Fuchs is leaving UF – will censorship remain?

Back on November 1, 2021, we first posted about president Ken Fuchs at the University of Florida and his rationale for preventing three political science department faculty members from testifying against Florida’s unconstitutional voting restriction law, which was that “despite the economic challenges faced by the State of Florida due to Covid, our elected officials invested even more in the University of Florida this past year, for which we are incredibly grateful.”

We continued on by commenting that

So “incredibly grateful” is UF that it is paying back the favor by refusing to allow its faculty to testify against state voting policy. This inevitably leads one to wonder if that state financial support for UF was predicated on the State of Florida’s understanding that the gift would make UF (even more) unwilling to criticize any state laws. Fuchs has made no secret of his own sense of being a figurehead, saying in the same August 26 address that he could not issue a mask mandate: “I literally don’t have that power… within hours, another message would go out from someone to everyone, again saying we’ve been informed that there will be no such mandate. We’re part of the state government.”

There was intense outcry against this censorship, but outcry from academics generally has very little or no impact on politics. This time, however, due to whatever behind-the-scenes actions may have been going on along with academic outcry, UF reversed its policy on November 5. And due to that, perhaps, and whatever else might be going on behind the scenes at UF, President Fuchs announced on January 5, 2022 that he will be stepping down “in about a year”.

He’s claiming victory:

“When I was appointed in 2014, I was asked to make three commitments to the Board of Trustees and the Board of Governors,” Fuchs said in the video. “First, that I would work to raise the stature of UF to be among the nation’s top 10 public universities. Second, that UF would launch and complete a $3 billion fundraising campaign. Third, that UF would not increase its tuition while I served as president. Those promises were made and those promises were kept.”

It seems that Fuchs, like many other people, defines “stature” as “rich” – a university with $3 billion is a university of high stature. But a university is supposed to be measured by the learning it makes possible, and its fidelity to objective investigation and free debate. It’s depressing to read that he will remain at UF as faculty in the engineering department.

Let’s hope this is a victory, and that the next UF president will be dedicated to the traditional definition of stature.

“A Template for Academic Freedom”

A shorter note than usual this time, to refer you all to a new weapon in the battle against censorship in education in the U.S.

Three faculty members–Valerie Johnson of DePaul University, Jennifer Ruth of Portland State University, and Emily Houh of the University of Cincinnati–wrote this two-page template for an Academic Senate Resolution that faculty at any institution can adapt to present to their own Academic Senate. The goal is to “get as many faculty senates as possible to adopt a resolutions called ‘Defending Academic Freedom to Teach about Race and Gender Justice and Critical Race Theory.'”

You can see the actual template here–it’s a Google doc that faculty can download to a local computer and edit for presentation to their own Academic Senate.

It’s refreshing to see the legalese of “WHEREAS” used, for once, in the name of fighting censorship:

WHEREAS state legislative proposals are being introduced across the United States that target academic discussions of racism and related issues in American history in schools, colleges and universities.
WHEREAS the term “divisive” is indeterminate, subjective, and chills the capacity of educators to explore a wide variety of topics based on subjective criteria that are inapposite from the goals of education and the development of essential critical thinking skills;
WHEREAS educating about systemic barriers to realizing a multiracial democracy based on race or gender should be understood as central to the active and engaged pursuit of knowledge in the 21^st century to produce engaged and informed citizens;
…THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that Senate resolutely rejects any attempts by bodies external to the faculty to restrict or dictate university curriculum on any matter, including matters related to racial and social justice, and will stand firm against encroachment on faculty authority by the legislature or the Boards of Trustees.

That’s just a short excerpt. If you are a faculty member at a higher-ed institution, go to the link and download it. If you know a faculty member, point them to it. This is a way to help do our part in this battle against censorship meant to shut down education on racism, sexism, and other ongoing human problems that have and do exist in the U.S.

November 2021 round-up: attacks on academic freedom in Florida and Texas

There’s a lot to include in any wrap-up of the battle going on in the U.S. right now to make colleges and universities nothing more than weapons in the hands of Americans who want to dismantle our democracy. Through sheer chance, we began our coverage of the University of Florida on the first of this month, and that story has continued to evolve throughout November. In our November 1 post, we described how three political science faculty members were refused permission to serve as expert court witnesses during a lawsuit challenging Florida’s new voting restriction law because, as UF president Kent Fuchs put it in a written statement,

It is important to note that the university did not deny the First Amendment rights or academic freedom of professors Dan Smith, Michael McDonald and Sharon Austin. Rather, the university denied requests of these full-time employees to undertake outside paid work that is adverse to the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution.

That is, UF employees will not testify against a state policy because then the state will cut funding to the university. The idea that state universities will lose funding if their faculty criticize the state is a new one, at least in the U.S., and it makes “the state” sound a lot less like Florida and a lot more like “the State”, as in “state-controlled media” or “state-controlled education”.

