Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag?
2011-09-17 · Guest: Harvey Silverglate (Co-founder and Chairman of FIRE) · 50:12
Erosion of free speech on college campuses
Bob Zadek and Harvey Silverglate discuss the erosion of free speech on American college campuses. They explore how universities use “harassment codes” and “free speech zones” to silence dissent and the role of FIRE in defending students and faculty.
Topics: Free Speech, First Amendment, Higher Education, FIRE, Academic Freedom, Censorship, Harassment Codes
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Harvey Silverglate, Caller (Chris), Caller (John)
Introduction and Ron Paul News [00:18]
Bob Zadek: Well, it’s 12:00 noon on Sunday. It must be The Bob Zadek Show, and yes folks, it is. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and around the country. 800-345-5639 is how you take advantage of your free speech rights, and free speech is the topic of today’s show. Also, if you listen to today’s show, I guarantee—underline guarantee—that you will end up saving money. In these troubling times, saving money is, yes, it’s a good thing.
More about how you save money in a moment. Today’s show is about free speech. Before we get into today’s show, just a bit of libertarian news. We’ve had in California the California Republican straw poll, and Ron Paul was the victor. Yes, libertarian Ron Paul substantially trounced Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, et al., and was by almost acclamation the winner in the California Republican straw poll. Could 2012 be the moment when libertarians can walk in the sunshine finally? We sure hope so.
Introducing Harvey Silverglate and FIRE [01:00]
Bob Zadek: Now to today’s show. Free speech and, as you will learn, how to save lots of money. To help me sort out the issue of free speech on college campuses, I am delighted to welcome for the entire hour my good friend Harvey A. Silverglate. Harvey is an attorney in Cambridge, Massachusetts—not exactly the hotbed of libertarian activity, perhaps we’ll talk about that. Harvey, most importantly, is the co-founder of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and he’s currently chairman of the Board of Directors. Harvey is by training a lawyer, is a litigator, and he writes regular columns for the Boston Phoenix and the National Law Journal. Harvey has taught at Harvard Law School. Harvey was a guest once before on the show on the occasion of his book, Three Felonies a Day. That show was well-received and was a popular show on my website. So Harvey, thanks for joining us again.
Harvey Silverglate: It’s my pleasure to be back.
Bob Zadek: Harvey, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—tell us in a word or two what the mission of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is.
Harvey Silverglate: Well, the mission very briefly is to take on the kind of totalitarian mentality among administrators and some professors—mostly administrators—on American college and university campuses today. FIRE began about 11 years ago after my co-author Alan Charles Kors and I authored the book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. We got responses when the book came out from hundreds and hundreds of students and their hysterical parents about the treatment those students were getting on campuses, being punished for saying things that were politically incorrect. We decided we couldn’t even handle the telephone calls, much less try to handle the cases. And so what we did was we organized FIRE, which fights this terrible scourge that has affected higher education today.
Public v. Private Universities and the First Amendment [02:00]
Bob Zadek: Now, a word about the—and it’s misunderstood—the right of free speech. People who feel their free speech rights are being abridged will complain that they have a constitutionally protected right to say whatever they want, wherever they want it. And if that right is stifled in any way, the victim or the alleged victim will complain they are constitutionally protected. It comes up once in a while when you hear some movie type, let’s say Susan Sarandon or somebody, or Barbra Streisand (without an “a” in her name), who complain that their movies are picketed and avoided, or their records not being bought because of what they think, and they say that violates their free speech rights. Of course, it does not.
The guarantee of free speech in the Constitution is only a protection from government denying you free speech rights. But you—I’m sorry, Harvey.
Harvey Silverglate: That is correct. That is correct.
Bob Zadek: But you have no constitutional right to have free speech on campus, or in the workplace, or in the movie theater. It is a somewhat limited right. It is because free speech is so important in general, but only constitutionally protected by government, that organizations like Harvey’s fill the void so importantly and give students protection where otherwise they wouldn’t have it at law. Now Harvey, I interrupted you.
