Tournament: Emory | Round: 1 | Opponent: Durham OC | Judge: Lucas Bailey
Framing
The alt-right is back and stronger than ever—students are already engaging in hate speech and harmful dialogue and are being recruited now on college campuses for white nationalist movements.
Harkinson 16, Josh. "The Push to Enlist "Alt-Right" Recruits on College Campuses." Mother Jones. N.p., 6 Dec. 2016. Web. 06 Jan. 2017. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/richard-spencer-alt-right-college-activism. SM
How much support is there for the loose-knit coalition of white nationalists and other far-right extremists known as the "alt-right"? Despite a spike in media coverage for the movement in the wake of Donald Trump's victory, a recent conference hosted by white nationalist Richard Spencer, who coined the term "alt-right," drew only about 275 attendees in Washington, DC. And after a video from the event went viral, showing audience members giving Nazi salutes to Spencer's cry of "hail Trump," the movement faced a fierce backlash. Although Trump named alt-right hero Stephen Bannon as his chief White House strategist, the president-elect went on to disavow the alt-right—in general terms, at least—in an interview with the New York Times. The movement gained momentum online in 2016 but is no longer just about social media, says Spencer; he sees a need to prove that the alt-right can attract supporters in the real world. And he says the best place to do that is on college campuses, starting with a speech he plans to deliver on Tuesday on the campus of Texas AandM University. "People in college are at this point in their lives where they are actually open to alternative perspectives, for better and for worse," Spencer says. "I think you do need to get them while they are young. I think rewiring the neurons of someone over 50 is effectively impossible." Recruiting on college campuses has long been a goal for "academic racists" such as Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow, a white nationalist whom Spencer helped bring to Duke University for an event in 2007, when Spencer was a student there. In May, Spencer and other white nationalists set up a "safe space" on the University of California-Berkeley's Sproul Plaza to discuss "how race affects people of European heritage." He claims that he will be giving two more speeches about the alt-right at universities in California. "The left just owns academia through and through," Spencer says, "so I think it is important to go to the belly of the beast and not let them own it." In recent months, Breitbart News pundit Milo Yiannopoulos' "Dangerous Faggot Tour" drew crowds at college campuses around the country. Several colleges canceled scheduled talks by Yiannopoulos because of "security concerns." Yiannopoulos does not label himself "alt-right" but has characterized the movement as a legitimate response to political correctness. He often describes white males as victims of "reverse discrimination" and speaks euphemistically of defending "Western values." A talk that he gave on the alt-right at the University of Houston in September drew cheers and a chant invoking the name of the alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog. "That was a revelation for me," Spencer said about Yiannopoulos' talk. "What we are doing is known to people, it's edgy and dangerous, it's cool and hip. It's that thing our parents don't want us to do. So that was definitely a huge inspiration." University campuses historically have incubated a range of social movements, from Marxism to multiculturalism on the left to right-wing movements such as neoliberalism and fascism, including Nazism in Germany (and in the United States). More recently, several groups sympathetic to the alt-right have cropped up on some college campuses: Identity Evropa Identity Evropa describes itself as "a generation of awakened Europeans who have discovered we are part of the great peoples, history, and civilization that flowed from the European continent" and who "oppose those who would defame our history and rich cultural heritage." Founded in February by 30-year-old ex-Marine Nathan Damigo, a junior social science major at California State University-Stanislaus, the group has been active on several California campuses. Its supporters have plastered campuses and downtown areas with posters featuring slogans such as "Let's Become Great Again" and "Serve Your People" superimposed over images or European Renaissance art. Most college professors who teach classes about race and identity "haven't done their homework," says Damigo, who, like Spencer, promotespseudoscientific theories about cognitive differences between the races. Most of his members, he says, are recent college graduates who discovered racialist ideas on their own and now aim to "mentor" younger students while "waging a culture war" on the ivory tower: "We want to have a constant presence there," he says. "We want to normalize our ideas and get to the point where we can push faculty into incorporating this literature into the lectures and into the educational program." In November, Damigo and more than two dozen Identity Evropa members attended Spencer's conference. As a student at Maryland's Towson University in 2012, Matthew Heimbach founded a "white student union." The group conducted night patrols to look for "black predators," according to Vice, and brought "race realist" Jared Taylor to speak on campus. Another white student union was formed in 2013 by Georgia State University student Patrick Sharp, an active member of the neo-Nazi website Stormfront. The "white student union" model has been promoted by alt-right media outlets; since then, more than 30 white student union pages have popped up on Facebook, though many are believed to be hoaxes. After graduating in 2013, Heimbach and his father-in-law founded the Traditionalist Youth Network, a white nationalist group cloaking itself in "traditionalism" that has allied with neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate groups, according to research from the Southern Poverty Law Center. In June, members of the TYN's affiliated Traditionalist Worker Party joined the group Golden Gate Skinheads for a demonstration in Sacramento that turned violent, sending five people to the hospital with stab wounds. Like other figures affiliated with the alt-right, Heimbach idolizes Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Russia is our biggest inspiration," he recently toldthe New York Times. "I see President Putin as the leader of the free world." Students for Trump Though the campus group Students for Trump ostensibly focused on electing and supporting Trump, at least one chapter has openly embraced white nationalist rhetoric and causes. The Facebook page of the group's Portland State University chapter posted an infographic called "What Does White Genocide Look Like," "White Lives Matter" memes, and a quote from former Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith about how "colonialism is a wonderful thing." In a counterprotest to a student union demonstration against arming campus police, Students for Trump held up signs reading "Thug Lives Don't Matter." PSU Students who spoke out against Students for Trump were reportedly targeted online by anonymous accounts with racist slurs and death threats, according to ThinkProgress. Campuses have mostly stopped short of banning such groups, opting instead to counter them with protests and educational efforts. Texas AandM University is hosting a counterevent Tuesday called "Aggies United" at its football stadium featuring musicians and activists. "I find the views of the organizer—and the speaker he is apparently sponsoring—abhorrent and profoundly antithetical to everything I believe,” the university's president, Michael Young, said in a letter to the campus community last week. "In my judgment, those views simply have no place in civilized dialogue and conversation." But, Young added, "we have no plans to prohibit the speaker from using the room he has rented. Freedom of speech is a First Amendment right and a core value of this university, no matter how odious the views may be."
