Shrinking Free Speech Zones

by Rachel Gillett

Many school teachers, administrators, and citizens nationwide are shocked at the results of a recent study of more than 100,000 students and 8,000 teachers that found that half of the U.S. high school students surveyed believe the government can censor the Internet and should have the right to approve news stories. Almost three-quarters of the students either don't know how they feel about the First Amendment or take it for granted. And even worse, after having the First Amendment read to them, one-third believe it goes "too far" in protecting free speech.

Despite the fact that 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals believe that unpopular views should be expressed, only 83 percent of the students think so. If teachers understand the basic democratic principles documented in the First Amendment, why do 75 percent of their students believe flag burning is illegal? "These results are not only disturbing-they are dangerous," notes Hodding Carter III, head of the Knight Foundation, which conducted the survey.

But should we really be surprised at such a failure? We live at a time when the Bush administration has been caught paying journalists to promote its agenda and has banned media coverage of returning caskets bearing deceased military personnel. Add to this the fact that television stations have refused to air Saving Private Ryan for fear of being fined by the FCC and it isn't so shocking that half of American high school students are perfectly comfortable with government censorship of the media. In fact, it isn't unusual for free speech to be censored in the school environment. According to Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, "today's administrators are more corporate CEOs managing huge budgets than educators." And in recent years administrators have frequently interfered with student publications, often asking for prior approval of the content. Even worse, one-fifth of the schools surveyed didn't have any student publications, 40 percent of those having eliminated such publications in the last five years. In this regard, the Knight Foundation's study showed that the presence of student publications correlated with a higher student understanding of First Amendment rights. As is reinforced by Michael Fitzgerald's account in "Goodbye, Mr. Fitz" (page 8, this issue), some teachers at the schools surveyed who had functioned as publication advisers had lost their jobs due to defending free speech instead of caving to pressure from administrators. That U.S. high school students are pessimistic about free speech isn't surprising given the hypocritical enforcement from their overseers.

So what good example do these students have to follow? Certainly not the Bush administration, whose expansion of the Patriot Act widened the government's power to intrude on free speech by, when convenient, defining protest as terrorism. Certainly not the Bush administration, whose arbitrary classification of "enemy combatants" supposedly validates the imprisonment of people without charging them with a crime or allowing them legal access to challenge their detention in court. Certainly not the Bush administration, whose idea of freedom of expression is a "designated free-speech zone" where a protester might get a glimpse of the object of disapproval.

And some would say that even the sixty million Americans who voted for the advancement of such policies provide a bad example.

Not only do these high school students have little to look forward to in the real world, but the college campuses many will soon inhabit are experiencing even more suppression of opinion than their high schools. Both students and faculty on college campuses students are dismissed or expelled for expressing unpopular views while those who carry out the vandalism or theft of expression they disagree with go unpunished. About 3,000 copies of the Arkansas State University campus newspaper were stolen in January 2005 in an apparent attempt to stifle a story about underage drinking at a fraternity. And the mayor of Berkeley, California, commandeered copies of a student newspaper that argued against his election.

In February a professor at the University of Colorado, Ward Churchill, resigned from his position as chair of the Ethnic Studies Department, and the university has faced increasing pressure to terminate his employment due to a controversy that has erupted over statements Churchill made in his speeches, essays, and a book expressing his political views on the reasons for 9/11. The professor's statements have been summarized ad nauseam by the mainstream media as "comparing World Trade Center victims to Nazis" and taken out of context by biased commentators who assert Churchill is an advocate of terrorism. Not only are these events evidence of attempts to squelch dissent but they also reveal a level of intense criticism based on a lack of understanding.

Churchill's book, Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which examines past U.S. military intervention and historical violations of international law, asserts that by allowing the U.S. government to engage in these violations U.S. citizens should expect retaliation. One particular statement in which Churchill referred to "the technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center on 9/11 as "little Eichmanns" has resulted in protests against his speeches and threats against his life. The point of the comparison was that Adolf Eichmann, in Churchill's words, "was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide" and such "German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies." Churchill's view is that those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks saw the WTC as a justifiable target, and the innocent civilians as collateral damage.

Whether Churchill's view is fair or not, he does have a point. In ignoring the crimes of our government, we as citizens are indirectly complicit in its actions. Likewise, by ignoring the government's censorship of dissent and the limitations it places on free speech, we are responsible for enabling the kind of authoritarian control that our Constitution opposes-and thus for the popular opinion in our nation's high schools that free speech is too free.

Rachel Gillett is editorial associate for the Humanist.

© 2004, the American Humanist Association