Harvey Silverglate: Let me make one little amendment to what you said. The First Amendment does protect student free speech on public university campuses because, for constitutional purposes, they’re considered the government. It’s a public agency. That is not true on private campuses. On private campuses, free speech is protected by a principle known as academic freedom, which all modern liberal arts universities ascribe to. And so on the private campuses, this is a promise being broken and basically a contract between college and student being broken when a student is punished for speech. So we do have grounds, both legal and moral, for opposing censorship, although it’s a little bit more subtle than when the government comes in directly and tries to censor you.
Bob Zadek: Although academic free speech, as I understand it—and maybe again Harvey you’ll correct me—but as I understand it, academic free speech is a protection that flows to faculty, not to students.
Harvey Silverglate: It also can flow to students, and courts have in many cases held that it flows to students because college and university handbooks very frequently say right in there that this is a liberal arts university and we respect the free speech of our students. Once a college says that—and almost all of them do, of course you know that they’ve got their fingers crossed when they’re writing these passages in the student handbooks—but most of them do say it, and we’re able to latch onto those promises to some degree. It’s not as certain and not as strong a protection as when a student goes to a public university where actually the constitutional right to free speech kicks in. But on all liberal arts campuses to some degree, there are some kinds of protections which are, however, ignored by most university—and I do say most—well over 50%, most university administrations.
The Ideological Skew of Higher Education [04:30]
Bob Zadek: And of course, the universities, we know from—and it’s been widely publicized—that both the administration and the faculty of most liberal arts colleges around the country are in their private, personal views, they are heavily skewed towards the left. So they quite naturally, since the administrators and the faculty are human and they just cannot resist letting their personal beliefs spill over into the carrying out of their professional responsibilities, that means that free speech on campus is limited in that opinions that may be labeled broadly opinions from the right are denied to the students. Both they don’t have access to those opinions, and they can’t express them.
And that is why this issue is so important to libertarians, because it has the effect of taking generation after generation of graduates from liberal arts colleges and sending them out into adult society with an unbalanced educational experience. Now, the universities have lots and lots of tricks that they use to stifle free speech. Harvey knows all of them. When we come back, Harvey will tell you how the universities use their power to stifle free speech. You will be amazed. And when we come back, Harvey’s website, FIRE, will teach you how to save lots and lots and lots of money. You wouldn’t want to miss this. Back in 90 seconds.
The Perversion of Language: Harassment Codes [06:30]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show. I’m your host Bob Zadek, every Sunday at noon here on 910 AM Fox News Radio. Thanks so much for listening. We are the leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and around the country. 800-345-5639 is the way to reach us if you want to share in the discussion. Today I am talking with Harvey Silverglate, founder and chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Harvey’s organization is performing a function that without it would not be performed. It is incredibly important, incredibly valuable. It affects nothing less important than the educational experience of all of our graduates from liberal arts colleges.
Now Harvey, college administrations have lots and lots of tricks in their tool bag which they use to stifle free speech. They charge security fees, they restrict petitioning, and they restrict demonstrations to small portions of a campus. Tell us about the tools that you have experienced universities use to stifle free speech.
Harvey Silverglate: Well, let me just start out by saying that their overall tool is to torture the English language. And that is—it’s right out of a classic essay by George Orwell called Politics and the English Language about how to use the English language to say nothing, or to say the opposite of what you mean. Now let me give you an example. You just raised this issue. Some of the campuses, what they do in order to basically minimize or completely get rid of pesky student dissent from the way the university is run, is they have an area on campus that they call a “free speech area.” And all public discussion, public speeches, organizing rallies by students on these political issues or philosophical issues is limited to the free speech area.
However, this is not really a free speech area, it’s a censorship area because the free speech area frequently comprises less than 1% of the geographic area of the college campus.
Bob Zadek: And it’s behind the incinerator.
Harvey Silverglate: And it’s almost invariably way distant from the center of activity on the campus. So by calling it a free speech area, the administrators make it sound like they’re protecting free speech when in fact they are censoring speech. And the same is true on campus speech codes. When FIRE first began, well over 90% of American college campuses, university campuses, had very restrictive speech codes. We’ve managed to battle them back where somewhat fewer than the 90% figure—I think we’re probably down to 75% or 80%—that have these restrictive codes.