Even consequentially, Free speech is a gateway to every other impact.
D’Souza 96 (Frances, Prof. Anthropology Oxford, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/hearings/19960425/droi/freedom_en.htm?textMode=on)
In the absence of freedom of expression which includes a free and independent media, it is impossible to protect other rights, including the right to life. Once governments are able to draw a cloak of secrecy over their actions and to remain unaccountable for their actions then massive human rights violations can, and do, take place. For this reason alone the right to freedom of expression, specifically protected in the major international human rights treaties, must be considered to be a primary right. It is significant that one of the first indications of a government's intention to depart from democratic principles is the ever increasing control of information by means of gagging the media, and preventing the freeflow of information from abroad. At one end of the spectrum there are supposedly minor infringements of this fundamental right which occur daily in Western democracies and would include abuse of national security laws to prevent the publication of information which might be embarrassing to a given government: at the other end of the scale are the regimes of terror which employ the most brutal moves to suppress opposition, information and even the freedom to exercise religious beliefs. It has been argued, and will undoubtedly be discussed at this Hearing, that in the absence of free speech and an independent media, it is relatively easy for governments to capture, as it were, the media and to fashion them into instruments of propaganda, for the promotion of ethnic conflict, war and genocide. 2. Enshrining the right to freedom of expression The right to freedom of expression is formally protected in the major international treaties including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In addition, it is enshrined in many national constitutions throughout the world, although this does not always guarantee its protection. Furthermore, freedom of expression is, amongst other human rights, upheld, even for those countries which are not signatories to the above international treaties through the concept of customary law which essentially requires that all states respect the human rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by virtue of the widespread or customary respect which has been built up in the post World War II years. 3. Is free speech absolute? While it is generally accepted that freedom of expression is, and remains the cornerstone of democracy, there are permitted restrictions encoded within the international treaties which in turn allow for a degree of interpretation of how free free speech should be. Thus, unlike the American First Amendment Rights which allow few, if any, checks on free speech or on the independence of the media, the international treaties are concerned that there should be a balance between competing rights: for example, limiting free speech or media freedom where it impinges on the individual's right to privacy; where free speech causes insult or injury to the rights and reputation of another; where speech is construed as incitement to violence or hatred, or where free speech would create a public disturbance. Given that these permitted restrictions are necessarily broad, the limits of free speech are consistently tested in national law courts and, perhaps even more importantly, in the regional courts such as the European Commission and Court of Human Rights. In recent years several landmark cases have helped to define more closely what restrictions may be imposed by government and under what circumstances. In particular, it has been emphasised by the European Court that any restriction must comply with a three-part test which requires that any such restriction should first of all be prescribed by law, and thus not arbitrarily imposed: proportionate to the legitimate aims pursued, and demonstrably necessary in a democratic society in order to protect the individual and/or the state. 4. Who censors what? Despite the rather strict rules which apply to restrictions on free speech that governments may wish to impose, many justifications are nevertheless sought by governments to suppress information which is inimical to their policies or their interests. These justifications include arguments in defence of national and/or state security, the public interst, including the need to protect public morals and public order and perfectly understandable attempts to prevent racism, violence, sexism, religious intolerance and damage to the indi-vidual's reputation or privacy. The mechanisms employed by governments to restrict the freeflow of information are almost endless and range from subtle economic pressures and devious methods of undermining political opponents and the independent media to the enactment of restrictive press laws and an insist-ence on licensing journalists and eventually to the illegal detention, torture and disappearances of journalists and others associated with the expression of independent views. 5. Examples of censorship To some the right to free speech may appear to be one of the fringe human rights, especially when compared to such violations as torture and extra-judicial killings. It is also sometimes difficult to dissuade the general public that censorship, generally assumed to be something to do with banning obscene books or magazines, is no bad thing! It requires a recognition of some of the fundamental principles of democracy to understand why censorship is so immensely dangerous. The conditon of democracy is that people are able to make choices about a wide variety of issues which affect their lives, including what they wish to see, read, hear or discuss. While this may seem a somewhat luxurious distinction preoccupying, perhaps, wealthy Western democracies, it is a comparatively short distance between government censorship of an offensive book to the silencing of political dissidents. And the distance between such silencing and the use of violence to suppress a growing political philosophy which a government finds inconvenient is even shorter. Censorship tends to have small beginnings and to grow rapidly. Allowing a government to have the power to deny people information, however trivial, not only sets in place laws and procedures which can and will be used by those in authority against those with less authority, but it also denies people the information which they must have in order to monitor their governments actions and to ensure accountability. There have been dramatic and terrible examples of the role that censorship has played in international politics in the last few years: to name but a few, the extent to which the media in the republics of former Yugoslavia were manipulated by government for purposes of propaganda; the violent role played by the government associated radio in Rwanda which incited citizens to kill each other in the name of ethnic purity and the continuing threat of murder issued by the Islamic Republic of Iran against a citizen of another country for having written a book which displeased them. 6. The link between poverty, war and denial of free speech There are undoubted connections between access to information, or rather the lack of it, and war, as indeed there are between poverty, the right to freedom of expression and development. One can argue that democracy aims to increase participation in political and other decision-making at all levels. In this sense democracy empowers people. The poor are denied access to information on decisions which deeply affect their lives, are thus powerless and have no voice; the poor are not able to have influence over their own lives, let alone other aspect of society. Because of this essential powerlessness, the poor are unable to influence the ruling elite in whose interests it may be to initiate conflict and wars in order to consolidate their own power and position. Of the 126 developing countries listed in the 1993 Human Development Report, war was ongoing in 30 countries and severe civil conflict in a further 33 countries. Of the total 63 countries in conflict, 55 are towards the bottom scale of the human development index which is an indicator of poverty. There seems to be no doubt that there is a clear association between poverty and war. It is reasonably safe to assume that the vast majority of people do not ever welcome war. They are normally coerced, more often than not by propaganda, into fear, extreme nationalist sentiments and war by their governments. If the majority of people had a democratic voice they would undoubtedly object to war. But voices are silenced. Thus, the freedom to express one's views and to challenge government decisions and to insist upon political rather than violent solutions, are necessary aspects of democracy which can, and do, avert war. Government sponsored propaganda in Rwanda, as in former Yugoslavia, succeeded because there weren't the means to challenge it. One has therefore to conclude that it is impossible for a particular government to wage war in the absence of a compliant media willing to indulge in government propaganda. This is because the government needs civilians to fight wars for them and also because the media is needed to re-inforce government policies and intentions at every turn.
