a pre-requisite for professional success and for entry into the middle class or beyond. A young college graduate earns $12,000 a year more than someone who did not attend college. The benefits of academic attainment extend beyond those who receive a degree. Entire communities benefit when more residents have college degrees. For instance, higher educational attainment has been connected with lower rates of crime, greater levels of civic participation, and better health. Areas with highly educated residents tend to attract strong employers who pay their employees competitive wages. Those employees, in turn, buy goods and services from others in the community, broadly benefitting the area’s economy. As a result, the wages of workers at all levels of education are higher in metropolitan areas with high concentrations of college-educated residents, economist Enrico Moretti of the university of California at Berkeley finds. This implies that – even though not all good jobs require a college degree – having a highly educated workforce can boost an area’s economic success. The economic importance of higher education will continue to grow. In a 2013 report, researchers from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce projected that by 2020, nearly two-thirds of all jobs will require at least some college education, up from 59 percent in 2007. The Georgetown Center further projects that, based on current trends – without significant new investment in capacity – the nation’s education system will not keep pace with the rising demand for educated workers. By 2020, the country’s system of higher education will produce 5 million fewer college graduates than the labor market will need. The increase in student debt in recent years also has important implications for the broader economy, most explicitly for students who incur the college debt but do not graduate. While debt is a crucial tool for financing higher education, excessive debt can impose considerable costs on both students and society as a whole. Research finds that higher student debt levels are associated with lower rates of homeownership among young adults; can create stresses that reduce the probability of graduation, particularly for students from lower-income families; and reduce the likelihood that graduates with majors in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics will go on to the further academic study that is often needed to obtain advanced positions in those fields. There is also growing concern that rising debt levels may be preventing some young adults from starting businesses. Many entrepreneurs rely heavily on personal debt to help launch their small businesses, and rising levels of student loan debt may make it more difficult to obtain loans or other lines of credit necessary for launching a startup. Looking at the period from 2000 to 2010, researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that as student loan debt rose, net business formation of the smallest businesses – those employing four or fewer people – fell. These findings mean states should strive to expand college access and increase college graduation rates to help build a strong middle class and develop the entrepreneurs and skilled workers needed to compete in today’s global economy.  They suggest further that the severe higher education funding cuts that states have made since the start of the recession will make it more difficult to achieve those goals

The only thing keeping graduation rates stable is financial aid —- allows students to study full-time, encourages academic progress, and is the only way low-income students can afford to enroll

Johnson 14 (Hans Johnson – supported by the College Access Foundation of California and writing for the Public Policy Institute of California, "Making College Possible for Low-Income Students: Grant and Scholarship Aid in California", http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R'1014HJR.pdf, pg. 20-24, EmmieeM)
Students fail to complete college for many reasons, including financial constraints. Certainly it is well known that low-income students are less likely to finish college than other students, even accounting for differences in academic preparation and records. Surveys of students who drop out of college find that, indeed, financial constraints play an important role. In one survey, respondents not only cited the need to work as ~are~ the primary reason for leaving college but also said that work and family commitments were the reasons for not being able to return to school. More than half of the respondents said that financial aid "that completely covered tuition and books" would induce them to return to school (Johnson et al. 2009). Studies on the direct effect of grant and scholarship aid on college completion also suggest that financial aid leads to increases in graduation rates. Assigning causality in such work is difficult, however, because students who apply for aid might be more motivated than others to earn a degree and because college prices and grant aid programs vary dramatically across colleges. In general, most studies find that grant aid for low-income students increases persistence rates by as much as 10 percentage points and completion rates by at least a few percentage points (Dynarski 2005; Deming and Dynarski 2009; Kuh et al. 2008).16 A rigorous study of Florida’s "Student Access Grant" found that students whose family income made them just barely eligible for the grant of $1,300 were four percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree within seven years than students who were ineligible for the grant because their income was just above the required level (28 versus 24; Castleman and Long 2013). Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics "Beginning Postsecondary Survey," we examined college completion rates among students in the United States who first entered college in 2003 and were followed through 2009.17 The data shows that grant aid is associated with higher rates of baccalaureate completion, even after controlling for institutional characteristics and student characteristics such as high school grade point average and family income. And our analysis indicated that the effect of grant aid is fairly strong: Every standard deviation increase in grant aid is associated with a 6.7 percentage point increase in the likelihood of graduating within six years. Our findings are consistent with but slightly different from those of Franke (2014). Restricting his analysis to students first enrolling in four-year colleges, Franke found that the effect of grant aid depends on its source: For every $1,000 in grant aid, federal aid (mostly Pell Grants) led to a 2.5 to 2.8 percent increase in degree attainment, state need-based aid led to a 2.4 to 2.6 percent increase, and institutional aid led to a 1.3 to 1.6 percent increase in degree attainment.18 A key consideration is whether the form of delivery of grant aid might lead to improvements in completion rates. It has been suggested, for example, that performance-based grants in which grant renewal depends on academic outcomes, such as grades and units completed, might be one way to improve college completion rates.19 However, studies have found only minimal if any effects of performance-based grants on student completion beyond the effects of other types of grants.20 The most rigorous of these evaluations, based on randomized controlled trials in seven states (including California), found mixed results (Patel et al. 2013). Among five states with findings related to persistence, the share of students registering at the beginning of the second year was slightly higher in only two of the states, including California (where persistence rates were 81.4 percent for program participants compared to 79.0 percent for the control group). In the six states with published findings on academic units (excluding California), the number of units earned in the first year increased slightly (but was not significant in two of the six states). Finally, in Ohio, the only state with several years of experience, completion rates (attainment of a vocational certificate, associate’s degree, or bachelor’s degree) increased by 3.5 percentage points (26.9 for program participants versus 23.4 for the control group), driven almost entirely by an increase in associate’s degrees. These generally positive results are consistent with, and of the same order of magnitude as, the effects of general grant aid and scholarship programs. In other words, increases in grant aid improve student persistence and completion, but performance-based grants do not seem to have greater effects than other types of grants. These results are not necessarily surprising, as almost all grants already have de facto performance requirements. For example, the amount of most grants depends on full-time versus part-time status, with full-time students receiving more aid. Moreover, the renewal of grant aid often depends on some measure of academic progress (such as not being on academic probation). Finally, and most obviously, students cannot receive grant aid if they fail to enroll in college. In addition to the direct effect on student persistence and completion, grant and scholarship aid can also indirectly improve student outcomes. For example, financial assistance enables students to work less and focus more on school. And to the extent that it allows students to attend college on a full-time rather than part-time basis, grant aid could reduce time to completion and increase completion rates. And finally, because the amount of grant aid offered is higher for full-time students, this form of assistance incentivizes full-time attendance. A second and perhaps more important indirect role of grant aid is that it can induce students to attend four-year colleges rather than community colleges. Because of high net prices at four-year colleges, some low-income students in California opt for community colleges because of their low fees and low net prices. Costs of attending community college can be particularly low for students who live at home, with sticker prices about $10,000 lower than for students with independent living arrangements. Among incoming freshmen at the state’s community colleges in 2007-2008, 50,000 were deemed ready for college-level work. Some of these students would have been eligible for CSU or even UC but instead opted for a community college. The downside of this is that students attending a community college rather than a four-year college are less likely to complete college. Using data from over 2,000 students who were awarded scholarships by the College Access Foundation of California (CAFC) and who were followed for six years, we estimated the probability of earning a bachelor’s degree based on the type of institution first attended. The CAFC students all intended to earn a bachelor’s degree, even if they first enrolled at a community college. However, as shown in Figure 6, students who began their college career at a four-year college were much more likely than those who enrolled at a community college to earn a bachelor’s degree, even when controlling for high school grade point average. Because we cannot control for all the differences between students first attending a community college and those first attending a four-year college, it is likely that our results overstate the causal effect of attending a four-year college on earning a bachelor’s degree. But even if we were able to account for all the differences between community college and four-year college students, we would certainly find that enrolling in a four-year college leads to much higher rates of degree attainment than starting first at a community college and then trying to transfer. 24 In this study, we examine the role of grant and scholarship aid in California in making college more accessible and in helping students complete college. Our primary findings are that: For many low-income students, college would probably not be possible without grant and scholarship aid, which has contributed greatly to keeping net prices from rising as fast as sticker prices. Grant and scholarship aid is associated with higher rates of baccalaureate completion. These findings hold even after controlling for institutional characteristics and student characteristics including high school grade point average and family income. Performance-based grants do not seem to have greater effect than other types of grants, largely because students already must meet institutional academic requirements to remain enrolled in college. An important role of aid is that it can induce students to attend four-year colleges rather than community colleges. Students are much more likely to earn a degree if they first enroll at a four-year college. 