But now, they don’t call them speech codes. We call them speech codes because we tell it like it is. They call them “harassment codes,” okay? They say, “We’re not limiting free speech, we’re limiting speech that reaches the level of harassment.” And by calling them harassment codes without shame, these liberal arts universities that claim to protect academic freedom and they want people to say whatever they believe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in fact routinely prosecute students in campus disciplinary tribunals for saying politically incorrect things about these hot-button issues such as gender and race and sexual identity and such. And so it is the perversion of the English language that allows these things to go on in a way so that they’re not noticed. They’re not noticed by parents who pay the outrageous tuitions. They’re not even noticed by the members of the boards of trustees who know nothing about what’s going on on the campuses that in theory they are directing. And it also hides the truth from the media. And one of FIRE’s main jobs—I know you’ve gone to the website, thefire.org—you’ll see that it’s a cornucopia of information that is accessed thousands of times a day by the news media who want to find out what’s really going on and can’t find it on the college websites.
The Coddling of the American Student [08:30]
Bob Zadek: You know, when you talk about harassment codes, I sit here in the microphone and my blood starts to boil. And I say, if a 19-year-old has to be protected from having somebody say something mean to them, what kind of a spine does this graduate have? And if this graduate ends up, God forbid, in the military, if they’re afraid of somebody saying something mean to them, how are they going to function in an adult society? And what kind of people are we raising? I mean, get over it and get tough. The world is not a very nice place. But for universities to pretend that it’s all little bunny rabbits and people hugging and singing Kumbaya, it makes me crazy because these students graduate and they end up in five-day-a-week therapy because they can’t cope as adults.
Harvey Silverglate: Well, let me tell you a story that you’ll find very interesting. This was back about 14 years ago. It was when The Shadow University was just about to come out. And I went over to the University of Wisconsin where they were having—the faculty senate was having a vote seeking to repeal the speech code at that university. And there was a meeting of the faculty senate, there was a huge attendance, the media were there, and a student got up. And this was a gay student, and he made a speech that was absolutely electric. And he said exactly what you just said. He said, “You know, I have a tougher time in life than a lot of other students because I’m gay. But I have to tell you, if you think that you’re helping me and protecting me by making it an offense on this campus for students to be frank with me about their views about me, you’re making a big mistake because it’s very useful for me to know what people think of me, who are my friends, who are my enemies. Because remember, I’m going to graduate. And when I go out in the real world, I’m going to suddenly find that the First Amendment protects people’s rights to tell me what they think. I will not have had training in learning the truth about people. You are not helping me at all.”
It had an electric effect on what was really a politically correct faculty, and it’s the only instance I know of to this day where an entire speech code has been repealed by the faculty. It’s quite an amazing story, isn’t it?
Bob Zadek: It really is. And of course, that’s what people should be trained in college—how to function as adults in a world that is sometimes unpleasant and inhospitable.
Harvey Silverglate: If you graduate college and you can’t listen to what somebody thinks about either you or your beliefs, you are totally unprepared for life in the world. What kind of an education is that?
Bob Zadek: And to imagine a place where you’re going to graduate college and you’re going to be fending off people who just want to hug you 24 hours a day. I mean, that’s not the world.
Harvey Silverglate: Oh, they want to hug you, but they’ve got suicide vests strapped on.
Bob Zadek: And so Harvey, besides free speech zones, which are hardly the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner in London, besides speech zones which are hidden behind the incinerator and you only can be there between midnight and 4:00 AM, besides that and there are speech codes, what other tricks—and then we’re going to get in after the break to the horrible horror stories that you explain so well on the website, the stories at Cal Poly and the stories at Widener University, which are really—it will make the small hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up. What other tricks do universities use? And also, am I overstating the case, Harvey, in imagining—or am I just tilting at windmills—by imagining that free speech seems to be more directed at stifling speech from the right than speech from the left? Am I overstating the case? Give us an objective view.
Harvey Silverglate: No, you’re not overstating it. But let me say there have been a significant number of instances, but a sheer minority of instances, in which students from the right have been censored. But that is by far the minority because the faculties and the administrators generally are from the left. And by the way, the left has to be divided into two categories. There is a libertarian left that believes in free speech. It’s a very traditional American liberalism that was alive and well when I was in school back in the 60s and 70s. But the liberalism, the left that has become ascendant in college campuses, is a very authoritarian, you know, and in some ways totalitarian left. So it is the kind of left that I, who has some liberal tendencies in addition to my libertarianism, finds to be completely threatening and anathema. It is a kind of a phony left that has taken over in American higher education.
