The shoutdown in Chapel Hill
Those of us who went through the agonies of the ill-advised and ultimately unconstitutional Speaker Ban Law in the 1960s were dismayed to read of the ugly confrontation between students, some faculty members, police and former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, the immigration opponent who was scheduled to speak on campus but was in effect shouted down by protesters the other night.
The most troubling thing was that the UNC-Chapel Hill campus appears to be intolerant of free speech -- especially if that speech appears to be bigoted, racist and offensive. I don't agree with Tancredo on anything that I know of, but disrupting his appearance and ultimately prompting him to flee does not solve the problem that students perceive -- that someone has thoughts they don't want to hear. Instead, it creates, maybe confirms, the impressions of many conservatives that university campuses are tolerant only of speech with which they agree and are intolerant of speech they find offensive. That's hardly the definition of academic freedom. Had students really wanted to irk Tancredo, they would have listened in stony silence, or perhaps turned their backs and walked out.
Such incidents also may play directly into the hands of those who agree with Tancredo and who oppose not only illegal immigrants in this country, but legal immigrants, too. Tancredo and his allies are using the UNC-CH incident to raise funds, ultimately strengthening financial and perhaps popular support for their
cause as well.
The lesson of the Speaker Ban Fiasco has been lost on students who believe free thought is dangerous. The truth is that it's more dangerous to ban speech than it is to hear the speech of those with whom you disagree. But to many people, evidently, the First Amendment is a scary thing.
If you want to see the take of lawyer Hugh Stevens, a former editor of the Daily Tar Heel and veteran of the Speaker Ban wars in the late 1960s, here's a link to a column that ran in today's Daily Tar Heel at UNC-Chapel Hill.
