CAMPUS FREE SPEECH ISSUES AREN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE

Back in the heyday of the 1960s, when everything seemed urgent and salient, there was a righteous battle for academic freedom. As the decade drew to a close, a delightfully liberal Supreme Court declared that free speech does not stop at the “schoolhouse gate.” 

More than a half century later, the issue of academic expression is up for relitigation. Unlike their solid and compelling predecessors of yore, these new cases are, in keeping with the tenor of our times, petty and silly.

Before wading into the shallow waters of what passes as today’s version of educational free speech, it’s worth a brief reminiscence of the far more glorious struggle of the ‘60s.  As the decade began, many public colleges and universities prohibited students from engaging in any political activity on campus.  In 1964, the issue came to a head at the University of California at Berkeley. 

While distributing leaflets proselytizing against the Vietnam War, Berkley student Jack Weinberg was arrested and placed in a squad car. Within minutes, thousands of student activists surrounded the vehicle, immobilizing it for 32 hours while making speeches from its roof. That was the beginning of the Berkley Free Speech Movement. 

Over the next few weeks, Joan Baez showed up to sing “We Shall Overcome”.  Berkeley Free Speech leader Mario Savio uttered his infamous command for students to “put your bodies on the gears . . . when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part.”  

After more than 800 students were arrested, many injured by police, a student strike shut down the campus until the administration lifted its restrictions on political speech.  Many other schools gradually followed course. For those that didn’t, the Supreme Court made it abundantly clear in a 1972 opinion that public colleges are a “marketplace of ideas” and that students and have a First Amendment right to express those ideas, regardless of how unpopular they may be. 

Meanwhile, a similar free speech movement was making its way through junior and senior high schools.  In 1965, then 13-year-old Mary Beth Tinker and her friends decided to protest the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands in their Des Moines, Iowa public school.  They were quickly suspended. That discipline was eventually declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Students,” the court wrote, “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”  

Now flash forward 50-plus years, to what legal commentators are calling the most important free speech case since Tinker v. Des Moines.  Sometime next month, the Supreme Court is expected to decide the fate of a trash-talking middle schooler from Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania. Back in 2017, Brandi Levy was a 14-year-old junior varsity cheerleader who had just been turned down for a promotion to the varsity squad.

Stewing over the rejection, Brandi, of course, reached for her smartphone and composed a Snapshot message preordained to become a landmark free speech case.  With her middle finger raised, she uttered nine words destined to live in judicial infamy: “Fuck school, fuck softball, fuck cheer, and fuck everything.” Brandi was summarily suspended from cheerleading for one year. 

Needless to say, Joan Baez didn’t rush into Mahanoy City to sing “We Shall Overcome.”   And regardless of what the Supreme Court does with this case, you can be pretty sure it will not wax poetic about finding space for “fuck school” et al, in the marketplace of ideas.  

Meanwhile, from the professorial side of the classroom, comes this annoying trifle of a contention that teachers are somehow enshrined with the “academic freedom” to choose the pronouns they will use for their students. Court dockets are filled with teacher lawsuits insisting they have the constitutional right to refer to transgender students with pronouns and honorifics based on their birth gender (here, here and here).

Take, for example, Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee (Ohio) State University.  As the semester began, Meriwether called on a student he assumed was male by using the honorific of mister.  The student, a transgender woman, sought out the professor after class and asked that he refer to her as Ms and use the pronouns she and her.  

That, Meriwether said, would be a problem.  As a Christian, the professor explained, he believes God created only two genders, and for him to use female honorifics and pronouns for someone born as a man would be a violation of his faith. Citing school policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity, the administration ordered Meriwether to refer to the student as she, her, or Ms. The professor rejected the order on First Amendment grounds, sending the issue up a crowded federal flagpole of similar cases.

What a difference a half-century makes. In the 1960s, academic freedom was about the right of professors and students to have an open exchange of ideas.  It is now being subverted to mean that a teacher can ignore with impunity the very identity of a student.  

For God’s sake, Professor, just call the kid what she wants to be called! You’re a philosophy teacher, so teach it. Share with your class the foundation for your principle that gender is binary and unalterable. Invite your students to explore other thinkers – including Christians – who have a contrary opinion (here, here, here and here). Let the dialectic be part of the learning.  Meanwhile, use she, her or Ms when referring to the transgender woman in your class. It’s just a name, a title, and since it is hers, she controls it. This isn’t about you or your beliefs, it’s about the basic human decency of calling someone what they want to be called. 

It has been years since I’ve been in a classroom, but I seem to recall that a strong predicate for learning was a welcoming, respectful student-teacher relationship.  You don’t get there by using the word mister for a 19-year-old transgender woman, someone who has undoubtedly struggled with a level of transformational pain most of us will never comprehend.

So there you have it: two vastly different free speech movements, one in the 1960s and one in the 2020s.  We sang “We Shall Overcome” back then.  We obviously need a new anthem. 

How about: “We Shall Overlitigate”?