Bob Zadek: You know, as we go to break and we’re going to do, Harvey, we’re going to talk about the Cal Poly story, which is a big deal, and Widener University and Brandeis, all of which you mention on your website. But when I was in the ninth grade—of course that’s far from college—I remember that for three weeks, Robert Hacker organized among my ninth-grade class at Junior High School 74 in Queens, New York, for some reason that I don’t remember, the Anti-Zadek Society. And for two weeks, my entire ninth-grade class was encouraged to ignore me and ostracize me. And that was incredibly unpleasant. I cried, I cried to my parents, but I got through it. And as I still talk about it here I am, much older, I’m much beyond the ninth grade, and I dare say in some small way I am the better for that experience and somewhat tougher. So those experiences which are unfortunately part of life, we cannot coddle and protect students and young adults and young Americans from something which might be a tad unpleasant.
This is Bob Zadek, 800-345-5639. I’m talking with Harvey Silverglate. The subject is free speech or not on college campuses. And when we come back, as promised, I will show you with Harvey’s help how to save buckets and buckets of money. You wouldn’t want to miss this. Back in 90 seconds.
Caller: Ron Paul and the Money Bomb [10:30]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show. I’m your host Bob Zadek, every Sunday at noon on 910 AM. Libertarian talk radio in the Bay Area and around the country, the show of ideas, not attitude. Thanks so much for listening. 800-345-5639 is the way to reach Harvey and myself. Thanks so much for listening.
Now Harvey, I opened the show with a little news brief about Ron Paul’s victory in California, in the California Republican straw poll. And that perked up one of our listeners. So Harvey, we’re going to hear from Chris in D.C. on Ron Paul. Chris, go ahead.
Caller (Chris): Yes, hi. How are you guys?
Bob Zadek: Hi Chris, thanks so much for calling.
Caller (Chris): Yeah, I’ll keep it brief. I just want to say how electrified the Ron Paul supporters are, and hopefully the rest of the listeners are, about Ron Paul’s big victory out there in California. It’s really a landmark victory. And I’m calling because the Super PAC, Ron Paul’s Super PAC, is going to be having a huge money bomb tomorrow, Monday the 19th, all day long. And if you believe in Ron Paul’s message of legalized freedom, individual freedom, and educational freedom, which you guys are talking about, you know, freedom of speech—and Ron Paul’s never voted to regulate even the internet. So if you believe in those things and if you see Ron Paul’s victory and support around the country, which is the most out of any Republican, go ahead and donate to our Super Bomb tomorrow, revolutionpac.com. It’s going to be huge.
Bob Zadek: Chris, thanks so much for your call. I happen to support Ron Paul and I wish you lots of luck in the campaign. Thanks so much for the call.
Caller (Chris): Thank you very much, sir. Have a great day.
Caller: The Hypocrisy of the 1960s Generation [12:30]
Bob Zadek: Harvey, we have a caller. We have John on the phone who has perked up about our topic on education on college campuses. John, welcome to the show.
Caller (John): Thank you. My question is for Harvey. How is it that today’s college faculty, who are presumably from the generation of the 1960s, has apparently become so hypocritical and biased in their views? What happened to that generation that grew up during that time period and was educated during that time period of the 60s and so on? Why have they turned out the way they have?
Bob Zadek: Well, Harvey, go ahead. You’ve had a lot of interaction with that generation in your work at FIRE. Any insights, Harvey?
Harvey Silverglate: Yes. Well, I had more interaction than you think because I started practicing law in 1967. And I actually represented a lot of student leftists who at the time were censored on the campuses, and I represented their free speech interests. A lot of these kids grew up and went into academia. They became professors, they also became administrators. And to my horror, I learned that these people who I represented back then were not really interested in free speech. They were interested in their own free speech. And once they got into positions of power, they thought nothing of doing to conservative students what conservative administrators did to them back in the 60s.
