Monthly Archives: May 2017

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If you dare question the (il)liberal orthodoxy, youre a pariah. And an adjunct professor at UCLA is in danger of becoming another victim.

Keith Fink has taught classes on free speech, contemporary issues, and entertainment law at UCLA for a decade. A lawyer by trade, Fink went on Fox News Channels Tucker Carlson Tonight show earlier in May to discuss the schools attempt tofire him in a star chamber review meeting that excluded him and his representatives.

The administration doesnt like what I have to say, Fink told the Los Angeles Daily News. I also support students basic rights to due process and the school doesnt like that. I show the students how their rights are violated. I dont believe in trigger warnings. I dont walk on eggshells. I dont believe in safe spaces. I run against that current.

The current at UCLA, as well as at most American colleges, is to stifle free speech or anything that runs contrary to the politically correct dogma now practiced on many campuses. Last June an appearanceby former Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos at the school was canceled after protesters blocked the entrance at the beginning, followed by a bomb threat. Another Milo event at UCLA earlier this yearwas also scuttled after the school claimed that it could not provide adequate security.

Fink is now undergoing a review process that he said probably willlead to his dismissal, since hes not a tenured professor at UCLA. His plight has drawn the attention of his students, who held a rally on campus Friday with signs saying free speech is under attack and keep your agenda out of our classroom to support him.

UCLA officials issued a statement Friday with regard to Finks employment, claiming that (t)he content of his courses has never been curtailed. UCLAs process for reviewing instructors is comprehensive and fair, and he has been afforded the full due process considerations mandated by the collective bargaining agreement.

Fink teaches in the Communications Studies Department, which happens to be the same one that your humble correspondent taught nearly20 years ago as a teaching assistant while a graduate student at UCLA. I taught several communications classes on journalism, and one time was asked to givea lecture for an adjunct professor who needed the day off.

Before deliveringmy presentation in front of about 300 students, I carefully reviewed the course material and couldnt help but laugh at the boilerplate liberal talking points about the state of journalism. The most galling item was the claim that the media establishment had an overwhelmingly conservative bias keep in mind that this was at a time whenFox News was in its infancy and the Internet was still being invented by Al Gore.

I ripped apart that lecture and instead gave a talk on the medias liberal bias, backed by my own experience as an actual practicing journalist (as opposed to most professors who teach in communications, including the one I was subbing for). Near the end, I held a no-holds-barred Q&A session and gladly answered each and every question. My presentation was received very well, with a number of students commending me for a refreshing and eye-opening discourse afterward.

Needless to say, I was not asked back for more.

That might be the fate awaiting Fink at UCLA as well since he clearly holds a view on free speech thats no longer acceptable in academia.

That would be a shame, said Mick Mathis, a senior at UCLA who attended Fridays rally.

This is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, Mathis told the Daily News. And its not a marketplace of ideas if theyre trying to get rid of somebody with a contradictory viewpoint.

Follow Samuel Chi on Twitter @ThePlayoffGuru.

The rest is here:
Free Speech Under Siege at UCLA as Conservative Professor Tries to Save Job - Breitbart News

We at the ACLU are often criticized for our unyielding defense of free speech rights. Even our closest allies complain when we defend the free speech rights of Klansmen and assorted other racists, misogynists, online haters, fake news creators, and other toxic speakers. In particular, we hear that such defenses of free speech rights serve not to protect the weak but to protect the powerful in their attacks on the vulnerable.

Recently Ive been re-reading Taylor Branchs Pulitzer Prize-winning book Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, a history of the civil rights movement with a focus on the life of Martin Luther King. Id forgotten what a fantastic telling of the civil rights story it and its two sequels are. But also, rereading the story in light of my work at the ACLU, Ive been struck by the injustice not only of segregation, separate but equal, and the deprivation of voting rights, but the key role that egregious violations of free speech rights played in Southern officials opposition to the movement. Its a reminder that when you mess with First Amendment rights, its ultimately the weak and powerless who lose out the most, even when those rights do sometimes protect the powerful.

All across the segregated South, many thousands of Black Americans went to jail protesting segregation and many of those who went to prison did so on the grounds that they were violating injunctions against protesting and assorted other unconstitutional restrictions on speech.