Free speech is a pre-requisite to any morality- without it self-realization is impossible.
Eberle 94 Eberle, Law @ Roger Williams, 94 (Wake Forest LR, Winter)
The Court's decision in R.A.V. reaffirms the preeminence of free speech in our constitutional value structure. n62 Theoretically, free speech is intrinsically valuable as a chief means by which we develop our faculties and control our destinies. n63 Free speech is also of instrumental value in facilitating other worthy ends such as democratic or personal self-government, n64 public and private decisionmaking, n65 and the advancement of knowledge and truth. n66 Ultimately, the value of free speech rests upon a complex set of justifications, as compared to reliance on any single foundation. n67 The majority of the Court in R.A.V. preferred a nonconsequentialist view, finding that speech is valuable as an end itself, independent of any consequences that it might produce. In this view, free speech is an essential part of a just and free society that treats all people as responsible moral agents. Accordingly, people are entrusted with the responsibility of making judgments about the use or abuse of speech. n68 From this vantage point, the majority saw a certain moral equivalency in all speech. Even hate speech merits protection under the First Amendment, because all speech has intrinsic value. This is so because all speech, even hate speech, is a communication to the world, and therefore implicates the speaker's autonomy or self-realization. Additionally, any information might be valuable to a listener who can then decide its importance or how best to use it. Accordingly, any suspicion or evidence of governmental censorship must be vigilantly investigated.
Only through a racial realism approach and policy action can real world change that has the end result of empowering the oppressed occur
Bell 92 (Derrick Bell, 1992, Conneticut Law Review, http://liberalarts.iupui.edu/mpsg/Essays/Bell20-20Racial20Realism.pdf,) AP
While implementing Racial Realism we must simultaneously ac- knowledge that our actions are not likely to lead to transcendent change and, despite our best efforts, may be of more help to the system we despise than to the victims of that system we are trying to help. Nevertheless, our realization, and the dedication based on that realiza- tion, can lead to policy positions and campaigns that are less likely to worsen conditions for those we are trying to help, and will be more likely to remind those in power that there are imaginative, unabashed risk-takers who refuse to be trammeled upon. Yet confrontation with our oppressors is not our sole reason for engaging in Racial Realism. Continued struggle can bring about unexpected benefits and gains that in themselves justify continued endeavor. The fight in itself has mean- ing and should give us hope for the future. I am convinced that there is something real out there in America for black people. It is not, however, the romantic love of integration. It is surely not the long-sought goal of equality under law, though we must maintain the struggle against racism else the erosion of black rights will become even worse than it is now. The Racial Realism that we must seek is simply a hard-eyed view of racism as it is and our subordinate role in it. We must realize, as our slave forebears, that the struggle for freedom is, at bottom, a manifestation of our humanity that survives and grows stronger through resistance to oppression, even if that oppression is never overcome. I am convinced that there is something real out there in America for black people. It is not, however, the romantic love of integration. It is surely not the long-sought goal of equality under law, though we must maintain the struggle against racism else the erosion of black rights will become even worse than it is now. The Racial Realism that we must seek is simply a hard-eyed view of racism as it is and our subordinate role in it. We must realize, as our slave forebears, that the struggle for freedom is, at bottom, a manifestation of our humanity that survives and grows stronger through resistance to oppression, even if that oppression is never overcome.
Thus the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best upholds a racial realistic perspective and engages in policy action to fight oppression
Harms
Free speech is as tight as a pin on college campuses—this limits productive dialogue that can foster new ideas and goes against the true purpose of higher level education
Maloney 16, Cliff, Jr (He is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, Class of 2014, with a B.A. in Education and a B.S. in Theatre Arts.) . "Colleges Have No Right to Limit Students' Free Speech." Time. Time, Oct.-Nov. 2016. Web. 04 Jan. 2017. http://time.com/4530197/college-free-speech-zone/.
In grade school, I learned that debate is defined as “a discussion between people in which they express different opinions about something.” Such open discourse was historically encouraged on our college campuses. Universities exemplified intellectual discussion and debate in America. No one voiced their opinions louder than students, professors and administrators. They pushed society’s limits by admitting women and people of color, and by encouraging diversity of thought amongst the college community. Historically, young people flocked to universities to learn more about the world around them, to encounter people from different backgrounds, to expand their minds and to form their own opinions. Unfortunately, things have changed. Recently on college campuses, our open discourse has been threatened, particularly when discussing politics. While the current presidential election represents polarizing wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties, we should be able to openly debate their policies and the direction in which they plan to take our country if elected. We should be able to discuss the abuse of power within our government and the consistent violations of our Bill of Rights. We should be able to participate in the free market of ideas. But our students are being silenced. University campuses are now home to a plethora of speech restrictions. From sidewalk-sized “free-speech zones” to the criminalization of microaggressions, America’s college campuses look and feel a lot more like an authoritarian dictatorship than they do the academic hubs of the modern free world. When rolling an inflated free-speech ball around campus, students at the University of Delaware were halted by campus police for their activities. A Young Americans for Liberty leader at Fairmont State University in West Virginia was confronted by security when he was attempting to speak with other students about the ideas he believes in. A man at Clemson University was barred from praying on campus because he was outside of the free-speech zone. And a student at Blinn College in Texas abolished her campus’ free-speech zone in a lawsuit after administrators demanded she seek special permission to advocate for self-defense. How have we let this happen in America, the land of the free? It’s because of what our universities have taught a generation of Americans: If you don’t agree with someone, are uncomfortable with an idea, or don’t find a joke funny, then their speech must be suppressed. Especially if they don’t politically agree with you. Instead of actually debating ideas that span topics from the conventional to the taboo, a generation of American students don’t engage, they just get enraged. In doing so, many students believe that they have a right to literally shut other people up. This is not only a threat to the First Amendment, but also to American democracy. In their manifestation, safe spaces and free-speech zones at public universities enable prejudice against unfavorable ideologies. Guised as progressive measures to ensure inclusion, these often unconstitutional policies exclude new and competing ideas, and are antithetical to a free academia. In excluding different ideologies, supposedly progressive campus speech codes do one thing: prevent the progression of ideas. Restrictive campus speech codes are, in fact, regressive. With over 750 chapters nationwide at Young Americans for Liberty, we are fighting against public universities that stifle free speech. We’ve launched the national Fight for Free Speech campaign to reform unconstitutional speech codes and abolish these so-called free-speech zones on college campuses. By hosting events such as large free speech balls, YAL chapters across the country are petitioning their campuses to adopt the University of Chicago’s principles on freedom of expression—the hallmark of campus speech policies. Our members have geared up with First Amendment organizations to ensure that their free speech rights on campus are protected. America is a land rooted in the ideas of a free society: the freedom to be who you are, to speak your mind and to innovate. By silencing our students and young people, we have started down a slippery slope. It is up to us to fight back to ensure that our First Amendment rights remain protected—not just on college campuses, but everywhere in America.
Speech codes increase racial tensions, cause backlash, and drive racist thought underground to where we can’t fight it
Herron 93, Vince. "Increasing the Speech: Diversity, Campus Speech Codes, and the Pursuit of Truth." S. Cal. L. Rev. 67 (1993): 407. SM
Some will argue that speech codes were never intended to solve the underlying problems of racism, sexism, and homophobia. According to this theory, speech. codes are meant only to give minority groups respite from verbal attacks while the university employs other mechanisms to attack root problems. These proponents argue that speech codes achieve these rather temporary and modest goals. Speech codes, they will argue, improve the situation for the minority students and give the university time to defeat the ignorance and intolerance that originally necessitated the promulgation of the speech codes. But it is unlikely that speech codes are so unambitious that they envision only preventing injury without attempting to address real problems. To believe the above proposition, one must believe that university administrators, in an attempt to foster better relations on campuses, produce codes with no more in mind than the vain hope that speech codes will be a quick fix to a long-term problem. The argument then, is that because they are offered only as a quick fix to a long-term problem, speech codes in fact do succeed in their goal of injury prevention. Even if it is true that administrators are so short-sighted, there is some evidence that speech codes actually serve to exacerbate already strained tensions on campuses. Dominant groups, which consider codes to be abridgements of free expression created to solve a problem reported only by minority groups (a problem whose gravity the dominant group does not recognize or understand), may struggle to accept the restrictions. Also, both dominant and minority group members alike have been.and will be sanctioned by university administrators under these codes that, doubtless, "exacerbate tensions among members of these groups." 66 It has also been suggested that censoring certain expression makes the expression more, rather than less, attractive.67 This leads to increased, not decreased, use of this expression, and, therefore, more injury, not less. Speech code proponents may disagree with the proffered evidence and dispute that the codes actually exacerbate tensions. They may continue to assert that speech codes in fact benefit minority group members by protecting them from injurious speech. But even if this assertion is accepted, these modest gains will be short-lived and are far outweighed by what both minority group members and educational environments sacrifice when speech codes are established and enforced. Codes not only fail to end the racism, sexism, and homophobia which lead to hate speech, but may actually retard the process. Besides failing to challenge the root problems of ignorance and intolerance, university speech codes exacerbate the problem by masking these causes of hate speech. "Suppression of expression conceals the real problems confronting a society and diverts public attention from the critical issues.''68 When ignorance and intolerance are suppressed but not eliminated, these root problems are less visible to the university community. It follows that when the university community is unable to discern the ill, they are unable to act to reverse the causes and the healing process is retarded. Speech-regulating rules may force campus members to act in a more proper and egalitarian manner when other members are watching.69 However, they will not change the members' true feeling toward other groups in the campus society. Campus speech codes in fact force community members to hide their true -views to avoid sanction. But this effectively forces campus members in need of rehabilitation to mask and disguise that need. This effect in turn frustrates and impedes the university's ability to facilitate the reformation. Thus of those members of the campus who hold ignorant or intolerant views may pass through the university system and into the rest of their lives with their erroneous views undetected by those who had a chance to correct them. As mentioned earlier in Part III.A, university members who are required to filter their expression through the requirements of a speech code may garner some knowledge as to their own insensitivities. Members who had the potential to engage in hate speech not because they were intolerant, but because they were unaware that their speech caused injury, will be able to begin their own rehabilitation through self-governance. But not all speakers will be able to rehabilitate on their own. Those speakers who continue to misunderstand their unawareness will not get the outside guidance they need to understand. Also it is safe to assume that there will be no self-governance by those who hold hateful ideas and prejudice. These speakers will, under the pressures of speech codes, feel restrained from exhibiting their feelings and this will effectively prevent their identification as bigots in need of rehabilitation. Suppression of the bigotry which leads to hate speech may also drive the ideas underground, allowing them to take on a life of their own unbeknownst to, and therefore unchallenged by, the rest of the university community. The rules that force these members underground may actually serve to strengthen and highlight their sense of grievance and even create martyrs.70 Those who are driven underground are able to attract new followers by holding themselves out to be as an "oppressed minority" in their own right, "whose 'truths' are so powerful that they are banned by the Establishment. ' 71 These "truths" are presented to potential followers unopposed, because those who would oppose these ideologies do not know they exist, or, without any reminder of the need for opposition, have become apathetic. Sweeping the problem under the rug is not the answer and will do little to solve the problem. Keeping the problem in the public spotlight, where community members are aware of it, enables members to attack it when it surfaces. Katharine Bartlett and Jean O'Barr stated, "If there is a silver lining to the blatant, egregious forms of hateful harassment that Lawrence describes, it is that they help to make the underlying forms of prejudice undeniable." '72 The gains in injury prevention garnered by campus speech codes are gained at the expense of the community's ability to recognize the ideologies which originally led to these injuries and hinders the continued fight against those ideologies.
