Opening Outrage
I have just created a new Vox group for First Amendment freaks like me. First Amendment freaks recognize that the fight for free speech is a daily struggle. "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it," Judge Learned Hand wrote in 1944. In other words, we either fight for free speech or we lose it.
As my opening outrage, I offer a controversy that began this spring when a student at Valdosta State University in Georgia decided to protest the university's plan to construct two new parking garages on the campus.
In March, the student, T. Hayden Barnes, posted flyers around the campus that raised environmental questions about the plan. In April, he wrote a letter to the student newspaper. He followed up with a letter to the university president, Ronald M. Zaccari.
Barnes soon received Zaccari's reply. On May 7, he entered his dormitory room to discover that a "notice of administrative withdrawal" had been slipped under his door. "As a result of recent activities directed towards me by you....you are considered to present a clear and present danger to this campus," Zaccari wrote. To be readmitted, Barnes would have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and to offer evidence "that you will be receiving on-going therapy."
As evidence of Barnes' purported derangement, Zaccari attached to his letter an image of the student's Facebook page, which contains a number of images related to the parking lot controversy, including Zaccari's face. According to the university president, this was a "threatening document." The university was also worried because Barnes had "posted a link on his website page to an article discussing the massacre at Virginia Tech"; linked to an advertisement for a film competition that featured the tagline, "Shoot it. Upload it. Get famous. Project Spotlight is looking for the next big thing. Are you it?"; and commented on his website that he was "cleaning out and rearranging his room and thus, his mind, or so he hopes."
The Virginia Tech massacre, which occurred on April 16, was clearly very much on Zaccari's mind. He was so convinced that Barnes' actions constituted "a specific threat to his safety and a general threat to the safety of the campus" that he put the campus police on "high alert" and hired plain-clothes police officers to accompany him to "high profile" events.
Barnes has appealed his explusion to the Georgia Board of Regents. The Georgia Office of State Administrative Hearings now has jurisdiction in the case and has scheduled a hearing for Nov. 26.
Unfortunately, there is nothing new about what is happening in Valdosta. President Zaccari's use of the words "clear and present danger" carries us back to a 1919 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the imprisonment of Eugene Debs and other critics of America's participation in World War I. The Court ruled that expressing criticism of the war constituted such a serious threat that protesters could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.
However, much has changed since 1919. Just six months after he wrote the unanimous decision upholding the imprisonment of Debs, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes changed his mind. In one of the most famous dissenting opinions in American legal history, Holmes wrote in Abrams v. U.S., "I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country."
The free speech movement was born just a few months later when the American Civil Liberties Union opened its offices in New York. In the intervening years, it has fought hard to prevent government officials from suppressing speech that it considers threatening. In 1969, the Supreme Court finally endorsed Holmes' view. Today, the government can punish only direct incitement to violent acts that occurs in a context that is likely to produce violence.
Clearly, T. Hayden Barnes is guilty of nothing more than unintentionally frightening a jumpy administrator.
There is one other remarkable aspect of this case. As free speech has grown in this country, so has the number of groups that are dedicated to defending it. The ACLU was our only civil liberties group for many years, but there are dozens today.
The group that is trying to call attention to the Barnes case is the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). I am grateful to FIRE President Greg Lukianoff for documenting this case in detail on his Web site.
As my opening outrage, I offer a controversy that began this spring when a student at Valdosta State University in Georgia decided to protest the university's plan to construct two new parking garages on the campus.
In March, the student, T. Hayden Barnes, posted flyers around the campus that raised environmental questions about the plan. In April, he wrote a letter to the student newspaper. He followed up with a letter to the university president, Ronald M. Zaccari.
Barnes soon received Zaccari's reply. On May 7, he entered his dormitory room to discover that a "notice of administrative withdrawal" had been slipped under his door. "As a result of recent activities directed towards me by you....you are considered to present a clear and present danger to this campus," Zaccari wrote. To be readmitted, Barnes would have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and to offer evidence "that you will be receiving on-going therapy."
As evidence of Barnes' purported derangement, Zaccari attached to his letter an image of the student's Facebook page, which contains a number of images related to the parking lot controversy, including Zaccari's face. According to the university president, this was a "threatening document." The university was also worried because Barnes had "posted a link on his website page to an article discussing the massacre at Virginia Tech"; linked to an advertisement for a film competition that featured the tagline, "Shoot it. Upload it. Get famous. Project Spotlight is looking for the next big thing. Are you it?"; and commented on his website that he was "cleaning out and rearranging his room and thus, his mind, or so he hopes."