Reaction was swift, from inside and outside UF. The next day, higher ed reporters wrote that “Administrators denied requests from a fourth professor who had asked to participate in litigation supporting mask mandates against [the state of] Florida…

The professor, the pediatrician Jeffrey L. Goldhagen, was asked to testify and serve as a declarant in litigation that followed Gov. Ron DeSantis’s executive order that forbade mask mandates in schools as the Delta variant of Covid-19 tore through the state. Goldhagen is chief of the division of community and societal pediatrics at the University of Florida‘s College of Medicine, in Jacksonville, and a professor in pediatric palliative care. Goldhagen said he would have spoken about why masks work and why children need protection from the virus.
…Goldhagen’s case appears to contradict the university’s earlier explanation for why the political-science professors’ testimony was blocked. The campus’s president, W. Kent Fuchs, and provost, Joe Glover, wrote on Monday night that the political-science professors would be “free” to testify “pro bono on their own time without using university resources.” Goldhagen wrote in the disclosure he submitted to the university that he would not be using university resources and indicated, when asked if he would be paid more than $5,000 annually, that he would not. He told The Chronicle that administrators never separately asked him if he would be paid at all.

The very next day–November 3–it was revealed that a faculty member at another state university, Florida International University, who supported the Florida voting restriction law was allowed to testify in its favor by FIU:

Court records show that the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee hired a Florida International University professor, Dario Moreno, as an “expert witness” in League of Women Voters of Florida v. Lee, which challenges the restrictive voting law.
At Florida International, a public university, administrators signed off on Moreno’s outside-employment request with little fanfare. The “Outside Activity/Conflict of Interest Form” includes no comments or feedback to Moreno — just a couple of sign-offs by his superiors. Though the filled-out form does not specify the lawsuit, it names a law firm — Shutts & Bowen — listed on the same court documents that name Moreno as an expert witness for the Republican committees.
…Moreno, who could not be reached for comment, is an associate professor in the politics and international-relations department. He has previously been paid by the Florida Legislature to defend Republican-drawn redistricting maps in court. According to a 2015 article in the Tampa Bay Times, Moreno had been “hired by the Florida Legislature to be an expert witness in defense of every GOP-drawn redistricting map since 1994.”

Uproar over the discrepancy led UF to issue a statement saying their faculty could indeed testify against the voting law, but only if they were not paid. FIU put no such stricture on Moreno as he testified in favor of the law, and he billed for 112 hours’ worth of compensation.

Where does the fault lie–with the State of Florida’s Republican-led government, which may send a message to its colleges and universities that any criticism of the government will be punished? or with those institutions, like UF and FIU, that are all too willing to accept this situation? or with the general public, which includes people who support the situation and people who do not support it, who do nothing?

Silke-Maria Warnock, a faculty member at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, throws down the challenge we are all facing:

It’s rarely a good sign if you find yourself wondering how to translate certain German words: Gleichschaltung,for instance, or vorauseilender Gehorsam. But reading the news out of the University of Florida, where two administrators informed three faculty members that they were not permitted to testify as expert witnesses in a court challenge to Florida’s voter-suppression laws, will send you down that road.
Gleichschaltung is the process by which institutions are brought under the control of totalitarian ideology. It is frequently rendered as “coordination” or “synchronization,” but those terms lack the terrifying connotation of switches flipped, one by one, until the same ideological current flows through every previously independent institution.
Vorauseilender Gehorsam means “obedience ahead of the command.” The Yale historian Timothy Snyder translates it as “anticipatory obedience,” and that is close enough, but it doesn’t quite capture the scurrying servility implied in “vorauseilen,” to hurry ahead.
We don’t know on whose orders David E. Richardson, dean of the university’s college of arts and sciences, rejected the request of Daniel A. Smith, chair of its political-science department, to testify as an expert witness in the voting-rights case; or on whose orders Gary Wimsett, UF’s assistant vice president for conflicts of interest, rejected the requests of Michael McDonald, who studies national elections, and Sharon Wright Austin, who studies the political behavior of African Americans, to do the same. All three faculty members had previously testified as expert witnesses against the state in other cases, and the university had never declared them to be subject to conflicts of interest.
Unless we want to believe that two different administrators independently invented the same policy from scratch and presented it in near-identical terms, we have to conclude that Richardson and Wimsett acted on orders from above. The notion that they simply anticipated such orders is, in some regards, even worse… Whether they got their orders from the trustees, the president, the provost, or from Gov. Ron DeSantis or one of his minions will emerge in due course. But no matter where the directive originated, both men should have refused to carry it out. They should instead have offered their resignations. You do not obey such commands, you do not hurry ahead to destroy your university’s reputation at the bidding of an authoritarian regime.
…The implications of the assertion that the faculty must not act in a manner adverse to the regime’s interest — “activities that may pose a conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida create a conflict for the University of Florida” — are staggering. If you are not allowed to bear witness against voter suppression in court, why would you be allowed to study the effects of voter suppression in the first place, or to teach your students about them? Such research and such teaching are not in Ron DeSantis’s interest, either, and by the logic of Richardson’s denial, any activity that is not in Ron DeSantis’s interest is not in the interest of the University of Florida.
…the university’s decision to declare itself an arm of DeSantis’s government rather than an independent institution beholden to the production and dissemination of knowledge and expertise represents an instance of Gleichschaltung that will be more difficult to reverse. It will only get worse. That it is the democratic franchise itself that is at stake in the court case in question only highlights how deep the threat is. Access to the vote is to democracy as freedom of speech is to the university: fundamental, constitutive. Democracies go bankrupt the same way everybody else does: very slowly, then all of a sudden. We are still at “slowly.” All of a sudden is scheduled for Tuesday, November 8, 2022. If Florida’s administrators have ever asked themselves how they would have acted in 1932, now they know.