Speech restrictions are white paternalism under the guise of protecting vulnerable minorities—they discount the effectiveness of marginalized groups historically successful use of free speech
O'Neill 15, Brendan. "Freedom of Speech Is the Best Friend Marginalised Groups Could Ever Have." Freedom of Speech Is the Best Friend Marginalised... N.p., 20 Mar. 2015. Web. 08 Jan. 2017. http://brendanoneill.co.uk/post/114125942824/freedom-of-speech-is-the-best-friend-marginalised. SM
There are many grating things about the army of students who have taken it upon themselves to protect their peers - especially their poorer, oppressed peers - from offensive words and ideas. There’s the paternalism of it all. With their hastily constructed “safe spaces”, and their No Platforming of anyone remotely off-message, these censorious students really believe they have a duty to protect the dainty eyes and ears of the student body from allegedly harmful things. They reduce students to the level of wide-eyed babes needing mother to switch the TV channel when something saucy comes on. There’s the killjoyism, too, the treatment of perfectly normal, fun stuff - like the Sun’s Page 3 or a rugby society’s daft, offensive posters - as wicked materials liable to warp minds and destroy self-esteem. These students’ hiding of the “sexist” Sun is an especially fun-free and prudish act, bringing to mind a sad sight I once saw in the shops of Dubai airport: lads’ mags that had been defaced with black gaffer tape by religious censors who didn’t want anyone to glimpse cleavage lest it drive them wild with rapacious desire. And then there’s the mind-dulling effect, the way these platform-pullers and prejudice-policers deprive students of the chance to confront ideas for themselves. This is really bad, for as was recognised by every enlightened thinker in history, from John Locke to John Stuart Mill (WHITE MEN, I know), people’s intellectual and moral muscles are exercised only through being used. When people are denied the chance to see and hear and read everything, including offensive, ugly things, they are robbed of the right to think for themselves, to decide for themselves what is right and wrong, to sharpen their minds and hone their morality through working things through. To live in a safe space, in a bubble through which no bad thought or offensive image may ever pass, is to infantilise yourself, and to deny yourself that potentially life-changing experience of having your mind rocked or your prejudices pricked and challenged by people who think differently. But worst of all, even more irritating than all that, is the way this pseudo-radical safe-thinking brigade has defamed freedom of speech as, in essence, a white, male, middle-class, “cis” conspiracy that benefits only… you guessed it, White Men. This is an argument you hear all the time from the self-elected guardians of moral decency on campus. Desperate to distinguish themselves from the censors of history - most of whom were controversy-allergic bores and/or tyrants - the No Platform nuts try to doll themselves up as radical. So they present free speech as oppressive - allowing White Men to assert their power over minority groups - and they present their acts of petty censorship and intolerant shutting down of debates as great strikes for equality and respect. “Orwellian” doesn’t begin to cover this doublespeak depiction of free speech as a tool of authoritarianism and censorship as a weapon of progress. “Freedom is slavery… Censorship is equality.” The worst thing about this branding of free speech as something that only benefits the privileged, white and middle class - an argument which is most vociferously made by the privileged, white and middle class students who stink up the student-union bureaucracy - is that it tells us freedom is not really important for minority groups, especially ethnic-minority groups. Apparently, students who come from poorer or blacker or more foreign backgrounds than the students who run unions don’t need freedom, because it will only end up harming them through exposing them to wicked words. No, they need protection; they need a moral forcefield guarding them from offence; they need saviours - step forward the brave new officials of the NUS, gallantly come to protect minority students in particular from nasty ideas. This idea that free speech benefits the white and well-off and harms the ethnic and less well-off is foul. Throughout history, many black and Asian activists fought tooth-and-catapult for freedom of speech, because they recognised that they needed freedom of speech in order to stand up for themselves, express themselves, to confront their oppressors. For them, free speech wasn’t a white middle-class conspiracy - it was the core freedom, the freedom that makes all other freedoms possible, the freedom upon which all of our political rights are built. Remove free speech and you destroy even the possibility of liberty. Consider Frederick Douglass, (a man, yes, but not a white one). Douglass was an African-American slave. After escaping slavery he became a tireless social reformer, fighting and arguing for the abolition of slavery and the expansion of freedom to all in America. And what did he consider to be the sharpest, most essential weapon in the armoury of blacks who longed for liberty? Freedom of speech. In his “Plea for Free Speech”, published in 1860, he said: “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South.” Here, in these words that echo down the decades and touch us still, we see one of the great arguments for free speech: that it empowers us, and it especially empowers the weak and oppressed. It allows us to speak against, and potentially to destroy, tyranny. As Douglass said, slavery itself was fortified with censorship, for those slave-owners knew very well that freedom of thought and speech would “break every chain in the South”. Freedom of speech - for all, as its name suggests - gives us the power to spread ideas, challenge ideas, put forward political ideals, wrestle with other political ideals, and to project ourselves into the public sphere. Today’s paternalistic student censors, with their desire to protect gay, female and ethnic-minority students in particular from “white men’s freedom of speech”, would have horrified Douglass. He would have seen their censoriousness for what it is: yet another attempt by the privileged to protect their ways of thinking from any kind of challenge or ridicule. Grotesquely, they do this, not by honestly saying that they want to privilege their way of thinking over other ways of thinking, but by infantilising less well-off and ethnic students and using them as a Trojan horse to secure the censorship of what the mostly white middle-class student bureaucracy considers to be unacceptable. Students, fight back. Heed Douglass and make today’s perverse and illiberal principality of student bureaucracy tremble before your free, unfettered, off-message speech.
This has given rise to the alt-right movements it hopes to contain and prevents agonistic deliberation of ideas
Carle 16, Robert. "How The American Academy Helped Create The Alt-Right." The Federalist. N.p., 22 Dec. 2016. Web. 06 Jan. 2017. http://thefederalist.com/2016/12/22/american-academy-helped-create-alt-right/. SM
American academics are rightly alarmed by the ascendance of the alt-right and its entrenchment in American politics. The alt-right includes nativists, conspiracists, isolationists, Putinists, white nationalists, and masculinists. The alt-right is pessimistic about the ability of people of different races and religions to live together, and is hostile to both legal and illegal immigrants. Alt-right websites warn against the dangers of miscegenation and criticize the pro-life movement as “dysgenic” because it encourages breeding by “the least intelligent and responsible” women. But American academics have been slow to acknowledge how dependent the leaders of the alt-right are upon playbooks that they learned on university campuses. These leaders are not southern Klansmen. The president of the National Policy Institute graduated from the University of Chicago. The founder of American Renaissance graduated from Yale. The Rise of Identity Politics Over the past 50 years, universities have replaced the Enlightenment ideal of a common humanity with a vision of an America divided into warring races and classes. They have purged their schools of the Enlightenment liberals (“dead white males”) who trained earlier generations to defend universal values over tribal values. Today, students on college campuses are much more likely to read identitarians like Lani Guinier and Marxists like Howard Zinn than to read John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Hume. In this environment, working-class white men have come to see themselves as an economically and politically marginalized tribe. Had colleges and universities stood up for liberal concepts such as free speech and our common humanity, the alt-right would not have gained a foothold in our culture. Instead, our universities have become cesspools of identity politics, censorship, and moral relativism. For a generation now, American academics have been punishing any hint of identitarianism on the Right while defending even the most hateful tribal, identitarian movements on the Left. Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos writes, “It was this double standard, more than anything else, that gave rise to the alternative right. It’s also responsible, at least in part, for the rise of Donald Trump.” Political correctness has trivialized the concepts of bigotry and racism so that they have lost much of their stigma. When a sombrero and tequila party can get you punished as a racist, then racism becomes a meaningless concept. Leftists who label Mitt Romney and John McCain as racists lose the moral authority to label anyone a racist. Activists who demonize white cis-gender men weaken the stigma against demonizing other groups. The debasement of intellectual life in the American academy was demonstrated by a hoax that New York University physicist Alan Sokal performed on his colleagues in 1996. Sokal submitted an article entitled, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” to Social Texts, a leading, peer-reviewed journal of cultural studies. His paper claimed gravity is merely a social construct, an instrument of phallocentric hegemony. Social Texts published the article, exposing its editors to national ridicule. They “liked my article,” Socal explained, “because they liked its conclusion that the content and methodology of postmodern science . . . supports the progressive political project.” In the past 20 years, Sokal-inspired sting operations have succeeded in getting dozens of spoof articles published in dozens of leading academic journals. Campus Assaults on Free Speech Colleges and universities facilitate extremism when they promote illiberal and unconstitutional speech codes that punish students and faculty for controversial speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has compiled a list of 316 speakers who have been disinvited from college speaking engagements because some members of their communities have objected to their points of view. On the list of the disinvited are Condoleezza Rice, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christine Lagarde, John Brennan, Kathleen Parker, and Jason Riley. Talented comedians like Chris Rock no longer perform on college campuses because of the censorious campus culture. In October, Yiannopoulos was disinvited from speeches he was to deliver at Columbia and New York universities because the universities feared attacks on LGBT and other minority groups. Yiannopoulos calls this rationale “garbage.” Yiannopoulos is openly gay, ethnically Jewish, and has never promoted violence. “The only person really at risk at any of my talks is me,” Yiannopoulos said. In 2010, an Association of American Colleges and Universities survey found that only 16.7 percent of faculty members strongly agree with the statement that they “feel safe to hold unpopular views on campus.” Witch hunts against academics who express any kind of heterodox views have become routine on college campuses. In February 2015, for example, Northwestern University’s feminist film professor Laura Kipnis wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing Title IX policies. The university subjected Kipnis to hours of grilling about her essay and the ideas underlying it. Kipnis was not permitted to have a lawyer present during her hearings, but she was allowed to have a colleague present. Kipnis chose Stephen Eisenman, the head of the Faculty Senate. When Eisenman told the Faculty Senate that he believed Kipnis’s investigation was a threat to academic freedom, Eisenman was brought up on charges of violating Title IX as well. Kipnis wrote, “It is astounding how aggressive . . . assertions of vulnerability have gotten in the past few years . . . Most academics I know— feminists, progressives, minorities, gays—live in fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster.” In September 2016, NYU implemented a bias reporting hotline by which students can anonymously report professors and classmates for perceived speech offenses. NYU professor Michael Rectenwald writes that this turned “every classroom encounter into a potential infraction and figures students as Soviet-style monitors of ideological conformity.” Shouting at People Isn’t Persuasive This year, when students who support Donald Trump started chalking Trump’s name on campus sidewalks, schools responded by comparing the chalking to mass murder. At the University of California at San Diego, for example, the provost sent an email to students threatening the school’s “fullest sanctions” against the chalkers. Never mind that UCSD’s policies explicitly state chalking is permitted “on sidewalks of the university grounds that are exposed to weather elements.” The Left’s tendency to shame and silence its opponents is ultimately self-defeating, “When has anyone been persuaded by being insulted or labelled?” British comedian Jonathan Pie says. “That’s why people wait until they are in the voting booth. No one is watching anymore. There’s no blame or shame, and you can finally say what you really think and that’s a powerful thing.” If academics are concerned about the degraded state of American politics, they should begin engaging, debating, and discussing politics with their political opponents instead of setting up echo chambers where only progressive points of view are allowed. The American experiment in human liberty depends upon universities that transmit to future generations respect for free speech and open and honest debate. To sustain our republic, we need desperately to recover the healthy intellectual habit of learning from opinions that we find offensive. A people that ceases to educate in freedom will cease to live in freedom.
Thus the plan- Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech.
