An organization fired up about protecting American liberties on college campuses received the Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award, typically given to freedom of speech defendants, Thursday night at Suffolk University.
The organization, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education received the award from Suffolk’s Ford Hall Forum, which bills itself as “the nation’s oldest continuously operating free public lecture series.”
After the ceremony, a panel of three FIRE members spoke to about 70 people regarding efforts to protect and maintain freedom of speech on college campuses around the United States. U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who presided over the Recording Industry Association of America’s suit against Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum for illegal file-sharing, moderated the panel.
“Liberty on campuses is something that we should fight for, no matter the consequences,” said FIRE co-founder and civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate.
Silverglate, who is also co-author of “The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses,” said FIRE was created after an enormous amount of phone calls made to the founders from students asking for help defending their rights.
FIRE President Greg Lukianoff spoke of several of the cases FIRE had received including one in 2007 of a student employee at Indiana University&-Purdue University Indianapolis who was found guilty by administrators of racial harassment for reading a book called “Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan” on his work breaks.
The school rescinded its original finding against the student after FIRE and the American Civil Liberties Union got involved and with the help of extensive media coverage, Lukianoff said.
Speech codes, any university regulations that prohibit expression that would normally be protected by the First Amendment in society at large, are also ongoing issues that FIRE tackles at many colleges, he said.
Boston University has a “red” speech code rating, meaning it has “at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech,” according to the FIRE website. BU codes cited on the website include policies on sexual harassment as well as tolerance, respect and civility.
Steven Pinker, a FIRE advisor and professor at Harvard University, talked about the psychology of taboo &- the idea that certain ideas can be sinful to think about.
“FIRE pushes back against the tendency to squelch questions that are taboo,” he said.
One attendee asked the panel about FIRE’s stance on the appearance on Holocaust deniers on college campuses.
“I think people who are Holocaust deniers should be heard because their arguments are ridiculous,” Lukianoff said.
Another attendee asked whether it was legal to steal or throw away large amounts of free student newspapers.
Lukianoff cited a case at University of California-Berkeley where a mayor was caught throwing out stacks of the newspaper that endorsed his opponent. Following the event, the city of Berkeley banned throwing away or stealing student newspapers, Lukianoff said, but such policies are variable and depends on the city or state.
A similar incident also occured at BU. In April 2009, employees in the Admissions Office chose not to make copies of The Daily Free Press bearing headlines about alleged “Craigslist killer” Philip Markoff, a second-year School of Medicine student accused of murder, available to prospective students and their families in the Admissions Reception Center at 121 Bay State Rd.
It was also later discovered the same office had hidden other issues of The Free Press in the past.
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