John Leo’s great City Journal piece– the ACLU’s silence on campus speech

John Leo: Free Inquiry? Not on Campus

We are very lucky to have the First Amendment. Without it, our chattering classes would be falling all over themselves to ban speech that offends sensitive groups, just as Canadian- and Euro-chatterers are doing now. We know this because our campus speech codes, the models for the disastrous hate-speech laws elsewhere, were the inventions of our own elites. Without a First Amendment, the distortions and suppressions of campus life would likely have gone national. Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, and many rap artists would be in jail, or at least facing charges.

The cause of free speech can no longer expect much help from the American Civil Liberties Union, more concerned today with civil rights and multicultural issues than with civil liberties and free speech. True, the ACLU still takes some censorship cases—it led the fight against the first wave of campus speech codes circa 1990, for instance. But the rise of the ACLU’s internal lobbies or “projects,” such as the Lesbian and Gay Project and the Immigrants’ Rights Project, has made the organization look more and more like a traditional left-wing pressure group, with little passion for the First Amendment. The ACLU is also following the money: funds flow in because the group responds to concerns of feminist, gays, and other identity groups, not because of its historical defense of free speech and civil liberties.

These days, the ACLU visibly stands aloof from obvious First Amendment cases—such as the college speech and harassment codes—and even comes down on the anti-free-speech side. Consider the group’s stance in Aguilar v. Avis Rent-A-Car System, a case involving ethnic epithets aimed by supervisors at Latino employees of Avis in San Francisco. A California court ruled that Avis had permitted a hostile environment. The California Supreme Court, abetted by both the northern Californian and the national ACLU, agreed, and upheld the lower court’s startling speech restriction: prior restraint on workers’ speech, forbidding a judge-made list of specific words. These words, not yet revealed or promulgated, will soon be taboo in every California workplace, even outside the earshot of Latino employees, and even if they are welcome. As civil libertarian Nat Hentoff wrote: “This may be the broadest and vaguest restriction of speech in American legal history.”

Even with the ACLU, the mainstream media, school officials, and much of the professorate AWOL, the speech police haven’t gone unopposed. Just ask former Clinton official Donna Shalala. As chancellor of the University of Wisconsin in the late eighties, she proved a fervent early advocate of campus speech restrictions. Though Shalala occasionally praised free speech, she and her team imposed not only a full-fledged student speech code, later struck down in federal court, but also a faculty code that provoked the first (and so far, only) pro-free-speech campus campaign strong enough to repeal such repressive restrictions. The Wisconsin faculty code was a primitive, totalitarian horror. Professors found themselves under investigation, sometimes for months, without a chance to defend themselves or even to know about the secret proceedings. One female professor said: “It was like being put in prison for no reason. I had no idea what it was that I was supposed to have done.”

It was pointed out when I previously posted the ACLU’s relative silence on campus speech suppression that the ACLU itself has a “policy” on campus speech codes and that ACLUers are on the board of FIRE. My answer: so what? A single 13 year-old statement and few letters here and there to universities over the years hardly excuses the ACLU from its conspicuous non-involvement in fighting the most tyrannical institutions in America. It has representation on FIRE’s board? Again: so what? Syria, Sudan and Saudi Arabia were on the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Leo brings the real reason to the surface — the conflict between the ACLU’s support for boutique radical causes and the money that flows from this has forced this organization to sacrifice any pretense of being true defender of the First Amendment. These speech codes and other various freedom and thought-killing university policies that silence any opposition to the radical multi-culti, homosexual agenda are set up specifically to favor those same groups that the ACLU has aligned with — politically and financially.

For information on an organization truly fighting campus tyranny, go to the Alliance Defense Fund’s Center for Academic Freedom. Most recently, ADF has entered the fray to defend an Arizona State University student who refused to be mocked in mandatory RA “tolerance” training and was sanctioned by the university for it. Things like “tolerance” and “diversity” “training” are the mutant offspring of the anti-liberty worldview of the ACLU and its allies. That these Orwellian programs exist and that the ACLU has done little to stop (and has even promoted!) them is no surprise to those with open eyes about the true goals of the ACLU.

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