There’s a contradiction within government policy —- restricting free speech may be unconstitutional, but not doing so causes public colleges to lose federal funding under Title IX

Bernstein 3 (David E. Bernstein – George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law with a focus on constitutional history, "You Can’t Say That: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties From Antidiscrimination Laws", "Censoring Campus Speech", https://books.google.com/books?id=zU2QAAAAQBAJandpg=PA60andlpg=PA60anddq=public+colleges+could+lose+funding+if+they+allow+for+racistsandsource=blandots=W67N5E3bznandsig=xXeBW8YaTy'Ilb34MIbu-grciy4andhl=enandsa=Xandved=0ahUKEwiBoqTkn'nQAhVBjFQKHcc7CIkQ6AEITDAI~~#v=onepageandq=public20colleges20could20lose20funding20if20they20allow20for20racistsandf=false, pg. 60-61, EmmieeM)
Given these constitutional barriers, public university speech codes were on the way out until the federal Department of Education revived them in 1994. Male students at Santa Rosa Community College had posted anatomically explicit and sexually derogatory remarks about two female students in a discussion group hosted by the college’s computer network. Several aggrieved students filed a complaint against the college with the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights. The DOE found that the messages probably created a hostile educational environment on the basis of sex for one of the students. University toleration of such offensive speech, the government added, would violate Title IX, the law banning discrimination against women by education institutions that receive federal funding. Under this standard, to avoid losing federal funds, universities must proactively ban offensive speech by students and diligently punish any violations of that ban. The DOE failed to explain how its rule was consistent with the First Amendment. Speech codes enacted by public universities clearly violate the First Amendment even if the codes are enacted in response to the demands of the DOE, so requiring public universities to enact speech codes or forfeit public funds would obviously be unconstitutional. Nevertheless, facing this choice, public university officials have ignored the First Amendment issue and complied with DOE guidelines. Although a few schools may truly be concerned about the potential loss of federal funding, the prevailing attitude among university officials seems to be that the DOE’s Santa Rosa decision provides a ready excuse to indulge their preference for speech codes. University officials implicitly reason that if the DOE can get away with ignoring the First Amendment, then so can they. Unfortunately, they may be right. 

Federal funding is used to maintain financial aid resources and colleges are only growing more dependent on it as state funding goes down

Pew 15 (The Pew Charitable Trusts – compiles evidence and non-partisan analysis to inform the public and create better public policy, "Federal and State Funding of Higher Education: A Changing Landscape", http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2015/06/federal-and-state-funding-of-higher-education, EmmieeM)
States and the federal government have long provided substantial funding for higher education, but changes in recent years have resulted in their contributions being more equal than at any time in at least the previous two decades. Historically, states have provided a far greater amount of assistance to postsecondary institutions and students; 65 percent more than the federal government on average from 1987 to 2012. But this difference narrowed dramatically in recent years, particularly since the Great Recession, as state spending declined and federal investments grew sharply, largely driven by increases in the Pell Grant program, a need-based financial aid program that is the biggest component of federal higher education spending. Although their funding streams for higher education are now comparable in size and have some overlapping policy goals, such as increasing access for students and supporting research, federal and state governments channel resources into the system in different ways. The federal government mainly provides financial assistance to individual students and specific research projects, while state funds primarily pay for the general operations of public institutions.

