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Shedding Rights on the American Campus
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19765 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1991 |
2,882 Words |
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Thomas L. Jipping
Thomas L. Jipping is director of the Free Congress
Foundation's Center for Law and Democracy. |
Freedom of speech is under attack in America. This has nothing to do with either 2 Live Crew or the National Endowment for the Arts. No, there is a genuine and overt attack on intellectual freedom and tolerance that threatens to subvert the Bill of Rights just as the United States celebrates the bicentennial of its ratification.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." This concept has certainly been expanded since those words were penned. "Speech" has become "expression." The Supreme Court last year decided whether the First Amendment protects flag burning (it said yes) and begging (it said no). On January 8, 1991, the Court considered whether that lofty provision protects "nude dancing" by women selling drinks in bars.
Despite debate at the margins, however, this clause stands for at least one fundamental principle. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan recently put it this way: "If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable" (Texas v. Johnson, 1989). Chief Justice William Rehnquist recently quoted a 1978 Supreme Court decision holding that "the fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it" (Hustler Magazine V. Falwell, 1988).
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the Court that giving this First Amendment freedom sufficient "breathing space" requires that "our citizens must tolerate insulting, and even outrageous, speech" (Boos v. Barry, 1988). In one of the most oft-quoted expressions of this principle, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote more than 70 years ago that "the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas. ... The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market" (dissenting in Abrams v. United States, 1919).
Free trade in ideas is central to the mission of higher education in America, particularly in the public school arena. Not long ago no one questioned that intellectual freedom and tolerance of alternative views and opinions must be especially protected in that context. The Supreme Court stated the obvious more than 30 years ago, that "the essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident" (Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 1957). The Court soon after repeated this principle: "The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms
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