Modesto Junior College and the “free speech area”
On Constitution Day, September 17, Bob Zadek told listeners that a student at Modesto Junior College named Robert Van Tuinen went on campus, where he was a student, and began handing out pocket-sized copies of the Constitution free to students who wished to take one Is America Doomed by Voter Ignorance? (2013). He was approached by campus police and told he could not do that. When Van Tuinen invoked his free speech rights and the First Amendment, he was told he did have free speech rights on campus, but that under something called the Time, Place, and Manner Rule he could pass out literature only in the “free speech area” — a cement area about three yards square in front of the student center. Zadek’s gloss: free speech means free speech, yet on the rest of the campus, he said, you have no free speech rights.
Zadek recounted that Van Tuinen had a run-in with an administrator, Christine Serrano, who told him he could make an appointment and reserve the cement area, but that it was largely taken for the next couple of weeks, and that filling out a number of forms might get him time to hand out the Constitution. The episode played a roughly forty-second clip of the confrontation. In the clip, Serrano described a “Time, Place, and Manner” and identified the free speech area in front of the student center, saying anyone coming through her office would need to fill out an application and provide a photo of an ID. Van Tuinen asked whether she was telling him he could not engage in free speech with fellow students; Serrano answered that she was not telling him anything, only sharing that to be in the free speech area he would need to fill out the form so she could place him. Van Tuinen repeated the question, and the excerpt ends there.
Zadek also cited Congress’s requirement that all publicly funded educational institutions provide educational programming on the history of the American Constitution on Constitution Day, a rule applying to any school receiving federal funds of any kind. He credited a nonprofit he called one of his favorites, FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), with writing a letter to the school complaining about the abridgment of the student’s First Amendment rights; the college, he said, backed off to some degree, explaining weakly that it wanted to assure free speech rights, that the student was being disruptive, and that perhaps it had overreacted. Zadek’s broader claim was that American colleges largely have speech codes telling students what they can and cannot say and where they can say it, and that this is how students are prepared to participate in political society.
Earlier in the same episode, Zadek framed the campus incident against the Founding. He said September 17 is Constitution Day, that since 1994 Congress declared it so, and that the date was chosen because the Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution on September 17, 1787, after roughly four months of work from about May 25, 1787, after which it was sent to 13 constitutional conventions for ratification. The Constitution as passed did not include a Bill of Rights; Virginia and other states agreed to ratify only on the understanding that a Bill of Rights would be added afterward, with Virginia in the lead among states uncomfortable ratifying without an express Bill of Rights. Zadek reminded listeners that the First Amendment assured free speech, part of American political life since ratification in 1788 — adding that somebody did not tell the administration of Modesto Junior College.
The education argument and the voting-test analogy
Free speech enters the episode’s first hour by a different door. Guest Ilya Somin argued that rising education levels over 50 or 60 years produced little or no increase in political knowledge, and that when governments run schools it is often not in their interest to increase political information, since they may prefer to indoctrinate students in preferred views or those of interest groups influencing education policy, conservative and liberal alike Is America Doomed by Voter Ignorance? (2013). Somin said the public, being ignorant, is poorly positioned to monitor education policy and ensure it increases knowledge rather than indoctrinating or wasting students’ time. He called it amazing that since the 1940s and ’50s there was a massive increase in average education levels but very little increase in political knowledge.
Zadek then raised, as something Somin had not put in his book, whether there is a case for some minimal knowledge test as a qualification to vote, analogous to the test for naturalized citizens, while acknowledging the Jim Crow past and calling the idea inflammatory. Somin answered that an argument exists and is discussed in Chapter 7 of the book: just as one takes a driving test because bad driving threatens others, bad voting threatens others. His objection was that government could not be trusted to draft such a test honestly, sincerely and without bias, since whoever held power when the test was established would have a strong incentive to skew it toward their party’s supporters, even setting aside racial or other biases. Somin said the history of these kinds of tests strongly suggests they would not be unbiased, though he had kicked around, for a future article, letting children vote if they could pass a test of political knowledge — since children are currently excluded as ignorant, and a knowledgeable minority could improve the electorate without taking the vote from anyone who has it.
