Commemorative Uses of Free Speech
I attended Spearman’s lecture in 2013, and I remember asking myself what the “free speech principles” he had referenced, were. As I continued to follow these fifty-year anniversary celebrations, it appeared to me that throughout this era of the commemoration of the Speaker Ban movement, there has been a lack of attention paid to how to understand the concept of “free speech” and its principles, as Spearman described, or how to practice the “legacy of free speech” on campus that supposedly stems from the movement. Indeed, through this commemoration process, the phrases “legacy of free speech,” “right to free speech,” and “academic freedom” have been inoculated through misuse and misapplication.
A large part of this misuse can be derived from the University administration itself, which in the fifty years since the protests, has shifted actions from being defendants in Dickson v. Sitterson to placing a monument to the student plaintiffs in one of the most protected and public spaces on campus, McCorkle Place. During this shift, the University has taken on the accomplishments of its students as its own. This conflating of responsibility in the fight against the law has led to a collective forgetting, in which the student plaintiffs might be celebrated as the actors in the fight, but the University also takes responsibility. That collective forgetting can be demonstrated in the dedication ceremony of the Speaker Ban monument in which a former student body president of the University used the words “our” and “we” to describe how “our dedication to freedom of speech back in 1966 has made us who we are today.”[4] Here too, I wonder how “freedom of speech” is operating in understanding how dedication to this principle has brought us into the current day.
A similar conflation has occurred around the concept of academic freedom and the right to freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. As legal concepts applied to the faculty’s right to research and teach, it is difficult to delineate their boundaries. But however difficult to define, the right to academic freedom outlined and protected by the American Association of University Professors is not coextensive with First Amendment rights, although courts have recognized a relationship between the two.[5] The concept of academic freedom has been invoked in commemorating the Speaker Ban movement, and though there were faculty involved in the overturning of the law, it did not directly threaten the faculty’s right to “full freedom in research” and “freedom in classroom in discussing their subject.”[6]
Oral history practice is a method by which to understand how the concept of “free speech” and surrounding rhetoric has shifted over the past fifty years, at the University and nationally. If there are themes in the interviews with Speaker Ban activists that resonate with the contemporary era of student activism at the University, the multiple meanings of “free speech” across the intervening fifty years--as a right protected by the First Amendment, an ideological concept that provides the right to speak and to be heard, and a contingency on academic freedom--need to outlined. Further, questions of who protects free speech on our campus, who commemorates its defense, and what relationships undergird the acts of protection and commemoration, need to be answered for both eras of activism. By asking interviewees to reflect on their relationship and understanding of free speech, we might be better able to understand the nuances and complexities of the term and its surrounding rhetoric.
[1] Hodge, Blake, “Speaker Ban Protests: 50 Years Later,” Chapelboro.com, March 17, 2015.
[2]Metzler, Caroline, “University free speech advocate rebukes restrictions,” The Daily Tar Heel, April 8, 2016.
[3] Spearman, Robert, "The Rise and Fall of the North Carolina Speaker Ban Law," Gladys Hall Coates University History Lecture, 2013, University Archives and Records Services, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[4] Speaker Ban Marker Unveiling Ceremony, The Daily Tar Heel, October 12, 2011, Video.
[5] Levinson, Rachel, “Academic Freedom and The First Amendment,” AAUP Summer Institute, 2007.
[6] American Association of University Professors, “1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” AAUP Bulletin, Volume I, Part 1 (December 1915): 17–39.
