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North Carolina Campus Free Speech Act: Goldwater Proposal

posted by Fnord666 on Friday August 11 2017, @11:04AM   
from the not-in-my-safe-space dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

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

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Original Submission

• Re:Not all speech is worth hearing (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 13 2017, @11:32AM

  by khallow (3766) on Sunday August 13 2017, @11:32AM (#553185) Journal

  Totally agree with the AC here. It's heavily implied that any ideas that aren't worth your bother shouldn't be discussed in public spaces on a college campus. That is the subject of this discussion after all. Maybe you shouldn't have written that if you didn't want to heavily imply that?
  
  Nobody here cares what you decide is worth your while. What we care about is who gets to decide who can or can't speak on a college campus. So when you say that there are some things you're not going to bother to go to certain talks, it's not to inform us that you are not indeed the single human on the planet who is perfected interested in every topic and has infinite time to attend every possible instance of public speech on a college campus.
  
  And given that you immediately segued into this question indicates you did indeed advocate blocking speakers whose speech you're not interested in:

  How is it "extremist" to advocate that a University has the right to be selective about who they invite?

  Who's doing the selection? You gave only one criteria for selection, whether you could be bothered to attend.

  On any decent-sized university campus, you can always find some extremists who'd be willing to invite anyone. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. Why should students get all this power?

  Because it's a university. Its whole purpose is to give the participants a place to communicate knowledge and ideas. A key part of that is to empower them to invite people with this knowledge and ideas to attend. Thus, students should have this power.

  But some random little extremist student group shouldn't be able to force an extremely provocative and controversial speaker on everyone.

  What's the mechanism behind this "forcing"? You've already stated that you wouldn't attend such speech, indicating that you don't believe that a random, little, extremist student group actually can force an extremely provocative and controversial speaker on you.

  Parent