And so what’s happened is there was simply a political power shift in American higher education. And of course, academic freedom suffered mightily because these people who are now running the campuses think that they are so clearly right about all social and political issues that anybody who disagrees with them is what they would call a regressive fascist. And that’s the—I think that’s what you are referring to. And the more politically adept of these faculty members became administrators, became presidents of colleges, and then they created these huge student life bureaucracies.
The Rise of the Student Life Bureaucracy [16:30]
Harvey Silverglate: We could do a whole hour just on the threat that these expanding student life bureaucracies pose to good education and to freedom of speech and conscience. Do you know that in the current economic downturn, there has been a substantial decrease in the number of faculty members taken on, but there has been an equally substantial increase in the number of deans and assistant deans and assistant associate deans, mostly in the student life arena, because they have taken it upon themselves to “train”—that’s the word they use—train their students into certain social and political and philosophical beliefs, which should be the subject of education and not training.
Bob Zadek: Do you think that getting rid of academic tenure would be a useful step to correct things?
Harvey Silverglate: Again, it’s a whole—that’s a whole other show, but go ahead, Harvey, in a couple of words. Well, there are a lot of people with some interesting ideas on how to deal with this. I think that tenure has some good aspects and some bad aspects. What I think has to happen, actually, is the university boards, the trustees who have ultimate authority but who have no idea what’s going on, have to start visiting the campuses, have to talk to students, have to talk to people at FIRE who know the campuses far better than the members of the boards of trustees. And they have to begin to insist on the dismantling of these bureaucrats, these student life bureaucracies that even the president of the university often has little idea what they’re doing. They have freshman training programs as if they’re dealing with trained animals in order to get the students to adopt a certain—now these days it’s a leftist—a certain left way of looking at the world and life. Do you know at Harvard, only a few couple of weeks ago, freshmen were asked to sign a written pledge pledging themselves to diversity and multiculturalism—all of these buzzwords which are very controversial. And only because we started to put the light of day on this did the Dean of Freshmen back down and he canceled the program of asking these students to sign this. To sign a political pledge! It’s like a loyalty oath to a certain political ideology.
Bob Zadek: John, thanks so much for the call. We appreciate it.
Caller (John): Thank you. Bye.
Case Study: Steve Hinkle and Cal Poly [18:30]
Bob Zadek: Now Harvey, I keep on mentioning as we go to each break that your website will save people lots of money. And you’re probably wondering what the heck I’m talking about. Well, Harvey’s website—thefire.org—it’s a very robust website. And amongst its other features, you can click and easily find the name of your college or university and immediately will pop up FIRE’s experience with speech codes and with free speech on campus. It is very robust. And I went to the website, Harvey, yesterday in preparing for the show, and I went to Syracuse. And I dropped down Syracuse University, which was sort of a nice place to spend four years in the early 1960s. And I saw Syracuse University sort of won the award one year for the worst free speech code. I forgot what it was exactly, but you didn’t think very highly of my alma mater. And I read the backup for FIRE’s findings on Syracuse. And I said, “Those sons of guns, they’re not getting another dime of my money till they change their ways.” So right away, off my list of charitable contributions comes Syracuse University, and I will now have that amount of money in my pocket that will not go to my university. So I will be economically better for it.
So I invite listeners out there to stress test from a speech code standpoint your college university at thefire.org website and you will see how your college or university has fared. Now Harvey, what caught my attention—and you’ve done so much great work—there was a case, it goes back a few years at Cal Poly, where you were very instrumental and very effective. It was a pretty horrendous case involving a lawsuit with a guy named Steve Hinkle. I wonder if you remember that case and if you could tell the audience the facts as you remember them. It involved the Plantation book.
Harvey Silverglate: Oh, you’re talking about the fellow who was reading a book and was charged with harassment?
Bob Zadek: Well, yes, and also there was a guy named Steve Hinkle who was putting up flyers. Steve Hinkle was a Republican and he went to the multicultural center at Cal Poly, which is in California, and he put up flyers advertising a discussion of a book called OK to Leave the Plantation. And the book was written by a black who was actually encouraging blacks to become more independent. It was pretty mainstream stuff, and he cautioned blacks about becoming too docile. It was a book that anybody would read and would benefit from. And the student, a guy named Steve Hinkle, who was a member of a Republican campus Republican club, all he did was he put up a flyer promoting a book, and in the flyer he had the name of the book, of course, OK to Leave the Plantation. And the university cops visited this guy and accused him of disruption of a campus meeting because a few blacks were meeting in the multicultural center at the time, although all he did was put up a flyer. He went through a year and a half of litigation and FIRE threatened to sue the university, at which time the university withdrew the charges and through FIRE’s help paid all of his legal expenses. This is just one example in California of how the university came down so hard on somebody for the sin—the sin—of putting a flyer up in a public campus meeting room promoting a discussion by an author, a mainstream author who had published. And FIRE did the good work of protecting Steve Hinkle.
