State Lawmakers Seek to Force Public Colleges to Protect Speech Rights

Having inspired mayhem by appearing on college campuses, the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos also seems to be helping fuel a new wave of state legislation aimed at ensuring that public colleges safeguard free speech.

State Rep. Martin Daniel of Tennessee has gone so far as to informally call his legislation “the Milo bill.” The proposal includes among its provisions a requirement that colleges adopt policies calling for them to punish any student who tries to shout down a speaker.

“In view of recent events surrounding Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere on other college campuses, it’s important for us, as a state, to step up and protect basic First Amendment rights,” Representative Daniel, a Republican, said this week in introducing his measure.

“We can’t allow politically correct policies to smother free speech,” he said. “Courtesy and civility, while encouraged, can never trump basic constitutional rights.”

Lawmakers elsewhere have cited efforts to thwart speeches by Mr. Yiannopoulos and other controversial figures in proposing bills intended to force colleges to protect the free-speech rights of invited speakers, faculty members, and students.

“No student or guest of a university should ever feel threatened to exercise their First Amendment right of free speech, nor should they ever be prohibited from doing so,” Lt. Gov. Dan Forest of North Carolina said this week.

Mr. Forest, a Republican, made his remark in announcing plans to push legislation that would require the University of North Carolina system to nullify any restrictive speech codes and to punish students who shout down speakers, and would expose the university to lawsuits by those whose free-speech rights it allowed to be infringed.

Although public colleges generally have withheld comment on the proposed state measures — in several cases, arguing that it is simply too early to do so — one major higher-education advocacy group, the American Association of University Professors, has expressed reservations about them.

In an interview on Thursday, Hans-Joerg Tiede, a senior program officer in the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, said the student-discipline policies required by some of the bills should be devised by colleges, with faculty input, not through “legislative interference in institutional autonomy.”

He also expressed concern that provisions exposing colleges to lawsuits when protesters silence speakers seem to “somehow hold them responsible for the conduct of other people, which is not easy for the university to control in every instance.”

Heightened Tensions

So far, all of the lawmakers who have introduced such legislation have been Republicans. President Trump himself expressed anger this month, when violent protesters shut down an appearance by Mr. Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart editor, at the University of California at Berkeley.

In Virginia, however, Democratic members of that state’s House of Delegates played a substantial part in its passage this month of a bill briefly declaring that no public college there can abridge the freedom of anyone — including students, faculty members, employees, and invited guests — to speak on its campus.

Even before the 2016 presidential election made clear that the nation had become exceedingly polarized, some state legislatures had been moving to protect the speech rights of public-colleges students, mainly by barring such institutions from maintaining limited “free-speech zones” or by adopting new protections for student journalists.

The divisiveness that the election and its aftermath have brought to campuses, as well as recent uproars on campuses over certain speakers, appear to have heightened awareness of such speakers’ vulnerability to what is widely known as “the heckler’s veto” — protest disruptive enough to keep them from being heard.

The measure that North Carolina’s lieutenant governor has proposed is based heavily on model legislation devised by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank in Arizona, and by Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Washington, D.C.

Likewise, the Tennessee bill contains a provision calling for public colleges to punish people who interfere with the free-speech rights of others. The bill also has language providing that students may sue colleges that violate their speech rights for injunctive relief, attorney fees, and court costs.

A measure passed 65 to 25 by North Dakota’s House of Representatives, and now pending before that state’s Senate, takes a different, and somewhat softer, tack. It would require the State Board of Higher Education, which governs the North Dakota University System, to adopt a policy that prohibits public colleges from restricting speech, punishing students for free expression, or shielding students “from constitutionally protected expression merely because it is considered unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive.”

One of the North Dakota bill’s sponsors, State Rep. Rick C. Becker, a Republican, on Thursday described the measure as a response to “the idea that people need to be protected from ideas that are different from theirs.”

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.