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With Governor Roy Cooper (D) taking no action on the bill, the state of North Carolina has enacted the Restore Campus Free Speech Act, the first comprehensive campus free-speech legislation based on the Goldwater proposal. That proposal, which I [Stanley Kurtz (Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center)] co-authored along with Jim Manley and Jonathan Butcher of Arizona's Goldwater Institute, was released on January 31 and is now under consideration in several states. It's fitting that North Carolina should be the first state to enact a Goldwater-inspired law.
[...] The North Carolina Restore Campus Free Speech Act achieves most of what the Goldwater proposal sets out to do. It ensures that University of North Carolina policy will strongly affirm the importance of free expression. It prevents administrators from disinviting speakers whom members of the campus community wish to hear from. It establishes a system of disciplinary sanctions for students and anyone else who interferes with the free-speech rights of others, and ensures that students will be informed of those sanctions at freshman orientation. It reaffirms the principle that universities, at the official institutional level, ought to remain neutral on issues of public controversy to encourage the widest possible range of opinion and dialogue within the university itself. And it authorizes a special committee created by the Board of Regents to issue a yearly report to the public, the regents, the governor, and the legislature on the administrative handling of free-speech issues.
Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/450027/north-carolina-campus-free-speech-act-goldwater-proposal
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @04:44PM (2 children)
Interesting example.
Or that flat Earth guy we had here who got bored with equidistant azimuthal map projections and started posting about anarcho-capitalism and violently imposed monopolies instead.
Lots of people have lots of speech. Campus only has so much space and so many days during the semester for hosting that speech.
I haven't been to college in a long time, and when I was I wasn't politically active. There was a feminist group focusing on date rape called Eyes Wide Open that was explicitly transphobic, threatening “crossdressers” with immediate expulsion (with a sealed transcript, making transferring credits to another college impossible) for attempted rape should they enter the womyn-born-womyn's restroom. (This was circa Y2K. My, how successful feminism has been at making bathroom laws a nationwide controversy!) That's the closest I came to being politically active, but I wound out dropping out because the campus was too much of a hostile environment and I really didn't have much confidence at the time with my own gender transition either.
It seems to me that colleges should require some amount of signatures, kind of like how we do ballot initiatives in my state, before a speaker may be invited. Perhaps if there are 5,000 students in attendance in an average semester, require 500 or so student signatures, and the speaker is invited and may have exclusive use of campus property for an afternoon to hold an event, or something.
Well, if you have 10% of your student population requesting the presence of a flat-Earth or young Earth creationist, my feeling is that it must not really be about making the shape of the Earth or the age of the Earth a controversial subject with multiple viewpoints and opinions that are all equally valid. If it is, well shit, you've got bigger problems at that university. Transfer out ASAP!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @07:14PM (1 child)
Speakers do not invite themselves. They are invited by student groups who also fund and organize the event. At larger campuses on any given day there might be a dozen different events going on. It's actually one thing I miss about university - the talks were an incredible way to introduce yourself to a variety of ideas you might not otherwise be familiar with, or to challenge well informed speakers of events espousing ideas you find dubious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @07:26PM
That's a good point. I was proceeding from the assumption that a diverse student body collectively wants more speakers to present their ideas on campus than can be practically accommodated. If they can all be practically accommodated, the more the merrier I suppose. If a student doesn't want to hear certain speech, I believe in most cases they aren't required to attend.