Case Study: Keith Sampson and IUPUI [20:30]
Bob Zadek: Now, that case you may think that that is a kind of bizarre exception. It is not. It is a very typical case. And I can tell you one that’s actually worse than that, and that is a case that we handled in 2008 at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. And there a fellow named Keith Sampson, who was a student employee working on the janitorial staff—he was earning his tuition by helping out and doing janitorial work. You really have to give this kid credit for working his way through school. And he was sitting during a break reading a book called Notre Dame vs. The Clan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. And it was an inspirational book about how these students at Notre Dame did defeat the Ku Klux Klan on their campus. But because of the cover, which had a picture of, you know, a Klan member in full regalia, the student was brought up on charges of harassing the black members of the janitorial staff because it was viewed as “threatening.” So here you have not only a serious book, but a book which is trying to make the case for civil rights being the subject—causing the student to be the subject of discipline because they thought the cover would upset other people on the janitorial staff.
Now Harvey, before—as they do to keep the audience stayed tuned—you’re going to tell us after the break what the result was with poor Mr. Sampson, who was guilty of the crime of reading in public—a new campus offense. What happened to Mr. Sampson? Stay tuned in 90 really short seconds. Harvey will tell us whether this story has a happy ending or not. Bob Zadek, 800-345-5639. Thanks for listening. Back in 90 seconds.
Case Study: Roman Caple and St. Augustine’s [22:30]
Bob Zadek: Thanks so much for listening. This is Bob Zadek, host of The Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at noon on 910 AM Fox News Radio. Thanks so much for listening. We are the leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and around the country. 800-345-5639 if you want to exercise your free speech rights, come right along. Your views are always welcome. Today we are talking about free speech or not on college campuses. My guest, second time here, is Harvey Silverglate. Harvey is chairman and founder of FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. thefire.org is the website. We are talking about how the universities stifle free speech. Before the break, Harvey was telling us about poor Mr. Sampson, who was a janitor at Purdue University—a student janitor, working his way through school as a janitor. And Mr. Sampson had the very bad luck to be reading a mainstream inspirational book in front of another student. The book had on its cover a picture of a Ku Klux Klan member. That offended another student, so Mr. Sampson was guilty of the college offense of reading in public. FIRE got involved and Harvey, what happened to Mr. Sampson?
Harvey Silverglate: Well, first of all, of course, they didn’t accuse him of reading in public. That’s what was really the charge. But the way they disguised it was “harassment.” It was racial harassment because it would upset a black person seeing him reading or carrying the book. And he was convicted. But then the story—FIRE got hold of the story and the Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz did a complete column about this in the Journal in July of 2008. And when the heat started to really take effect on them—they were getting phone calls and letters from alumni and reporters—they finally backed down. They acquitted Sampson after having convicted him. They publicly apologized to FIRE and said it wouldn’t happen again. But I want to point out they didn’t actually apologize to the student. They made a public apology, but they never actually apologized to the student. But we did win that one, but only because we got national press.
Bob Zadek: And I guess if I know my audience, my audience is out there first of all being curious, becoming more and more curious about whether their alma mater is on the good side or the bad side of the free speech issue. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s easy to find out. Go to thefire.org website and you will find out how your alma mater is doing. And if they are not doing so well, we have power. Just stop giving them money. When you get a call from that member of the alumni association or you get an email inviting you to contribute, all you need do is respond by saying you will get a contribution when FIRE tells me that you are on the good side of the free speech issue. So in this regard, the marketplace and the pocketbook will help push the universities back onto the good side of this issue. Harvey, has it been your experience that FIRE has been—I know you don’t actively encourage people to withhold donations, that’s not how you operate—but have people indicated to you they have used your website as somewhat of a gift-giving guide?