The impact is massive – combatting the structural barriers that prevent individuals from attending college is the main internal link to competitiveness

U.S. Department of Commerce 12 (Prepared by the U.S. Department of Commerce with consultation from the National Economic Council, "The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity in the United States", http://www.esa.doc.gov/sites/default/files/thecompetitivenessandinnovativecapacityoftheunitedstates.pdf, pgs. 2-10, EmmieeM)
Education is a key element for promoting economic growth and increasing the innovative capacity of a firm or a country. Economic growth "closely depends on the synergies between new knowledge and human capital, which is why large in‐ creases in education and training have accompanied major advances in techno‐ logical knowledge in all countries that have achieved significant economic growth."1 Our nation’s education system underpins the United States’ rise to the position of richest nation on the planet in the last century.2 However, we must recognize and address cracks in this building block of American innovation, lest we fall behind countries that have placed a higher priority on developing a skilled workforce. It is not sufficient in today’s global economy for a nation to have a generally skilled and educated workforce. Increasingly, the specific skills embodied in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education fuel the innovative processes that are especially valuable to our economy. These skills are sought by companies across the economy as they look to expand their work‐ forces. These STEM skills are not only important for those working towards advanced degrees. All levels of the education system should incorporate the critical thinking and other skills that are the hallmark of STEM education.3 This chapter compares the United States to other nations on the dimensions of access to education and training and academic outcomes, with a particular focus on STEM. Furthermore, it outlines the diverse and critical role of the Federal government in building a skilled and competitive workforce. Areas to be addressed are summarized below: The United States must sustain the quality of its post-secondary education system, which is the top destination for students from abroad, while also removing barriers that have limited the post-secondary participation and performance of U.S. students. It is essential that the United States equip future and current workers with the skills needed to compete in a global labor market. Given the importance of the role played by technological progress and innovation in promoting economic growth, investment in STEM education is especially important. Yet the United States is falling behind in this area at all education levels, and addressing this shortcoming is needed if we are to continue to produce not only a workforce with the technical skills needed to fill current job openings, but persons with the unique blend of technical expertise and entrepreneurial spirit who will create the products and industries of the future. Education is a complex and multifaceted process that spans pre‐school through life‐long learning and involves policy issues ranging from affordability and technology, to questions of support for higher education, classroom size, equal access, and teacher compensation. This chapter primarily and narrowly focuses its attention to STEM because of the strong link between STEM skills, STEM occupations, and innovation. However, our narrow attention to STEM in no way implies that other aspects of education policy are not important in making our country more innovative and competitive. Indeed, our attention to STEM should be viewed as only one example of an area where concern has been raised about the nation’s performance relative to other countries in the world. The STEM workforce is typically defined as the set of professional and technical support occupations in the fields of computer science and mathematics, engineering, and life and physical sciences. In 2010, there were 7.6 million STEM workers in the United States, representing about 1 in 18 workers. Computer and math occupations account for close to half of STEM employment, followed by engineering with 32 percent of STEM jobs, physical and life sciences with 13 per‐ cent, and STEM management jobs with 9 percent. Over the past 10 years, growth in STEM jobs (7.9 percent) was three times as fast as growth in non‐STEM jobs (2.6 percent). Looking ahead over the coming years, STEM employment is expected to continue to grow at a faster rate (see figure 4.1). STEM workers fill our nation’s research and development facilities and drive our nation’s innovation and competitiveness by generating new ideas, new companies, and new industries. Not surprisingly, more than three‐fourths of the most celebrated inventors and entrepreneurs since 1800 had degrees in engineering, physics, chemistry, computer science, or medicine.4 Commensurate with their importance in driving economic productivity and growth, workers in STEM fields earn more on average than workers in other fields. As a result, providing more students with the skills to work in STEM fields is crucial both to the nation’s economic future and to improving the incomes of our workers. STEM workers enjoy large earnings premiums over non‐STEM workers. For example, in 2010, the STEM premium earned by workers with a bachelor’s degree was 27 percent, and for workers with a graduate degree, it was 12 percent5 (see table 4.1). STEM workers are also less likely to experience joblessness than their non‐STEM counterparts. Just as innovative processes take place both inside and outside the