A key chapter in the movement, for example, was the Albany Movement of 1961 and 1962 in Albany, Georgia. At one point, when a group of prominent Black citizens went to pray for justice on the steps of city hall there, they were arrested. For praying. Several months later, Martin Luther King himself was also arrested in Albany for praying outside city hall for an end to segregation.

A year later, when the focus of the movement had shifted to Birmingham, Sheriff Bull Connor obtained an injunction from a compliant state judge ordering 133 specific people, including movement leaders, not to engage in parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing, or even conduct customarily known as kneel-ins in churches. It was Kings violation of this injunction that landed him in prison for the stint during which he wrote the famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

In 1962, Robert Moses, the fearless and zen-like civil rights hero who circulated across Alabama and Mississippi trying to register Blacks to vote, was handing out leaflets in Sunflower, Mississippi, announcing a voter registration drive. He was arrested by police on the charge of distributing literature without a permit.

In February 1963, a suspicious fire destroyed several black businesses in Greenwood, Mississippi. When one local activist named Sam Block speculated that the fire was a bungled act of arson aimed at the SNCC offices next door, he was arrested by Greenwood police for statements calculated to breach the peace.

Later that year, John Lewis the man now serving in Congress whom President Trump slammed as All talk, talk, talk no action or results was arrested in Selma, Alabama, for carrying a sign outside the courthouse that read One Man/One Vote.

In all these cases and many others like them, the violations of First Amendment rights were so flagrant that they would be laughable were they not such deadly serious business for the men and women risking their lives confronting segregation. Official defenders of segregation seemed to feel the need to keep up a pretense of legality by wrapping their arrests in a justification of injunctions or patently unconstitutional charges like distributing literature without a permit.

When activists were arrested for such things, civil rights groups often appealed to the Justice Department, headed by JFKs brother Robert, but the political interests of the Kennedy Administration were for the whole thing to just go away. After all, Kennedy was elected by a Democratic coalition of White southerners, northern liberals, and Blacks that civil rights split wide open. The Kennedys didnt want their popularity to collapse in the South, and they didnt want to put their fellow Democrats the Southern governors in a bad position with federal intervention.

As a result, civil rights activists claims about the unconstitutional suppression of their speech had to wind their way through the court system largely without DOJ assistance. Because few southern judges were willing to uphold the First Amendment rights of Black Americans, it often fell to federal courts to uphold their rights, and that took time, during which charges could hang over activists.

In one famous case, a group of King supporters ran an ad in The New York Times appealing for donations for the civil rights cause. Among other things, the ad criticized the police in Montgomery, Alabama although it contained several inaccuracies. In response, Montgomery police commissioner L.B. Sullivan filed a defamation lawsuit against top civil rights leaders, including Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth. This was part of a larger effort by Southern officials to use libel law to squelch press coverage of the civil rights movement. When Alabama courts ruled in favor of Sullivan, officials began to seize personal property including automobiles and family land from the civil rights leaders, driving several of them to move out of the South, including Shuttlesworth, who left his Alabama church to move to Cincinnati. The case hung over the activists (and the New York Times) for years until the Supreme Court finally dismissed Sullivans claims in the landmark 1964 free speech case New York Times v. Sullivan.

The illegitimate nature of the charges that were thrown at many civil rights activists has echoes today in the vague, catch-all charges like disturbing the peace that police often abusively levy against protesters and others that anger a police officer in one way or another. It also has echoes in the attempts of some in state legislatures to criminalize dissent in new and creative ways.

When the authorities are allowed to get away with such things, the people who pay most sharply are the people who are out in the streets, trying to push their country to become a better, more just place. Its easy to think of the civil rights movement as a campaign against segregation, which it certainly was, but it was also a campaign for the full spectrum of rights, including freedom of expression. (And lets not forget that civil rights activists privacy rights were of course also violated, most famously by the FBI with its wiretaps of not only of Martin Luther King but of other activists, too.) There was a reason it was called a rights movement.

As my colleague Lee Rowland recently pointed out, our free speech rights are indivisible, with civil rights leaders speech protected by the courts, for example, based on rulings protecting the speech of racists speaking at KKK rallies. If we dont stand up for the First Amendment when racist speech is censored, it is the weak, the powerless, minorities, and those who seek change who will be hurt most in the end.