Harvey Silverglate: Yes. And we have a very simple system. We divide the campuses into three categories. There’s the red light schools, which have very restrictive speech codes; the green light schools, which allow free speech; and then the yellow light, which have some aspect of restriction on speech but aren’t totally totalitarian. And a lot of people do use that as a guide for giving. Some people use it as a guide for where they should send their children and where they should avoid sending their children. So it’s been very effective and we really spend a lot of time analyzing these campuses before we rate them.
Bob Zadek: I found that to be wonderfully empowering for me, and it helps me in determining who to give my charitable contributions to at year-end when I make those decisions. I found myself far more informed by use of the FIRE website. Now Harvey, there was another case you may be aware of off the top of your head. It involved St. Augustine’s College and it was a recent case which involved Facebook. In the St. Augustine’s College case, we had a student named Roman Caple who posted some sort of somewhat negative comment about the university he attended at St. Augustine’s College. He posted a negative comment on the Facebook page, which was open to the public of the university. And the university got angry at this guy exercising his Facebook free speech rights and they punished him, and his offense was, quote, “negative social media exchange.” Negative social media exchange. Well, that seems like a capital offense to me. And what they did was in a way that was so petty and so spiteful, they said he had to turn over his cap and gown to the security office and he couldn’t graduate with his colleagues. They let him graduate, but he couldn’t do so publicly. I mean, how petty can you get?
Harvey Silverglate: Well, you recall that that happened—the student made his negative comment about the administration of the school after a tornado. And if memory serves, what his complaint was that the school really mishandled the dealing with that tornado. And so in addition to the fact that this is very petty criticism, it’s also, it seems to me, against the public interest because don’t we have a strong social interest in having students talk about the way the administration fails in something as important as dealing with the impact of something like a tornado? So they were looking—the administration was really looking to deprive the public of the knowledge of what happened when that school’s administration failed.
Case Study: Professor O’Connell and Widener University [24:30]
Bob Zadek: You know, Harvey, you’re exactly right. And we’ve been talking about—we’ve been wondering on the air today what kind of students will result, what kind of citizens will be the result of this college experience. And when I read about the student at St. Augustine’s criticizing the university and then being denied public graduation rights, I flash forward to something which seems off-message, but it’s not. The Obama administration in government contracting has required by executive fiat that would-be government contractors indicate who they gave money to for lobbying and for political support as another way to stifle free speech. So again, it is those in power—not college campuses, but in this case government, but it’s the same crowd—deathly afraid of people exercising their free speech rights and are learning how to use the power they find themselves having to stifle free speech.
Now Harvey, we only have a minute, but I want to just mention if you can in a minute or two, if you recall the Widener University issue, which was a Professor O’Connell who is suing the dean, Linda Ammons, for defamation because a couple of students made some claim that in a classroom he made them cry or he said a bad thing.
Harvey Silverglate: Well, this is—there’s a whole rash of these cases involving professors who used hypotheticals in class and on exams that students were upset about or administrators were upset about because they thought they were insulting. And this was just one case in which this professor of criminal law used the names of faculty members and the dean, Dean Ammons, in a hypothetical on an exam. And the dean thought that it reflected badly on her because—mind you, it was a hypothetical. Professors do this all the time. It’s kind of a lighthearted way of giving exam questions. She was offended and she disciplined him and tried to fire him and he turned around and sued her. Sued her! And he’s winning. Of course he’s winning, because the suit is in a real court, not a kangaroo campus court.
Bob Zadek: And Dean Ammons got two students who have filed over 50 harassment complaints, got these two students—and by the way, this is a law school—got two students to file these sexual harassment complaints without specifying specifically what the charges were, and he had refuted them at an administrative hearing, but it doesn’t go away. This is what’s going on in college campuses. We have to live in fear of what will the graduating classes be like if not for the work, the good work of Harvey and his organization, FIRE. Once again, visit Harvey’s website, see if you should continue your contributions to your alma mater. Free speech must prevail. Thanks so much for listening. This is Bob Zadek, host of The Bob Zadek Show. I’ll be back next Sunday, and special thanks to Harvey Silverglate for his work appearing on the show and his good work at FIRE. See you in a week.