The date of November 8, 2022 refers to the next election day, when Governor DeSantis is up for re-election.

Of course, it’s not just Florida. If our CRT page has taught us anything, it’s that democracy is under attack in all 50 states, and that higher ed is a much-hated target. Most recently, the University of Texas at Austin has halted a research study “on the effectiveness of antiracism training for white children”–the original “critical race theory” topic that began our own coverage of CRT.

The name of the university is different, but the attack is the same:

This follows a complaint to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that the project is racially discriminatory, among other criticism. his follows a complaint to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that the project is racially discriminatory, among other criticism.

–It’s astounding and depressing that a single, horrible argument has gained so much credibility: that teaching about racism is racist. Our first CRT page post, Truth v. Myth: Trump’s Executive Order on Diversity Education, thoroughly explores this double-speak. Teaching Americans that racism existed in the past and still exists in the present, and takes the form of white racism against non-white people in our laws (institutional racism), is, the argument goes, racist because it makes white people feel bad by assuming that they are racist until they prove themselves non-racist. It is imperative, in this argument, that no white person ever feel bad or consider whether they participate in or benefit from racism, institutional and otherwise, and the deeper, much more screwed-up message is that non-white people are racist. Non-white people assume that white people are racist, which is racist.

To be brief, in a society where racism against non-white people is deeply embedded in law and social more, every white person does indeed have to make an effort to change this situation, and remove racist laws and representations from our nation.

To return to this particular UTA story, it seems logical that if CRT is “new” and suspect, it should be objectively, scientifically tested through studies of its impact. That’s what was happening at UTA. But its opponents could not take the chance that the study might prove that white children were not damaged by learning about racism, and so have shut it down, with the university’s meek acquiesence–or its gleichschaltung:

Numerous professors are asking the university to allow the research to proceed during the internal and external reviews, arguing that UT Austin’s institutional review board previously approved the project, as did peer reviewers during a competitive internal funding process.
These professors warn that halting research due to outside complaints threatens the integrity of the study at hand and, more generally, chills free inquiry into timely subjects such as antiracism.
UT Austin “leadership’s decision to pause elements of the study based on the mere filing of a complaint, and before any assessment of whether the complaint poses a credible claim, compromises the integrity of the research and the academic freedom to conduct research and draw conclusions rooted in evidence,” 18 UT Austin education professors said this week in a letter to President Jay Hartzell and Provost Sharon Wood.
…“The leadership’s decision to pause any aspects of the study has the effect of legitimizing actions that, however unfounded, seek to suppress scholarly pursuit of truth and the advancement of scientific knowledge.”
The purpose of the study, according to a recruitment flier, is to explore “overall engagement with the GoKAR! program, as well as the potential for the program to reduce bias and increase awareness of racism.”
The study hit a speed bump after Mark Perry, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Michigan and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, filed a complaint with the Dallas OCR office alleging violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race.
UT Austin “blatantly violates Title VI by illegally engaging in racial discrimination on the basis of skin color by promoting, sponsoring, offering, and marketing a discriminatory program that engages in racial segregation,” Perry wrote to the OCR. “In violation of Title VI, the University’s GoKAR! Program operates illegally and exclusively for caregivers and their 4-5 year old children who both must identify as white and illegally excludes and discriminates against and excludes non-white caregivers and their 4-5 year old children on the basis of their race and skin color.”
…Victor Saenz, chair of educational leadership and policy at UT Austin and the first of the 18 education professors to sign the letter of concern, said via email that he wanted “to clarify that we’ve been in constant communication with all levels of UT leadership throughout this review process.” The university is “working expeditiously to help resolve this matter to ensure our faculty are being fully supported.”
Saenz’s letter to Wood and Hartzell tells something of a different story: “We are deeply concerned by the request to pause any aspect of the research. The university’s actions raise serious concerns regarding the differential treatment of research based on subject matter and viewpoint. In our experience, and in consulting with individuals who have extensive experience interacting with the [OCR] and/or expertise in academic freedom and civil rights, this is an atypical and unprecedented response from a university.”
…Referencing several critical blog posts and news articles about the study, some of which suggest that the project amounts to training, not research, [a letter from UTA faculty] says that “to succumb to political coercion, especially as it relates to scholarship that confronts anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and any other forms of oppression, compromises the central function of a public university. The university’s actions send a message that risks censoring and chilling professor speech based on viewpoint, running afoul of central tenets of the First Amendment.”

Yes, Perry is saying that a study of white children’s responses to educational materials that will help change racist attitudes about non-white people is racist because it doesn’t allow non-white children to participate–it’s segregation. Perry is deeply concerned that non-white children are not being given the chance to learn how not to be racist, perhaps against other non-white children, but given everything we have learned about this topic, it seems safer to bet that Perry wants non-white children to learn not to be racist against white children.

If only this type of university-supported attack on science, the objectivity of higher ed, and our national commitment to liberty and justice for all were truly “atypical and unprecedented”. This snowball is quickly growing and the hill it rolls down becomes steeper and steeper.