traditional spheres of research and development (RandD), STEM is now often defined both in‐ side and outside the traditional set of science and engineering jobs. Thus, STEM can be defined not just as a group of workers in science and engineering jobs, but also as a set of workers with STEM education or STEM knowledge and skills, whether or not they work in STEM jobs. The human capital embodied in the work that STEM workers perform is valued in other sectors of the economy. This capital includes knowledge of mathematics, computers, and electronics and more general skills, such as critical thinking, troubling shooting, and various forms of reasoning.6 More generally, a growing number of occupations in the economy have been found to require a greater intensity of non‐routine analytical and interactive tasks—that is, ones requiring reasoning and high executive functioning—while a declining number of occupations rely more heavily on manual and routine tasks.7 Nearly two-thirds of workers with undergraduate degrees in a STEM field are working in non-STEM occupations, such as healthcare, education, the social sciences, and management (see figure 4.2). These workers are not underperforming, nor are they mismatched in their current jobs. Rather, the same human capital that drives innovative processes through traditional RandD-related employment is needed across our economy, a suggestion that is confirmed in surveys of these workers as well. Furthermore, many STEM-educated workers who choose education jobs are likely teaching STEM skills to others. The value of STEM human capital is reflected in the earnings premium enjoyed by college‐educated workers with a STEM degree. All else equal, workers with a STEM degree earn 11 percent more per hour in full‐time non‐STEM jobs than workers with other undergraduate degrees. When STEM majors work in STEM jobs, their earnings premium rises to 20 percent, relative to persons with non‐ STEM degrees working in non‐STEM jobs. Given that more than two‐thirds of STEM workers have at least a college degree and that demand for STEM workers and workers with STEM degrees continues to grow, the U.S. college and university system is a cornerstone of our STEM future. Fortunately, at the college level, the United States continues to set the standard of the quality of the educational system and in the value of obtaining a college degree. However, the United States is losing ground to other countries in important areas of education, specifically in creating opportunities for students to gain expertise in STEM skills. Improvements are required at all education levels, including post‐secondary school, if the United States is to remain internationally competitive and for it to continue to excel in preparing its workforce for an increasingly knowledge‐intensive economy. Elite institutions within the United States’ college and university system typically dominate global rankings of prestigious higher education institutions. In 2011‐ 2012, in a worldwide ranking, 18 out of the top 25 universities and 30 out of the top 50 universities were in the United States. The United Kingdom was next with four in the top 25 and five in the top 50.11 These rankings make our country a magnet for the best students from around the world. The United States is still the top destination for students studying abroad, although its share has fallen some‐ what over time (see figure 4.3). Another way to look at the desirability of the United States as a destination for study is in export terms: when students from abroad come to the United States to study, that is an export of educational services (see figure 4.4). In 2010, receipts from education exports exceeded $21 billion, more than doubling over the previous 10 years in keeping with the rising cost of attending U.S. colleges and universities. Close to half of the receipts came from China ($4.0 billion), India ($3.3 billion), and Korea ($2.2 billion) (see figure 4.5). Roughly 40 percent of international students in 2010–2011 were studying in STEM‐related fields, such as engineering (18.7 percent), math and computer sciences (8.9 percent), and physical and life sciences (8.8 percent). Business and management ranked the most popular individual field (21.5 percent).12 While the United States continues to have top‐flight higher education institutions, fundamental problems in the kindergarten through college system threaten our ability to increase the skills of our workforce as rapidly as needed. Among high school graduates who do enroll in college, a remarkably high proportion—20 percent—takes at least one remedial course their freshman year.13 Stu‐ dents who take remedial coursework often do not fully catch up with their other college‐going peers: compared with college students who need no remediation, students who take even a single remedial course are less likely to earn their bachelor’s degree than students who did not take any remedial courses.14 More generally, the United States has slipped behind other countries in terms of college attainment rates over the second half of the 20th century. The cohort born be‐ tween 1943 and 1952 had the highest share of bachelor degree holders in the world. Since then several other countries have not only caught up but surpassed the United States in the proportion of adults who have completed college. Currently, the share of the U.S. population aged 25–34 that has attained post‐secondary education is only slightly above the OECD average.1 Of those who graduate from college, the United States produces fewer STEM graduates relative to other developed countries. OECD data show that in 2009 12.8 percent of U.S. graduates with bachelor’s degrees were