The Virginia Tech massacre, which occurred on April 16, was clearly very much on Zaccari's mind. He was so convinced that Barnes' actions constituted "a specific threat to his safety and a general threat to the safety of the campus" that he put the campus police on "high alert" and hired plain-clothes police officers to accompany him to "high profile" events.
Barnes has appealed his explusion to the Georgia Board of Regents. The Georgia Office of State Administrative Hearings now has jurisdiction in the case and has scheduled a hearing for Nov. 26.
Unfortunately, there is nothing new about what is happening in Valdosta. President Zaccari's use of the words "clear and present danger" carries us back to a 1919 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the imprisonment of Eugene Debs and other critics of America's participation in World War I. The Court ruled that expressing criticism of the war constituted such a serious threat that protesters could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.
The free speech movement was born just a few months later when the American Civil Liberties Union opened its offices in New York. In the intervening years, it has fought hard to prevent government officials from suppressing speech that it considers threatening. In 1969, the Supreme Court finally endorsed Holmes' view. Today, the government can punish only direct incitement to violent acts that occurs in a context that is likely to produce violence.
Clearly, T. Hayden Barnes is guilty of nothing more than unintentionally frightening a jumpy administrator.
There is one other remarkable aspect of this case. As free speech has grown in this country, so has the number of groups that are dedicated to defending it. The ACLU was our only civil liberties group for many years, but there are dozens today.
The group that is trying to call attention to the Barnes case is the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). I am grateful to FIRE President Greg Lukianoff for documenting this case in detail on his Web site.
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Comments
A serious affront to free speech recently was FEMA's fake press conference. It undermined free press, it subverted free speech, it assumed (ignorantly) that the press and citizens were too sheepish to figure it out, and it was a symptom of an annoying but not quite ubiquitous approach by the Bush administration to control public discourse in any way possible, including fraud.
However, it was found out, it was exposed, and the director got fired. The corruption of that agency (within the corrupt Homeland Security Dept) is widespread but rather superficial. The efforts to manipulate press and public discourse are not effective, not absolute, not deep.
If a thoughtful observer compared the frequency and effectivenss of actual free speech with the frequency and effectiveness of government manipulation of free speech, what would be the result? Could it be summed up by saying that power corrupts? Or could it be summed up by saying that efforts by government authorities - both high and petty - to control the flow of facts and arguments are common but flaccid?
For every government effort to control speech (they are there) how many cases are there of free speech that refuses to be controlled? For every editorial writer that experiences pressure to push an agenda, how many editorials are written without pressure? What empirical or reasonable ratio can be estimated for the reach of government pressure over free speech?
You raise an interesting point. The overwhelming majority of censorship efforts do fail. The American Library Association counted more than 500 challenges to books in schools and libraries last year. Yet almost all the books remained on the shelves.
But why do they fail? I think you are right that many of these efforts are half-hearted or, as in the case of the FEMA press conference, the result of misjudgments by government officials.
Yet, in the past, we had far more censorship in this country than we have today. Principals pulled books at the first sign of opposition. Government spied on American citizens and tried to disrupt "disloyal" groups, including the labor, civil rights and anti-war movements.
Censorship is less effective today because World War I gave birth to a civil liberties movement in the United States. The ACLU was founded in 1920 as a response to the imprisonment of more than 1,000 critics of the war. Today there are dozens of groups that defend free speech. FIRE, the group that reported the case in Vladosta, Georgia, is one of those groups.
if it weren't for groups like ACLU, FIRE and National Coalition Against Censorship, censorship would be a far more serious problem.
Hmm. This is what I read, which to me suggests that the man is NOT receiving a promotion:
The fomer FEMA flack who orchestrated a fake press conference last week has lost his shot for the top PR job in the Department of National Intelligence.
CNN reported earlier Monday that John "Pat" Philbin, the Director of Public Affairs responsible for FEMA's recent faked news conference, was all set to accept a his promotion, until his new boss realized that hiring a spokesman with a penchant for fiction might not be the best idea.