We’ll end as we always do–everyone must do their part to stop this takeover and dismantling of our democracy. Get involved in whatever legal and non-violent ways that you can, where you are, locally and nationally. Stop the gleichschaltung before it becomes a way of life.

This time it’s Nebraska: another state to ban teaching about racism?

This time it’s Nebraska. On July 26, Governor Pete Ricketts tweeted (because Twitter is where state policy should be formed and debated) that

I strongly urge the Board of Regents to pass the resolution opposing the imposition of Critical Race Theory on students, so we keep academic freedom alive and well at the University of Nebraska.
Additionally, the University of Nebraska should consider it an honor to be listed on the AAUP’s censure list alongside notable conservative institutions, including Brigham Young University, Catholic University of America, and Hillsdale College.

The AAUP is the American Association of University Professors. Nebraska is only the latest state to join the movement to censor K12 and college instruction:

On March 18 we wrote about the Iowa state legislature working to incorporate the anti-justice language and intent of the Trump Executive Order 13950 of September 22, 2020 (Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping), which we spilled so much ink on late last year. The University of Iowa is being pressured by the state legislature to end diversity education for students and staff.
Then on March 23 we posted about the Idaho state legislature attempting to do the same. Then, just over a month later came the terrible update: they did. On April 29 the Idaho House approved legislation aimed at preventing public and charter schools and universities from teaching critical race theory, which examines the ways in which race and racism influence American politics, culture and the law.
On May 14, we posted about New Hampshire, whose House Bill HB544–“An Act relative to the propagation of divisive concepts”–is yet another move to make teaching Americans about racism illegal.
On June 7, we posted about Oklahoma and Kansas: Oklahoma Governor Keven Stitt signed legislation to ban critical race theory, and department chairs at Pittsburg State received an urgent email summons to “inquire” whether Critical Race Theory is being taught in any PSU classes. “The specific information would be 1. yes or no and 2. if yes which course(s). The response needs a short timeline as I need to have this information to the Dean’s office by the end of the day.”

We believe at this point Nebraska makes 17 states that have passed or are considering legislation to censor instruction. The irony of using censorship to protect freedom is so grating; how can this transparently illogical strategy be so successful every time?

The resolution Ricketts speaks of was introduced by U of Nebraska Regent Jim Pillen. It reads:

Whereas the campus and facilities of a university are places for open reflection, discussion, study, research, and learning and
Whereas America is the best country in the world and anyone can achieve the American Dream here and
Whereas education, free speech, and sound learning are the keys to freedom and opportunity in this country and
Whereas we oppose discrimination in any form and
Whereas Critical Race Theory does not promote inclusive and honest dialogue and education on campus and
Whereas Critical Race Theory proponents seek to silence opposing views and disparage important American ideals
Be it resolved that the Regents of the University of Nebraska oppose any imposition of Critical Race Theory in curriculum.

The vague language is so insulting. “Any” “imposition” of “Critical Race Theory”? What’s an “imposition”? Isn’t any syllabus with required reading on it “imposing” that content on students? The word “any” allows just that–a definition of “imposition” so broad it becomes at once meaningless and an effective total ban on anything that anyone decides is “critical race theory”.

The University of Nebraska has been simmering ever since 2018, when a white grad student teaching adjunct flipped off a white undergrad campaigning on campus for the neo-conservative Turning Point USA organization. The two got into an argument, the grad student gave the undergrad the finger, it was filmed, and all hell broke loose as neo-conservatives claimed it as yet another proof that white Americans are under constant threat and attack on college campuses.

The AAUP censured UNL for suspending Lawton from teaching, and that’s the censure list that governor Ricketts says the state should be proud to be on.

U of Nebraska system president Ted Carter and four campus chancellors have published a defense of academic freedom, which reads in part “Issues around race, equity and the fight against racism are an important part of our country’s story and they have an appropriate place in our classrooms,” which says it as well as we ever could.

Once a term like CRT becomes widespread, it’s pretty reasonable to assume most people using it don’t know what it really means. That’s the way neo-conservatives and white supremacists want it: vague enough to be scary, broad enough to include anything they don’t like.

To allow an individual to define, on his own, what CRT is and does, and therefore to ban it for all, is something we would expect in a dictatorship, like when Viktor Orbán re-writes the Hungarian constitution on his lunch break to confirm his own dictatorial powers.

Our response?

Whereas a crucial component of any claim that America is the best country in the world is an appreciation of the Founders, and
whereas the Founders welcomed and dedicated themselves to open debate, and
whereas the Founders wrote in great detail and great specificity about how they thought this country should be governed, and
whereas the Founders did not hide behind vague wording to hide their agenda, and
whereas the Founders didn’t write threats into our founding documents, and
whereas the Founders didn’t impose censorship to protect any individual agenda,
Be it resolved that all of these vague, threatening censorship laws are un-American, and destroy anything that was great about America.

What makes a country great is its dedication and commitment to facing its problems honestly, in order to slowly but surely resolve them. Find out what your state legislature and state education system are doing and speak out against any attempts to introduce censorship defined as patriotism.