in STEM fields. This places the United States near the bottom of OECD countries in terms of the percentage of STEM graduates produced. Significant economic competitors—such as South Korea (26.3 percent), Germany (24.5 percent), Canada (19.2 percent), and the United Kingdom (18.1 percent)—are on the long list of countries producing a much higher percentage of STEM graduates.16 As they advance through the education system, U.S. students choose not to enter STEM fields or, if they do pursue these studies, do not continue. Three out of four high school students who test in the top math quartile don’t start with a STEM major in college, and only half of all students who start in a STEM major graduate with a STEM degree.17 While no single reason can account for the low share of students in STEM fields, students’ poor K–12 math and science preparation and their unwillingness to commit the additional study time needed for math and science courses relative to other classes are likely contributing factors.18 As detailed below, the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation have developed initiatives to improve K–12 and college‐level STEM instruction and to reduce the number of students exiting STEM majors for other majors. Given the importance of a college education to a worker’s productivity and earnings, particularly for STEM‐educated workers, it is striking that only 70 percent of high school graduates in 2009 went on to some higher education—a rate lower than that of the highest performing countries, such as Norway and New Zealand.19 One barrier to college attendance is the high price of tuition and fees. Whether for a 2‐year or 4‐year degree, tuition has climbed much faster than consumer prices and household incomes. Over the past decade, in‐state public university tuition and fees more than doubled while tuition and fees for 2‐year schools rose 71 percent. During the same period, overall consumer prices increased 27 percent and nominal median household income rose 18 percent (see figure 4.6). In other words, household income over the period was not able to keep up with the overall increase in consumer prices, let alone the soaring sticker price of a college education. The cost of room and board (not included in tuition and fees) was no more forgiving. Between the 1999–2000 and 2009–2010 school years, the cost of staying in a college dormitory rose 80 percent while board increased 55 percent. Grant aid from public and private sources, including Federal Pell Grants and Federal education tax credits and deductions, however, have helped soften the financial blow to families. As a result, the net price of a college education—that is, the published price of tuition and fees minus all forms of financial aid—has not in‐ creased as fast as the sticker prices.20 In fact, in constant dollars the net price for full‐time students attending public, four‐year institutions in 2011–2012 increased just $60 relative to 2007–2008, while the net price for public, two‐year schools and private schools in 2011–2012 was lower than in 2007–2008.21 

Competitiveness is key to US dominance – we need to keep innovating faster to ensure economic prosperity and hegemony

Segal 04 – Senior Fellow in China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
~Adam, Foreign Affairs, "Is America Losing Its Edge?" November / December 2004, http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20041101facomment83601/adam-segal/is-america-losing-its-edge.html~~
The United States' global primacy depends in large part on its ability to develop new technologies and industries faster than anyone else. For the last five decades, U.S. scientific innovation and technological entrepreneurship have ensured the country's economic prosperity and military power. It was Americans who invented and commercialized the semiconductor, the personal computer, and the Internet; other countries merely followed the U.S. lead. Today, however, this technological edge-so long taken for granted-may be slipping, and the most serious challenge is coming from Asia. Through competitive tax policies, increased investment in research and development (RandD), and preferential policies for science and technology (SandT) personnel, Asian governments are improving the quality of their science and ensuring the exploitation of future innovations. The percentage of patents issued to and science journal articles published by scientists in China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan is rising. Indian companies are quickly becoming the second-largest producers of application services in the world, developing, supplying, and managing database and other types of software for clients around the world. South Korea has rapidly eaten away at the U.S. advantage in the manufacture of computer chips and telecommunications software. And even China has made impressive gains in advanced technologies such as lasers, biotechnology, and advanced materials used in semiconductors, aerospace, and many other types of manufacturing. Although the United States' technical dominance remains solid, the globalization of research and development is exerting considerable pressures on the American system. Indeed, as the United States is learning, globalization cuts both ways: it is both a potent catalyst of U.S. technological innovation and a significant threat to it. The United States will never be able to prevent rivals from developing new technologies; it can remain dominant only by continuing to innovate faster than everyone else. But this won't be easy; to keep its privileged position in the world, the United States must get better at fostering technological entrepreneurship at home.

