Speechcodes.org

LINK:Speechcodes.org


About speechcodes.org

Colleges and universities routinely punish students and faculty for their speech, their writings, and their membership in campus groups. On campus after campus, administrators create and enforce codes to outlaw free speech and free expression that does not conform to various new campus orthodoxies. Almost all of these speech codes depend, for their survival, upon a double standard that strikes at the heart of legal and moral equality. In the course of the past few years, the following sorts of codes some later modified after public exposure have existed on America's campuses:

* Bowdoin College has banned jokes and stories "experienced by others as harassing."
* Brown University has banned "verbal behavior" that produces "feelings of impotence, anger, or disenfranchisement," whether "intentional or unintentional."
* Colby College has outlawed speech that causes "a vague sense of danger" or a loss of "self-esteem."
* The University of Connecticut has outlawed "inconsiderate jokes," "stereotyping" and even "inappropriately directed laughter."
* The University of Buffalo Law School has limited student free speech by "the responsibility to promote equality and justice."
* Syracuse University has outlawed "offensive remarks...sexually suggestive staring...[and] sexual, sexist, or heterosexist remarks or jokes."
* West Virginia University would instruct incoming students and new faculty that they must "use language that is not gender specific...Instead of referring to anyone's romantic partner as girlfriend' or boyfriend,' use positive generic terms such as friend', lover,' or partner.'" Until recently, WVU enforced "free speech zones" (in reality, "censorship zones") that comprised only one percent of the public campus.
* Lastly, the University of North Dakota has criminalized as harassment anything that intentionally produces "psychological discomfort, embarrassment, or ridicule" (a category of no small scope).

Under rules such as these, if applied to the letter, major voices of public criticism, satire, commentary, and debate would be silenced on American campuses, and some of our greatest authors, artists, and filmmakers would be banned. More ominously, in the face of such codes, students intuit a supposed right to be free from offense, embarrassment, or discomfort. As a result, other students begin the compromise of self-censorship.

Such attitudes stay with students long after they graduate. If students on our nation's campuses public and privatelearn that jokes, remarks, and visual displays that "offend" someone may rightly be banned, they will not find it odd or dangerous when government itself seeks to censor and to demand moral conformity in the expression of its citizens. A nation that does not educate in freedom will not survive in freedom, and will not even know when it has lost it.

It is to prevent such a scenario that FIRE has created speechcodes.org.

Speechcodes.org is a searchable educational database that chronicles the state of freedom at America's colleges and universities. Speechcodes.org informs and educates students, parents, faculty, administrators, journalists, public officials, and the wider society about the state of free expression on college campuses across the nation. It promotes informed public scrutiny of an institution's concern for, or disregard of, the central tenets of liberty and academic freedom. In addition, this website provides researchers, scholars, and journalists with the tools needed to assess the current assault against liberty and dignity in higher education.

Beyond speechcodes.org

Speechcodes.org is only one component of FIRE's strategy to change the climate of American higher education from one that condones censorship to one that defends and promotes individual rights. In addition to exposing illiberal speech codes to the light of public scrutiny via speechcodes.org, FIRE has initiated its Speech Codes Litigation Project, which aims at rolling back speech codes through the courts. FIRE and its allies are launching legal challenges to speech codes at public institutions across the country, beginning in eight of twelve federal appellate circuits. Our efforts aim to create definitive precedents for holding public institutions to their constitutional obligations.

This strategy focuses first on public colleges and universities, because the Bill of Rights pertains there, and because most private institutions that censor unpopular speech claim a legal obligation to do so. This is a false claim because this censorship is unconstitutional. Most private colleges and universities are unwilling to state that they have chosen to offer their students fewer freedoms and protections than are available to students at public colleges and universities. By ending the reign of partisan censorship in public higher education the dynamic of academic freedom everywhere will change.

FIRE's Speech Codes Litigation Project at public institutions is only the beginning. In the second phase of litigation, FIRE and its allies will file legal challenges against private universities that commit fraud and violate their contractual obligations by promising free speech while delivering censorship. Although private institutions are not bound by the First Amendment, they are bound by how they sell themselves to prospective students and by the promises they make in their brochures and student handbooks. Private universities will be forced to end the fraudulent promise of free speech when their false advertising is exposed.

FIRE s goal is to restore individual liberty, responsibility, dignity, honesty, and consistency to higher education, without abridging the rights of voluntary association through informed consent. Recognizing that universities cannot defend in public what they do in private, Speechcodes.org relies on the power of public exposure to defeat speech codes on America's campuses.

As Justice Louis Brandeis so correctly observed, sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant.