Texas Lawmakers Weigh the Limits of Free Speech on Campus

Rudy Martinez was used to seeing racist fliers cropping up on the campus of Texas State University, but this one was particularly jarring. It featured a photo of him, along with his name, phone number, and his employer’s number beneath the headline “He wants you dead!”

The senior had recently been fired as an editorial writer for the campus newspaper, The University Star, for a piece that tested the limits of free speech to the breaking point on a campus already racked by racial tensions.

On Wednesday, he told his story, his voice shaking with emotion, to members of a Texas Senate panel who were there to find out how free speech is being threatened on college campuses and what lawmakers can do about it. It was the kind of story that shows how blurred the lines can be between free speech and hate speech and the difficulty of protecting both speech and safety.

Martinez’s opinion column, titled “Your DNA Is an Abomination,” was meant to encourage conversation about white privilege, but it deeply offended many with statements like “Ontologically speaking, white death will mean liberation for all.”

The university’s president, Denise M. Trauth, publicly denounced the column as racist. Some student activists, including Martinez, have argued that she wasn’t as quick to condemn the hate mail and death threats — some from nonstudent white-supremacist groups — the column provoked.

A campus spokesman countered that the president has consistently denounced the fliers, which were immediately removed. The activists urged the Senate panel, in its efforts to protect free speech, to draw a distinction when speech advocates violence, and to not allow hate groups to use the First Amendment as a weapon.

The agenda for Wednesday’s hearing by the Senate Committee on State Affairs was ordered by the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick. It called on the committee to “ascertain any restrictions on freedom of speech rights that Texas students face in expressing their views on campus along with freedoms of the press, religion, and assembly.” It also asked the committee to recommend policy changes that “protect First Amendment rights and enhance the free speech environment on campus.”

The meeting took place as college leaders nationwide are struggling to find the balance between free speech and the safety of students. Conservative lawmakers in many states, like Texas, are stepping into the fray, passing laws to punish protesters who shout down speakers or to prohibit colleges from limiting controversial speech to designated free-speech zones.

The committee’s chair, Joan Huffman, a Republican from Houston, set the tone in her opening remarks. “We’re seeing far too many instances across the country where faculty and students have moved to limit speech when they don’t like what is being said,” she said. “We need to put an end to that. We must not allow any infringement on these rights to go unchecked.”

A Difficult Balance

Texas State’s president told the panel that “our challenge is to create a learning environment that is simultaneously supportive and inclusive on one hand, but also protective of what some find unpopular and even offensive expression on the other.”

It was clear, from the more than four hours of discussion and dozens of public statements that followed, that that was no easy task.

One by one, speakers from campuses across Texas described free-speech battles they’d fought in recent years while lawmakers questioned them on what legislative steps could be taken to prevent such skirmishes in the future.

One of the first up was Texas Southern University, which last year canceled a planned commencement speech by John Cornyn, a Republican and the state’s senior U.S. senator, after many on the historically black campus objected to his support for the Trump administration.

Months later, an address there by another conservative politician, State Rep. Briscoe Cain, was halted after protests broke out. Cain issued a statement accusing Texas Southern of caving to bullying from Black Lives Matter protesters.

Huffman, the Senate committee’s chair, suggested to Raphael X. Moffett, the university’s vice president for student affairs, that this constituted a “heckler’s veto,” in which speech is suppressed because someone fears a violent reaction.

“That’s the exact kind of incident we don’t want to happen,” she told him.

Moffett said the event was canceled because it hadn’t been properly registered.

Students who belong to groups like the Young Conservatives of Texas described their struggles to find faculty sponsors to allow them to become recognized student organizations so they can meet on campus. When faculty members overwhelmingly lean left, finding sponsors can be extremely challenging, they said. Eliminating the sponsorship requirement could help ensure that their free-speech rights are protected, they said.

Conservative students also objected to being charged high security fees for their events.

Universities, the students said, pay lip service to free speech when they allow such groups to host events but then burden them with prohibitively high security costs.

Alex A. Meed, a senior at the University of Texas at Austin, urged the panel, in its zeal to protect free speech, to recognize when speech calls for violence and should be restricted.

“I hope you will continue to give administrators the right to cancel events that could go dangerously out of hand,” he said.

Again, the discussion turned back to the host institution and the fliers that have rattled the Texas State University campus. One flier, posted on lamp posts and in bathroom stalls across the campus in November 2016, called for “tar & feather VIGILANTE SQUADS” to “arrest & torture those deviant university leaders” in the wake of Donald J. Trump’s election to the presidency.

Five men unaffiliated with the university were issued criminal trespass warnings in December after the campus police caught them posting propaganda, including the flier targeting Martinez.

‘A Constitutional Right to Speak’

Benjamin Salinas, a student who serves as social-media director for College Democrats of America, urged the panel to consider the emotional impact that hateful propaganda can have on underrepresented students.

Texas State has celebrated the growing diversity of the campus, where white students now make up 47 percent of the enrollment, Hispanic students 36 percent, and black students 11 percent. Three years ago white students made up 52 percent of the enrollment, Hispanics 32 percent and black students 9 percent.

The Texas Attorney General’s office is also planning to publish guidelines by the end of the summer to help colleges navigate First Amendment challenges.

Brantley D. Starr, deputy first assistant attorney general, told the Senate panel that while the U.S. Supreme Court has called universities “the marketplace of ideas … there is peculiar trend sweeping the nation that undermines the very DNA of our universities. It’s the idea that we should protect college students from ideas that might upset them by censoring speech.”

He added: “There is no constitutional or statutory right to not be offended. But there is a constitutional right to speak.”

There are, Starr added, narrow exceptions, as Texas A&M University argued when it decided not to allow the racist provocateur Richard Spencer to speak on campus for a second time. The event was slated for September 11 of last year, just a month after a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, Va., killing one and injuring 19 more.

The university was justified, Starr said, in concluding that the risk of violence warranted turning Spencer away.

Thomas Lindsay, director of the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank, said he was encouraged by the number of states that are considering bills that would enhance free-speech protections on campuses.

Many are based on model legislation designed by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank.

“It’s in times of political polarization that the First Amendment is most in jeopardy,” Lindsay said. “Why? Because we become angry. It’s during these times of political polarization that we need most to listen to each other.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.