Loss of competitiveness results in great power conflict—retrenchment makes war inevitable and ensures the US would be dragged in – that causes your heg bad impacts so it’s try or die for the AFF

Khalilzad 11 — Zalmay Khalilzad, Counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, served as the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations during the presidency of George W. Bush, served as the director of policy planning at the Defense Department during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, 2011 ("The Economy and National Security," National Review, February 8^th, Available Online at http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/259024, Accessed 02-08-2011)

Today, economic and fiscal trends pose the most severe long-term threat to the United States’ position as global leader. While the United States suffers from fiscal imbalances and low economic growth, the economies of rival powers are developing rapidly. The continuation of these two trends could lead to a shift from American primacy toward a multi-polar global system, leading in turn to increased geopolitical rivalry and even war among the great powers. The current recession is the result of a deep financial crisis, not a mere fluctuation in the business cycle. Recovery is likely to be protracted. The crisis was preceded by the buildup over two decades of enormous amounts of debt throughout the U.S. economy — ultimately totaling almost 350 percent of GDP — and the development of credit-fueled asset bubbles, particularly in the housing sector. When the bubbles burst, huge amounts of wealth were destroyed, and unemployment rose to over 10 percent. The decline of tax revenues and massive countercyclical spending put the U.S. government on an unsustainable fiscal path. Publicly held national debt rose from 38 to over 60 percent of GDP in three years. Without faster economic growth and actions to reduce deficits, publicly held national debt is projected to reach dangerous proportions. If interest rates were to rise significantly, annual interest payments — which already are larger than the defense budget — would crowd out other spending or require substantial tax increases that would undercut economic growth. Even worse, if unanticipated events trigger what economists call a "sudden stop" in credit markets for U.S. debt, the United States would be unable to roll over its outstanding obligations, precipitating a sovereign-debt crisis that would almost certainly compel a radical retrenchment of the United States internationally. Such scenarios would reshape the international order. It was the economic devastation of Britain and France during World War II, as well as the rise of other powers, that led both countries to relinquish their empires. In the late 1960s, British leaders concluded that they lacked the economic capacity to maintain a presence "east of Suez." Soviet economic weakness, which crystallized under Gorbachev, contributed to their decisions to withdraw from Afghanistan, abandon Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and allow the Soviet Union to fragment. If the U.S. debt problem goes critical, the United States would be compelled to retrench, reducing its military spending and shedding international commitments. We face this domestic challenge while other major powers are experiencing rapid economic growth. Even though countries such as China, India, and Brazil have profound political, social, demographic, and economic problems, their economies are growing faster than ours, and this could alter the global distribution of power. These trends could in the long term produce a multi-polar world. If U.S. policymakers fail to act and other powers continue to grow, it is not a question of whether but when a new international order will emerge. The closing of the gap between the United States and its rivals could intensify geopolitical competition among major powers, increase incentives for local powers to play major powers against one another, and undercut our will to preclude or respond to international crises because of the higher risk of escalation. The stakes are high. In modern history, the longest period of peace among the great powers has been the era of U.S. leadership. By contrast, multi-polar systems have been unstable, with their competitive dynamics resulting in frequent crises and major wars among the great powers. Failures of multi-polar international systems produced both world wars. American retrenchment could have devastating consequences. Without an American security blanket, regional powers could rearm in an attempt to balance against emerging threats. Under this scenario, there would be a heightened possibility of arms races, miscalculation, or other crises spiraling into all-out conflict. Alternatively, in seeking to accommodate