BLM protests are patriotic

We’ve noticed this week that one of our posts–The Boston Tea Party and a tradition of violence–which we posted back on November 21, 2011, has been getting a lot of traffic. We wonder if this is connected with people searching for historical justifications or damnations of public protest currently taking place in America. Let us say unequivocally that nonviolent protest in the name of liberty and justice for all is one of the greatest acts of patriotism that any person, anywhere, including the United States of America, can make. Black Lives Matter protestors are patriotic Americans desperately trying to save this country from those un-American citizens who would turn it into a race-based dictatorship.

We at the HP are taking part in Black Lives Matter protests nightly in our towns. It’s the very least we can do to fight against those who want an end to America as a land of liberty and justice for all.

The U.S. is founded on the Third Article of the Bill of Rights added to our Constitution, which says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Peaceful protests (“assemblies”) which demand change from our government (“petition the government for a redress of grievances”) are not just some kind of inheritance from the past. The right to peaceful protest against injustice is fundamental to our form of government, and our rights as citizens.

Gradually since the 1980s, and the presidency of Ronald Reagan, we’ve built a harmful paradox in America: the government is at once “the problem,” and needs to be utterly dismantled so people can be free of taxes and laws they don’t like; but at the same time, people who protest publicly against the government are ridiculed or threatened as dangerous outliers.

To be frank, it’s a specific kind of protestor who is threatened as un-American: the non-white, non-male, non-Christian, and/or non-straight protestor. As racist, sexist, and homophobic people attempt to make white straight Christian male the definition of “American”, the only American who has the right to protest because he’s protesting all those other “non” people, we find that neo-Nazi marchers are basically unopposed by police while everyone else (the “nons”) are met with military-level shows of force.

These anti-“non” protestors usually claim that they are the majority and therefore have the right of tyranny over everyone else. This claim grows in ferocity as white men steadily slip into the minority of the U.S. population, and is transformed into a call for oligarchy–government by the minority, oppressing the majority.

Just two months after the birth of this blog, in May 2008, we posted the first version of our tyranny of the majority post, in which we pointed out that our three-part government is set up specifically to prevent tyranny of the majority by empowering the judiciary to protect and uphold the rights of minority citizens. We’ve reposted this almost a dozen times since then, as gay marriage was legalized in individual states, and as Americans were heard wondering why the courts “pass laws” they don’t like. America is not an oligarchy. It’s a democracy. That’s the torch you must accept as it is passed to you if you want to claim that you are patriotic.

So when we see people searching out our post on the riots that characterized pre-Revolution Boston, we feel uneasy because we fear that our condemnation of those riots will be used to condemn Black Lives Matter protests. It should not be. Here’s why.

As we put it in our post,

When you read about the events leading up to the Tea Party, you quickly become a little uncomfortable with the readiness of Bostonians to physically attack people and destroy their property as the first means to their ends.

…This willingness to use violence got mixed reviews from patriot leaders. Some felt it was justifiable because it was in protest of an unfair government. Others felt it gave the patriot cause a bad name, and attracted lowlifes who weren’t fighting for democracy. All of them knew it had to be carefully managed to keep it under control: at any moment a mob nominally in the service of colonial leaders could become a force that knew no loyalty and could not be controlled by anyone.

It is certainly unsettling for modern-day Americans to read about the tactics our ancestors were ready to use when they believed themselves to be crossed. Mob violence is not something we condone today, and so much of the violence in colonial Boston seems to have been based not in righteous anger but in personal habit and popular tradition that it’s hard to see it as truly patriotic.

Patriot leaders like Samuel Adams knew they would have to keep violence out of their official platform, disassociating the decisions of the General Court from the purveyors of mob violence. The Tea Party would be a triumph of this difficult position.

The problem with pre-Tea Party Boston was that it relied on mob violence–people tearing down the houses of men who they felt were unjust, throwing bricks at them, pouring hot tar over their naked bodies and covering them with feathers, then forcing them to run through the streets or be beaten. That is mob violence. Those are acts of revenge. They do not further the cause of justice. They can never be actions taken in the name of justice.

Public protest is different from mob violence. Public protest can be violent or non-violent. Violent public protest is just one half-step above mob violence, because it cannot be controlled in a way that promotes justice. It is about revenge, not change.

Non-violent public protest is, by its very nature, controlled to force change rather than take revenge. Building are not burned, people are not beaten. It is the ultimate in democracy, and a legacy given to Americans by their Founders.

Unfortunately, there are always low-lifes who attach themselves to a non-violent protest, wait until it is peacefully ending, then start looting and throwing smoke bombs and forcing violence. Some do this to further their own ends of looting and/or expressing their contempt for human suffering and individual liberty. Some do it to make the protestors–the “nons”–look bad. People who have contempt for, and fear of, liberty and justice for all infiltrate the crowd to destroy the movement.

Those who protest against racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious bigotry are patriotic Americans, and the true inheritors of the American Revolution.

Free speech in dangerous times

We were reading an article about a student at Georgia Southern University who recently gave a presentation in class in which he endorsed racism and white supremacy. You can read the article here. The abstract of the article was this:

Georgia Southern freshman promotes white supremacist ideology in a class presentation. The university says the presentation falls within his free speech rights. Now students of color say they feel unsafe because of his protected speech.