Zadek’s closing joke — a system in which he and Somin are the only two voters — drew from Somin the observation that in private life one is often the only voter, or one of two in a marriage, and that greater control over one’s own life is available so long as one is willing to let others have the same privilege. Zadek then closed the hour by naming Somin’s forthcoming book, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter, and previewed the Modesto Junior College segment and the eminent domain taking of mortgages by the city of Richmond, California.
A caller from Sonoma, Chuck, asked about ancient Greek democracy, where citizens elected officials and the army officers who led them into battle Is America Doomed by Voter Ignorance? (2013). Zadek answered that Somin discussed ancient Greek political society in the book, and that the demise of Greek society is partly attributable to voter ignorance: the population had to vote on launching a campaign against, Zadek believed, the city of Syracuse, was grossly misinformed about its strength, voted for war on that basis, lost, and substantially weakened the Greek Empire, which many historians believe led to its demise. Zadek added the contemporary economy as another example, saying voters in the 2010 election were effectively asked whether John Maynard Keynes is correct or whether Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and other more laissez-faire economists are correct, and whether Paul Krugman or Arthur Laffer is correct. On knowledge shortcuts, Zadek said he overcompensates by reading perhaps too much, while many Americans select pundits and columnists they believe have done the heavy lifting and follow their advice — his personal example being George Will — and that shortcuts are not bad per se so long as one is selective. Party labels, by contrast, he called a bad shortcut.
Medical speech and AB 2098
In the 2022 episode, Bob Zadek and Dr. Jeffrey Singer, identified as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a practicing surgeon, discussed the intersection of free speech, medical science and government control Free Speech & the Scientific Method (2022). The episode’s description states that they critique the rise of a “scientific priesthood” that suppresses dissenting views, with specific focus on the treatment of the Great Barrington Declaration and on the implications of California’s AB 2098, which the description says threatens to penalize doctors for providing information that contradicts official government narratives. The excerpt as provided consists of that framing and a list of topics — free speech, the scientific method, COVID-19, AB 2098, the Great Barrington Declaration, medical ethics, public choice theory and the First Amendment — followed by the speaker roster; no transcript of the discussion itself is included.
Across episodes
The two episodes are nine years apart and address different institutions. In 2013, Zadek himself narrates and denounces a campus speech restriction at Modesto Junior College, with Van Tuinen, Serrano, FIRE and Congress’s Constitution Day mandate as the named particulars, and with Somin supplying the adjacent argument about political ignorance and knowledge tests Is America Doomed by Voter Ignorance? (2013). In 2022, Zadek’s guest is Dr. Jeffrey Singer, and the contested speech is medical rather than political, with AB 2098 and the Great Barrington Declaration as the named particulars and a “scientific priesthood” as the object of critique Free Speech & the Scientific Method (2022). What changes between the treatments is the setting and the speaker at the center — a student handing out Constitutions becomes a doctor whose advice departs from official narratives — while the recurring question is who gets to decide which speech is permitted. The excerpts do not show either treatment responding to the other.
What the sources do not cover
The 2022 excerpt supplies no transcript, so the episode’s argument, its treatment of AB 2098 and the Great Barrington Declaration, and any positions taken by Zadek or Singer in dialogue are not recoverable from the sources here. The 2013 excerpt does not say what became of Van Tuinen’s confrontation beyond the college’s partial retreat, nor does it state the outcome of any FIRE letter. The excerpted material does not state the text of the Time, Place, and Manner Rule, the terms of AB 2098, or the contents of the Great Barrington Declaration, and it does not resolve the clip that breaks off mid-exchange between Serrano and Van Tuinen.