Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances.”
Whenever I read the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, I am struck by the distance between the American creed and American reality, a distance widening wherever I look.
If there is any venue in the United States where our ideas should flow out unrestricted, be it in the medium of speech, of press, of assembly, of protest — it is the college campus. After all, if colleges and universities are not repositories of ideas, then what are they?
In too many cases, the ideas of student activists do not flow unrestricted on college campuses. They are confined into small spaces, into so-called “free speech zones.”
In recent years, these zones have been challenged, most recently in Virginia. Last week, the Virginia Community College System agreed to suspend its student demonstrations policy in response to a lawsuit filed by Christian Parks, a student at Thomas Nelson Community College. A campus police officer stopped Parks from preaching because, among other things, he was not standing on the designated “free speech zone.”
Let’s unpack the rhetoric behind the so-called “free speech zones.” Officials proclaim students and faculty have free speech. But to maintain “order,” so certain people are not offended, or for security reasons, they must “freely speak” over there, in that small area, in that zone. Thus, these officials are also saying students do not have the right to freely speak, freely assemble, freely protest over here, on the rest of campus. On the rest of campus, they are enslaved. Or in other words, the establishment of “free speech zones” enslave speech on the remaining 99 percent of campus space.