We were struck by this summary. The idea that non-white students feel unsafe because of protected hate speech is meant, we think, to represent a failure of the American system. But that is exactly the situation our Constitution and our legal precedent support and protect–even promote. Hate speech should be protected and it should make people who are targets of the hate, and people who are not targets but support liberty and justice for all, feel unsafe.

Why? Because real democracy is not a “set it and forget it” mechanism. People don’t establish a just system and then sit back while it runs. In our real democracy, people are allowed freedom of speech, even some (not all) forms of hate speech, because we didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole of someone saying that anything they disagree with is hate speech. That’s what dictators do: they say that their opponents are attacking them. The student who supports white supremacy would probably say that non-white people who protest him are using hate speech against him.

Instead, our government and laws say that most hate speech is protected for two solid reasons: first, we all have the right to freedom of speech; and next because we have laws in place that protect people against physical violence and legal discrimination based on race, sex, and religion.

And, crucially, the main reason we protect even hate speech is that outlawing it simply does not work. There will always be people who feel they can profit by hate. You cannot eradicate this human characteristic. Attempts to outlaw it only give it more power: if all hate speech is illegal, just spouting it makes the speaker a hero to the haters because the speaker seems brave–they’re risking their freedom to speak out. If it’s legal, that power is stripped away from it. So rather than outlaw it, we allow it within a system that contains it to speech alone. Speech is one thing; actual harm to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in business, relationships, society, etc., are another. The former is protected while the latter is not.

When someone promotes racism, the answer is not to silence them. The answer does not lie with the perpetrator. It lies with all those who hear the perpetrator. It’s our reaction and our response that are the solution. When we hear hate speech, the answer is not just to hound that person off the stage. When we read that non-white students feel unsafe, we can’t shake our heads and say “I wish the university would expel that student. Then the problem would be solved.” We know the problem would not be solved, because that student is not the problem–he’s just one representative of it.

The real solution is to work harder, redouble our efforts, to ensure that our actual laws are not changed to protect actual harm (as defined above). Monitor your local and state government as well as the federal government. Support candidates who vow to protect legal equity. Efforts are going on in many state legislatures to overturn voting rights, access to health care and education, and other pillars of equity. A student giving a presentation is not the problem here. The problem is the ever-present minority attempt to undermine our system, to undo liberty and justice for all, which ebbs and flows, shrinks and expands, over time. We are in a period of expansion that we need to fight.

Monitoring our system of government is hard and incremental. People feel impatient with this, and convince themselves that an immediate, violent protest will do the trick. But as we say in our post The Boston Tea Party and the tradition of American violence, that’s not the strategy that built our nation. It’s a strategy of revolution that we left behind long ago:

When you read about the events leading up to the Tea Party, you quickly become a little uncomfortable with the readiness of Bostonians to physically attack people and destroy their property as the first means to their ends. Violence was sanctioned in odd ways in colonial Boston.

…In August 1765, effigies of a British minister and an American stamp distributor (of the unpopular Stamp Act) were hung in the South End; at dusk the effigies were taken down by a crowd who then completely destroyed a building owned by the stamp distributor, went to the man’s house and threw rocks at the windows, broke in, and destroyed some furniture. When Governor Hutchinson tried to reason with the rioters, they threw bricks at him. The stamp distributor resigned the next day.

…Tea commissioners were routinely summoned to public meetings by anonymous letters which threatened their lives as well as their jobs if they did not show up. Commissioners and others deemed hostile to the patriot cause were tarred and feathered—the “American torture.”

…This willingness to use violence got mixed reviews from patriot leaders. Some felt it was justifiable because it was in protest of an unfair government. Others felt it gave the patriot cause a bad name, and attracted lowlifes who weren’t fighting for democracy. All knew it had to be carefully managed to keep it under control: at any moment a mob nominally in the service of colonial leaders could become a force that knew no loyalty and could not be controlled by anyone.

…Patriot leaders like Samuel Adams knew they would have to keep violence out of their official platform, disassociating the decisions of the General Court from the purveyors of mob violence.

Violence for violence is the classic “two wrongs make a right” argument. Hate speech on campus or anywhere must be met with substantive, long-term action, not a brief storm of vocal outrage. Individuals are symptoms, not causes. Anyone who promotes white supremacy or any other kind of hate speech can only be successfully countered by efforts to protect the legal system and system of government that contain them and limit their hate to speech alone. Letting hate speech incidents turn into shouting matches in the street and nothing else does not fix the problem. When people finish shouting, those lawmakers who feel they have more to gain by subverting our system than protecting it will quietly go about rewriting the laws in their state or our nation to keep “minorities” down, denying them fair access to housing and jobs and education and voting.

In the article, Daniela Rodriguez, an organizer for the Savannah [Georgia] Undocumented Youth Alliance made these statements:

“He feels safe to speak up, and now I can only imagine how many more are out there with this racist mentality of hate,” said Rodriguez, who is the lead organizer for the Savannah Undocumented Youth Alliance, or SUYA, which advocates for the rights of undocumented immigrants in Georgia.

“Now they feel very comfortable, very brave to do something worse,” Rodriguez said. “The administration should do something before something else happens.”

…“That’s really a problem,” Rodriguez said. “Students of color don’t feel safe speaking up, but white supremacists feel safe.”

