Floyd Abrams: College Campuses Pose Greatest Threat to Free Speech

What is the greatest threat to free speech in America?

The question was the subject of a lecture this week at Temple University Law School delivered by Floyd Abrams, long one of the nations most prominent First Amendment litigators.

Mr. Abrams, a partner Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, points his finger at academia. Heres an excerpt from his remarks, which were posted online by legal blog Concurring Opinions:

[P]ressures on freedom of expression and all too often the actual suppression of free speech comes not from outside the academy but from within it. And much of it seems to come from a minority of students, who strenuously and, I think it fair to say, contemptuously disapprove of the views of speakers whose view of the world is different than theirs and who seek to prevent those views from being heard. The amount of students who will not tolerate the expression of views with which they differ is less important than the sad reality that repetitive acts of speech suppression within and by our academic institutions persist and seem to grow in amount. And that is shameful.

Mr. Abrams highlights a number of a recent examples of recent campus speech controversies, such as the one that flared at University of California-Irvine earlier this month after student leaders there sought to ban the display of the American flag from a campus lobby.

He also talks about the decision last year by Brandeis University to offer and then withdraw an honorary degree to a human-rights advocate and former Dutch lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali because of her criticisms of Islam.

And Mr. Abrams recounted last years free speech fight at Rutgers University involving former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who reversed her decision to give a commencement address after her selection as speaker drew protests from some students and professors.

Mr. Abrams concludes:

What can one say about this other than to quote from the statement of the American Association of University Professors that, in the clearest language,observed that [o]n a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned or forbidden. No viewpoint or message may be deemed so hateful or disturbing that it may not be expressed. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it well, when he was a Harvard undergraduate before the Civil War and was a student editor of Harvard Magazine. We must, he wrote in 1858, have every train of thought brought before us while we are young, and may as well at once prepare for it.