As Ive argued before, it is in times of political turmoil and conflict when our civil liberties really get tested when angry people who want to change the world hit the streets in protest, and others, such as police officers and other officials, feel contempt and hatred for those doing the protesting. The Sixties was one of those times. Were arguably in the middle of another one. If we are, many protesters will have even more cause to be glad that our First Amendment rights are as solidly established as they are and to hope they remain that way.

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Civil Rights Movement Is a Reminder That Free Speech Is There to Protect the Weak - ACLU (blog)

Students and supporters of a UCLA adjunct professor are protesting what they say is pressure the university is putting on him because of his outspoken conservative politics.

Keith Fink, a lawyer, has taught classes on free speech, contemporary issues, entertainment law and other subjects at UCLA for 10 years. He and student supporters said he may be dismissed from the school because administrators disagree with his views and practices, such as holding seminars on students rights and interviews he gave on Foxs Tucker Carlson Tonight about his charge that UCLA is blocking students from taking his popular free speech course.

The administration doesnt like what I have to say, Fink said by phone Friday. I also support students basic rights to due process and the school doesnt like that. ... I show the students how their rights are violated. ... I dont believe in trigger warnings. I dont walk on eggshells. I dont believe in safe spaces. I run against that current.

Fink, an adjunct professor at the university, said a recent shift in the leadership of the Communication Studies department, where he teaches, has led to pressure on him. He is undergoing a review process that he said could result in his dismissal and which UCLA said is routine for lecturers who have completed 18 quarters of teaching at the school. Fink said he didnt accept a salary in his first years of teaching at UCLA, which is why, administrators told him, the review is taking place now rather than several years ago.

About 25 students and supporters, carrying signs saying Free speech is under attack and Keep your agenda out of our classroom, gathered Friday on campus before bringing a list of demands to Laura Gmez, interim dean of UCLA College Division of Social Sciences which oversees the Communication Studies department, who wasnt in her office when they delivered their list. Among the demands: that Fink be allowed to keep teaching and that the school implement curriculums that increase intellectual tolerance on campus.

Mick Mathis, a senior at UCLA, said pressure on Fink is about curtailing free speech.

This is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, and its not a marketplace of ideas if theyre trying to get rid of somebody with a contradictory viewpoint, Mathis said.

RELATED STORY: Student sues Pierce College over tiny free speech zone

Requests for comment sent to Gmez and to Kerri Johnson, dean of the Communication Studies department, werent returned by deadline Friday.

But university officials issued a statement in response to questions about whether Finks employment at UCLA is under consideration:

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The content of his courses has never been curtailed, and as a lecturer, Mr. Fink is protected by a collective bargaining agreement between UCLA and the American Federation of Teachers, the union to which he belongs as a lecturer. UCLAs process for reviewing instructors is comprehensive and fair, as well as respectful of the privacy normally accorded to personnel procedures. His current review is in-progress, and he has been afforded the full due process considerations mandated by the collective bargaining agreement and that every lecturer undergoing this review receives, said the statement sent by UCLA spokeswoman Rebecca Kendall.

Cynthia Truhan, a UCLA alumna and volunteer at the school, said she came to the protest Friday out of concern that the situation reflects a chilling of free speech at a public school.

As an alumni, I am highly disturbed, because now in our own backyard is a firm example of what is happening across the nation, which I feel is a silencing of free speech of any divergent opinion that varies from the base of that particular university, Truhan said.

Fink and students said that a popular class he teaches, Race, Sex & Politics: Free Speech on Campus, has consistently had more students who want to attend than spots available, yet the school has effectively reduced the class size to around 200 through a cap on enrollment and by moving it to a smaller classroom. Fink said he was allowed nearly 300 seats for past sessions of the class.

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Fink, an alumnus of UCLA, said he is outspoken in his political viewpoints. Asked if he has ever used a racial slur in his class, as a student alleged in one news report, Fink said he has only in the context of discussing free speech.

N-----, c--- ... Of course! I teach harassment. You have to use those words in discussions with students about what constitutes a hostile environment, he said. Its all contextual. That infuriates me, the insinuation that Im using racial epithets, out of context.

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UCLA students say 'free speech is under attack' and a conservative ... - LA Daily News