Rodriguez is out there doing the long, hard, invisible work of keeping our system just, and we applaud her. She was doing this work before the uproar at SGU, and will likely continue to do it long after we’ve all forgotten about it. We take slight issue with her overall message, though; yes, we can imagine there are more people out there who feel that being racist will help them in some way, and feel a little more bold about it after this student made his public stand. Maybe some white supremacists feel a little more safe now, at least at SGU or in Georgia.

But that’s the story of humankind. It seems there will never be a human society that is not plagued by members who want to profit by hate if that’s an option. The story of America, on the other hand, is people who know that we are committed by our founding principles to do better than this. People who pledge allegiance to a flag that symbolizes a republic dedicated to liberty and justice for all. People who know that the battle to live by those principles is never done. That every generation must re-commit to that battle personally. Some Americans feeling unsafe is not an indictment of our system, it’s a bat-signal to us to rise up to protect our system, to activate it to do its job, which is protecting those Americans. In America, not feeling safe is not the end of the story. It’s the catalyst to reclaim safety for all. It’s a challenge we must–and do–rise to, every time.

Obstruction or democracy?

We keep hearing TV broadcasters asking Democratic members of Congress whether their attempts to rebut the Trump Administration’s platform isn’t just the same sort of obstructionism that Republicans were accused of during the Obama Administration.

In a discussion about whether Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation would be blocked by Democrats who a) were skeptical of his record and b) were protesting the Republicans’ refusal to give President Obama’s candidate Merrick Garland a hearing, a Democratic member of Congress was asked, “Isn’t that the same sort of obstruction of justice Democrats accused the Republicans of when they wouldn’t allow Merrick Garland a hearing?”

In interviews about blocking the Republican alternative to the American Health Care Act, Democrats are repeatedly asked whether their efforts aren’t just like the Republicans voting over and over to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act.

And discussions of the travel ban on seven Muslim nations have gone the same way: “aren’t you just obstructing anything the new president wants to do?”

The list goes on. We want to just step in to say no, it’s not obstructionist to stand up for democracy, liberty, and justice for all. Those Republicans who wanted to block expanded health care, a Democratic president’s Supreme Court Justice, and our Constitution’s ban on creating religious tests were all engaged in anti-American, anti-democratic harm. Those Democrats who are now trying to block reduced health care, the fantasy that the Constitution says a President can’t nominate a new Justice in an election year, and religious discrimination are engaged in pro-American, pro-democratic good.

It’s not just member of Congress of course; college students protesting the invitation of speakers to their campuses who promote discrimination and practice hate speech have also been accused of violating the First Amendment by denying those speakers their freedom of speech. But not all speech is protected, and hate speech is certainly not. Refusing to treat someone who promotes discrimination differently than someone who does not is not protecting fairness and equality, it’s protecting hate speech, and saying it’s no different than other speech in the guise of protecting, somehow, “diversity”.

As Kate Knibbs says, “The phrase ‘ideological diversity’ is a Trojan horse designed to help bring disparaged thought onto campuses, to the media, and into vogue. It is code for granting fringe right-wing thought more credence in communities that typically reject it, and nothing more.”

Let’s not let those who would violate our Constitution tell us that by standing up for it we are being obstructionist.

Next time: back–yes, back after all–to Obama’s farewell address.

What does the First Amendment say?

Hello and welcome to part 2 of our series on the Bill of Rights. We’re moving into the First Amendment here. It’s the celebrity Amendment in the Bill of Rights. “First Amendment rights”, “my First Amendment rights”—these phrases are like “Washington crossing the Delaware” or “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes”: famous, oft-repeated, but often difficult for the people saying them to really explain. What are our First Amendment rights?

Let’s read the text of the amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

What is “an establishment of religion”? A state religion. The FA says that Congress (the legislative branch of the federal government) cannot make any religion the official state religion of the United States. A state religion is supported financially by the federal government of a nation, which also puts barriers in the way of other religions to prevent them from gaining traction. In the 18th century when this amendment was written, every kingdom in Europe had a state religion. Britain’s was Anglicanism. The Anglican church received tax support and if you were a member of another church it was hard to get a job in the government. Go back a century to the 1600s and it would be illegal to be a member of any other church. “State” religion is endorsed by the government, and so the head of the government—the monarch—is the head of the church. Henry VIII created the Anglican church when he made himself, not the Pope, the head of the Catholic church in England. An English person who rejected Anglicanism was rejecting the authority of the monarch, which is treason, which is a capital offense. The Puritans and Pilgrims left England because they could not accept the Anglican church without major reforms, and refused to worship in it as they were told to. This was political treason and made them criminals.

By rejecting the concept of a state religion, the concept of the head of state (our president) being the head of a church, and the concept of forcing people to either belong to the state-approved religion or stand trial for treason, the Framers were making a bold and revolutionary stand that went directly against everything the great European powers had fought for during the Thirty Years’ War. We tend to think of a state religion as obviously contrary to democracy, but European powers would not reach this conclusion for over a century, and in Europe the old state religions are still powerful. In France, non-Catholics are rare. In Britain, Anglicanism is the norm. Even people who don’t practice their religion are born into its culture, which by now is indistinguishable from the socio-political culture to them.