Solvency
Education on resisting oppression is key to raising a class of radical students willing to alter the material conditions of oppression through democratic policy actions
Giroux 15 (Henry, American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Higher Education and the Promise of Insurgent Public Memory,” March 3, 2015, http://truth-out.org/news/item/29396-higher-education-and-the-promise-of-insurgent-public-memory)
The current call to cleanse history in the name of a false patriotism that celebrates a new illiteracy as a way of loving the United States is a discourse of anti-memory, a willful attempt at forgetting the past in the manufactured fog of historical amnesia. This is particularly true when it comes to erasing the work of a number of critical intellectuals who have written about higher education as the practice of freedom, including John Dewey, George S. Counts, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Social Reconstructionists, and others, all of whom viewed higher education as integral to the development of both engaged critical citizens and the university as a democratic public sphere. (19) Under the reign of neoliberalism, with few exceptions, higher education appears to be increasingly decoupling itself from its historical legacy as a crucial public sphere, responsible for both educating students for the workplace and providing them with the modes of critical discourse, interpretation, judgment, imagination, and experiences that deepen and expand democracy. As universities adopt the ideology of the transnational corporation and become subordinated to the needs of capital, the war industries and the Pentagon, they are less concerned about how they might educate students about the ideology and civic practices of democratic governance and the necessity of using knowledge to address the challenges of public life. (20) Instead, as part of the post-9/11 military-industrial-academic complex, higher education increasingly conjoins military interests and market values, identities and social relations while the role of the university as a public good, a site of critical dialogue and a place that calls students to think, question, learn how to take risks, and act with compassion and conviction is dismissed as impractical or subversive. (21) The corporatization, militarization and dumbing down of rigorous scholarship, and the devaluing of the critical capacities of young people mark a sharp break from a once influential educational tradition in the United States. The corporatization, militarization and dumbing down of rigorous scholarship, and the devaluing of the critical capacities of young people mark a sharp break from a once influential educational tradition in the United States, extending from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey to Maxine Greene, who held that freedom flourishes in the worldly space of the public realm only through the work of educated, critical citizens. Within this democratic tradition, education was not confused with training; instead, its critical function was propelled by the need to provide students with the knowledge and skills that enable a "politically interested and mobilized citizenry, one that has certain solidarities, is capable of acting on its own behalf, and anticipates a future of ever greater social equality across lines of race, gender, and class." (22) Other prominent educators and theorists such as Hannah Arendt, James B. Conant and Cornelius Castoriadis have long believed and rightly argued that we should not allow education to be modeled after the business world. Dewey, in particular, warned about the growing influence of the "corporate mentality" and the threat that the business model posed to public spaces, higher education and democracy. He argued:¶ The business mind, having its own conversation and language, its own interests, its own intimate groupings in which men of this mind, in their collective capacity, determine the tone of society at large as well as the government of industrial society.... We now have, although without formal or legal status, a mental and moral corporateness for which history affords no parallel. (23) Dewey and the other public intellectuals mentioned above shared a common vision and project of rethinking what role education might play in provideing students with the habits of mind and ways of acting that would enable them to "identify and probe the most serious threats and dangers that democracy faces in a global world dominated by instrumental and technological thinking." (24) Conant, a former president of Harvard University, argued that higher education should create a class of "American radicals," who could fight for equality, favor public education, elevate human needs over property rights and challenge "groups which have attained too much power." (25) Conant's views seem so radical today that it is hard to imagine him being hired as a university president at Harvard or any other institution of higher learning.
Key to Activism: Means your appeal to fairness to be weighed against the critical pedagogy that the 1AC creates.
Racists exposing themselves spurs counterspeech which creates activism on campus that constructs solutions and exposes the moral bankruptcy of their views
Calleros 95, Charles R. "Paternalism, Counterspeech, and Campus Hate-Speech Codes: A Reply to Delgado and Yun." Ariz. St. LJ 27 (1995): 1249. SM
Delgado and Yun characterize these arguments as "paternalistic" and "seriously flawed. ,49 In my reply below, I begin in part II.A with the fourth argument that more speech is the best response to offensive hate speech, and I attempt to establish that counterspeech is much more effective than Delgado and Yun are ready to concede. Within the same part, I conclude that free speech consequently can be a powerful instrument of reform benefitting minorities. In part II.B, I support the second argument against restrictions on speech with an example of a policy suppressing offensive speech that hurt a minority group on one campus and an example of a policy favoring speech and counterspeech that helped minorities on another campus. Finally, in part II.C, I support the notion that free speech allows a therapeutic venting of frustrations and provides valuable information about bigotry, but I qualify my conclusions. In the end, I favor education and counterspeech as a response to campus hate speech principally because I believe that such a response is more effective, empowering, constructive, and healing than is suppression of hateful speech. A. Speech as an Instrument of Reform: The Efficacy of Counterspeech Delgado and Yun summarize the support for the counterspeech argument by paraphrasing Nat Hentoff: "Antiracism rules teach black people to depend on whites for protection, while talking back clears the air, emphasizes self-reliance, and strengthens one's self-image as an active agent in charge of one's own destiny." 50 Delgado and Yun also cite to those who believe that counterspeech may help educate the racist speaker by addressing the ignorance and fear that lies behind hostile racial stereotyping.51 But they reject this speech-protective argument, stating that "it is offered blandly, virtually as an article of faith" by those "in a position of power" who "rarely offer empirical proof of their claims. 52 The authors argue that talking back in a close confrontation could be physically dangerous, is unlikely to persuade the racist speaker to reform his views, and is impossible "when racist remarks are delivered in a cowardly fashion, by means of graffiti scrawled on a campus wall late at night or on a poster placed outside of a black student's dormitory door." 53 They also complain that "even when successful, talking back is a burden" that minority undergraduates 54 should not be forced to assume. In rejecting the counterspeech argument, however, Delgado and Yun cast the argument in its weakest possible form, creating an easy target for relatively summary dismissal. When the strategies and experiential basis for successful counterspeech are fairly stated, its value is more easily recognized. First, no responsible free speech advocate argues that a target of hate speech should directly talk back to a racist speaker in circumstances that quickly could lead to a physical altercation. If one or more hateful speakers closely confronts a member of a minority group with racial epithets or other hostile remarks in circumstances that lead the target of the speech to reasonably fear for her safety, in most circumstances she should seek assistance from campus police or other administrators before "talking back." Even staunch proponents of free speech agree that such threatening speech and conduct is subject to regulation and justifies more than a purely educative response. The same would be true of Delgado's and Yun's other examples of speech conveyed in a manner that defaces another's property or invades the privacy of another's residence. 56 When offensive or hateful speech is not threatening, damaging, or impermissibly invasive and therefore may constitute protected speech, 57 education and counterspeech often will be an appropriate response. However, proponents of free speech do not contemplate that counterspeech always, or even normally, will be in the form of an immediate exchange of views between the hateful speaker and his target. Nor do they contemplate that the target should bear the full burden of the response. Instead, effective counterspeech often takes the form of letters, discussions, or demonstrations joined in by many persons and aimed at the entire campus population or a community within it. Typically, it is designed to expose the moral bankruptcy of the hateful ideas, to demonstrate the strength of opinion and numbers of those who deplore the hateful speech, and to spur members of the campus community to take voluntary, constructive action to combat hate and to remedy its ill effects. 