the stronger powers, weaker powers may shift their geopolitical posture away from the United States. Either way, hostile states would be emboldened to make aggressive moves in their regions. As rival powers rise, Asia in particular is likely to emerge as a zone of great-power competition. Beijing’s economic rise has enabled a dramatic military buildup focused on acquisitions of naval, cruise, and ballistic missiles, long-range stealth aircraft, and anti-satellite capabilities. China’s strategic modernization is aimed, ultimately, at denying the United States access to the seas around China. Even as cooperative economic ties in the region have grown, China’s expansive territorial claims — and provocative statements and actions following crises in Korea and incidents at sea — have roiled its relations with South Korea, Japan, India, and Southeast Asian states. Still, the United States is the most significant barrier facing Chinese hegemony and aggression. Given the risks, the United States must focus on restoring its economic and fiscal condition while checking and managing the rise of potential adversarial regional powers such as China. While we face significant challenges, the U.S. economy still accounts for over 20 percent of the world’s GDP. American institutions — particularly those providing enforceable rule of law — set it apart from all the rising powers. Social cohesion underwrites political stability. U.S. demographic trends are healthier than those of any other developed country. A culture of innovation, excellent institutions of higher education, and a vital sector of small and medium-sized enterprises propel the U.S. economy in ways difficult to quantify. Historically, Americans have responded pragmatically, and sometimes through trial and error, to work our way through the kind of crisis that we face today. The policy question is how to enhance economic growth and employment while cutting discretionary spending in the near term and curbing the growth of entitlement spending in the out years. Republican members of Congress have outlined a plan. Several think tanks and commissions, including President Obama’s debt commission, have done so as well. Some consensus exists on measures to pare back the recent increases in domestic spending, restrain future growth in defense spending, and reform the tax code (by reducing tax expenditures while lowering individual and corporate rates). These are promising options. The key remaining question is whether the president and leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill have the will to act and the skill to fashion bipartisan solutions. Whether we take the needed actions is a choice, however difficult it might be. It is clearly within our capacity to put our economy on a better trajectory. In garnering political support for cutbacks, the president and members of Congress should point not only to the domestic consequences of inaction — but also to the geopolitical implications. As the United States gets its economic and fiscal house in order, it should take steps to prevent a flare-up in Asia. The United States can do so by signaling that its domestic challenges will not impede its intentions to check Chinese expansionism. This can be done in cost-efficient ways. While China’s economic rise enables its military modernization and international assertiveness, it also frightens rival powers. The Obama administration has wisely moved to strengthen relations with allies and potential partners in the region but more can be done. Some Chinese policies encourage other parties to join with the United States, and the U.S. should not let these opportunities pass. China’s military assertiveness should enable security cooperation with countries on China’s periphery — particularly Japan, India, and Vietnam — in ways that complicate Beijing’s strategic calculus. China’s mercantilist policies and currency manipulation — which harm developing states both in East Asia and elsewhere — should be used to fashion a coalition in favor of a more balanced trade system. Since Beijing’s over-the-top reaction to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese democracy activist alienated European leaders, highlighting human-rights questions would not only draw supporters from nearby countries but also embolden reformers within China. Since the end of the Cold War, a stable economic and financial condition at home has enabled America to have an expansive role in the world. Today we can no longer take this for granted. Unless we get our economic house in order, there is a risk that domestic stagnation in combination with the rise of rival powers will undermine our ability to deal with growing international problems. Regional hegemons in Asia could seize the moment, leading the world toward a new, dangerous era of multi-polarity.