Finally, this statement is saying the U.S. government will be completely civil. There is complete separation of church and state. The federal government will play no role in the religious life of the country, and no religious beliefs can shape our laws.

Why is “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” tacked on to the first statement? Of course this is all one sentence, and makes more sense as one sentence, but we had to pull it apart to discuss state religion. This phrase is important on its own, though: it doesn’t just reiterate the main message that there is no state church, but also forbids the federal government to outlaw any religion. Again, this was radical for the time. In Europe practicing any religion other than the state religion was heresy and treason. The U.S. is not only saying it won’t impose religious uniformity by adopting a state religion, it’s saying it will not just allow but protect by law the proliferation of religious practices.

This was a big deal in a country that mostly hated and feared Catholics. If Congress had decided to outlaw Catholicism in 1787, most Americans would have been very supportive. But the Framers are making an enormous commitment to true democracy by saying no religion will be outlawed in the U.S.

What does it mean to say Congress will not abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press? This is the most famous part of the celebrity Amendment. Freedom of speech—if you asked Americans to name one phrase that sums up all our freedoms, this might be it. It’s so important that the concept and definition of “speech” has been expanded over the centuries to include clothes, tattoos, parades, art, and other non-mouth-moving activities. In 1919 the Supreme Court decided that some kinds of speech are indeed illegal; any speech that endangers other people is not protected (this was the case that gave us the famous example of shouting Fire! in a crowded theater when there is no fire; someone who does that will be arrested). But that decision was overturned 50 years later because Americans have identified themselves so completely with freedom of speech that we found a way around the problem of endangerment (that ruling said that only speech that creates a dangerous situation faster than the police can arrive to mediate it is illegal).

Again, this amendment is radical. No kingdom in Europe allowed its citizens to criticize the monarch, the government, or the state religion, without punishment. After nearly two centuries of religious war and civil war, Europe cracked down hard on anyone who tried to stir up trouble. But the Framers believed Americans could have freedom of speech without abusing it. Libel laws were maintained, of course; we never said you could lie about someone and not be punished if they choose to prosecute. But expressing an opinion would never be illegal in this country.

Isn’t “the press” synonymous with speech? It’s just speech that is printed rather than spoken aloud. But the Framers specifically included the press so they could protect actual printers. Again, the way to start trouble in Europe for nearly 200 years had been to print pamphlets and broadsides criticizing the government and/or church. And for nearly 200 years European powers had punished rebellion by punishing not just the authors of these documents but their printers—men hired to put paper through a printing press who had nothing to do with what was written. The Framers were protecting printing presses, publishers of books, pamphlets, and broadsides as well as newspapers, as well as the authors of all these items. In an age where a book that displeased the government could get not just its author but its printer arrested, this was an important addition to the amendment.

Why protect the right of the people peaceably to assemble? Once more we think of the time the Constitution was born in. In pre-modern Europe, people did not gather in large groups. It just didn’t happen in the course of normal human events. The vast majority of people lived in small villages, where there weren’t enough people to make up large crowds. The only way a large crowd could gather was if there was trouble: someone stirring up the people and urging them to leave their villages and meet in one place, usually to protest the government. These gatherings quickly turned into mobs, and were usually violent. In the cities, people could gather in large crowds but were prevented by the watchful eye of royal authorities from doing so, for the same reason. There was just no acceptable reason why any large crowd would gather in that period. The Reformation period was characterized by mob after mob after mob being put down violently by government forces, causing almost incalculable losses of human life and capital.

So when the Framers said Americans had the right to gather in large groups, they looked like they were inviting trouble. That’s why this part of the amendment is the only one with a caveat: the people must assemble peaceably. Colonial America had a terrible record of mob violence, often sparked for no good reason (see our post The Boston Tea Party and a tradition of violence for more on this). It seemed like the last place where you would be safe allowing people to gather in large groups. But part of freedom of speech is freedom of assembly—people have to be allowed to talk together. Knowing the fondness for mob violence that Americans had, the Framers offer the one condition in the amendment by saying Americans can gather together but only if they are not violent. They didn’t say speech was free as long as it didn’t criticize; they didn’t say printers could print anything as long as it didn’t call for violence. But they did restrict public gatherings to peaceful purposes.

What is petitioning the Government for a redress of grievances? This means that Americans can criticize the government, and as you understand by now, this was not on the table in Europe. At a time when Europe was trying to end its centuries of strife by cracking down hard on any public expression, America was inviting its citizens to talk to their government and even make complaints. A redress of grievances is making something wrong right. If someone has injured (grieved) you, they must make it right somehow (redress it). If the government does something wrong, if it violates the Constitution, Americans have the right to demand that the government stop that violation and then make up for the damage it has done. This is two rights in one: the right to demand that the government obey the Constitution, and the right to demand repayment for any violations of the Constitution. This keeps the government honest, and sharpens people’s love for and commitment to the Constitution.

That’s a lot! But then this is the star amendment that, for most Americans, completely sums up who we are and how things here should be. You wouldn’t think another amendment could rival the First in importance, and for about two centuries none did. But in the late 20th century, the Second Amendment was wrested out of obscurity and thrust into the spotlight, and we’ll go over that amendment next time.

Next time: the very clearly military Second Amendment