58 Above all, it can serve to define and underscore the community of support enjoyed by the targets of the hateful speech, faith in which may have been shaken by the hateful speech. Moreover, having triggered such a reaction with their own voices, the targets of the hateful speech may well feel a sense of empowerment to compensate for the undeniable pain of the speech. 59 One may be tempted to join Delgado and Yun in characterizing such a scenario as one "offered blandly, virtually as an article of faith" and without experiential support. 6° However, campus communities that have creatively used this approach can attest to the surprising power of counterspeech. Examples of counterspeech to hateful racist and homophobic speech at Arizona State and Stanford Universities are especially illustrative.61 In an incident that attracted national attention, the campus community at Arizona State University ("A.S.U.") constructively and constitutionally responded to a racist poster displayed on the outside of the speaker's dormitory door in February 1991. Entitled "WORK APPLICATION," it contained a number of ostensibly employment-related questions that advanced hostile and demeaning racial stereotypes of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Carla Washington, one of a group of AfricanAmerican women who found the poster, used her own speech to persuade a resident of the offending room voluntarily to take the poster down and allow her to photocopy it. After sending a copy of the poster to the campus newspaper along with an opinion letter deploring its racist stereotypes, she demanded action from the director of her residence hall. The director organized an immediate meeting of the dormitory residents to discuss the issues. In this meeting, I explained why the poster was protected by the First Amendment, and the women who found the poster eloquently described their pain and fears. One of the women, Nichet Smith, voiced her fear that all nonminorities on campus shared the hostile stereotypes expressed in the poster. Dozens of residents expressed their support and gave assurances that they did not share the hostile stereotypes, but they conceded that even the most tolerant among them knew little about the cultures of others and would 62benefit greatly from multicultural education. The need for multicultural education to combat intercultural ignorance and stereotyping became the theme of a press conference and public rally organized by the student African-American Coalition leader, Rossie Turman, who opted for highly visible counterspeech despite demands from some students and staff to discipline the owner of the offending poster. The result was a series of opinion letters in the campus newspaper discussing the problem of racism, numerous workshops on race relations and free speech, and overwhelming approval in the Faculty Senate of a measure to add a course on American cultural diversity to the undergraduate breadth requirement. 63 The four women who initially confronted the racist poster were empowered by the meeting at the dormitory residence and later received awards from the local chapter of the NAACP for their activism. 64 Rossie Turman was rewarded for his leadership skills two years later by becoming the first African-American elected President of Associated Students of A.S.U.,65 a student body that numbered approximately 40,000 students, only 2.3 percent of them African-American. 66 Although Delgado and Yun are quite right that the African-American students should never have been burdened with the need to respond to such hateful speech, Hentoff is correct that the responses just described helped them develop a sense of self-reliance and constructive activism. Moreover, the students' counterspeech inspired a community response that lightened the students' burden and provided them with a sense of community support and empowerment. Indeed, the students received assistance from faculty and administrators, who helped organize meetings, wrote opinion letters, spoke before the Faculty Senate, or joined the students in issuing public statements at the press conference and public rally.67 Perhaps most important, campus administrators wisely refrained from disciplining the owners of the poster, thus directing public attention to the issue of racism and ensuring broad community support in denouncing the racist poster. Many members of the campus and surrounding communities might have leapt to the racist speaker's defense had the state attempted to discipline the speaker and thus had created a First Amendment issue. Instead, they remained united with the offended students because the glare of the public spotlight remained sharply focused on the racist incident without the distraction of cries of state censorship. Although the counterspeech was not aimed primarily at influencing the hearts and minds of the residents of the offending dormitory room, its vigor in fact caught the residents by surprise. 68 It prompted at least three of them to apologize publicly and to display curiosity about a civil rights movement that they were too young to have witnessed first hand. 69 This effective use of education and counterspeech is not an isolated instance at A.S.U., but has been repeated on several occasions, albeit on smaller scales.7° One year after the counterspeech at A.S.U., Stanford University responded similarly to homophobic speech. In that case, a first-year law student sought to attract disciplinary proceedings and thus gain First Amendment martyrdom by shouting hateful homophobic statements about a dormitory staff member. The dean of students stated that the speaker was not subject to discipline under Stanford's code of conduct but called on the university community to speak out on the issue, triggering an avalanche of counterspeech. Students, staff, faculty, and administrators expressed their opinions in letters to the campus newspaper, in comments on a poster board at the law school, in a published petition signed by 400 members of the law school community disassociating the law school from the speaker's epithets, and in a letter written by several law students reporting the incident to a prospective employer of the offending student.71 The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of speech, just not the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary sanctions as a form of empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert enough to catch his verbal hardball and throw it back with ten times the force. Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of offensive speech is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is conceded by Delgado and Yun. In both of the cases described above, the targets of hateful speech were supported by a community united against bigotry. The community avoided splitting into factions because the universities eliminated the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful speakers were protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top administrators to develop standards for, and some limitations on, their participation in such partisan speech. 72 Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out against intolerance when it is isolated as an issue rather than diluted in muddied waters along with concerns of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr., depended partly for their success on the consciences of the national and international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their television sets and in the print media,73 the empowerment of the targets of hateful speech rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community who sympathize with them. One can hope that the counterspeech and educational measures used with success at A.S.U. and Stanford stand a good chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual inquiry at any campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate. On the other hand, counterspeech by the targets of hate speech could be less empowering on a campus in which the majority of students, faculty, and staff approve of hostile epithets directed toward members of minority groups. One hopes that such campuses are exceedingly rare; although hostile racial stereotyping among college students in the United States increased during the last decade, those students who harbored significant hostilities (as contrasted with more pervasive but less openly hostile, subconscious racism) still represented a modest fraction of all students.74 Moreover, even in a pervasively hostile atmosphere, counterspeech might still be more effective than broad restrictions on speech. First, aside from the constitutional constraints of the First Amendment, such a heartless campus community would be exceedingly unlikely to adopt strong policies prohibiting hateful speech. Instead, the campus likely would maintain minimum policies necessary to avoid legal action enforcing guarantees of equal educational opportunities under the Fourteenth Amendment75 or federal antidiscrimination statutes such as Title V176 or Title IX. 77 Second, counterspeech even from a minority of members of the campus community might be effective to gradually build support by winning converts from those straddling the fence or from broader regional or national audiences. Such counterspeech might be particularly effective if coupled with threats from diverse faculty, staff, and students to leave the university for more hospitable environments; even a campus with high levels of hostility likely would feel 78 pressures to maintain its status as a minimally integrated institution.
