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• 1 2016-04-11T08:42:16-07:00 Free Speech Activism: The Right to Speak and the Right to Be Heard 17 plain 2016-04-18T06:05:16-07:00 Through the fall of 2015, protests in opposition to racism and marginalization against black students at campuses across the United States encountered an unexpected antagonist to their struggle. Student activists found themselves under attack for abusing the rhetoric of free speech and free expression in order to shut out dissent and protect their student groups from what they viewed as attacks from university administrators. For a few weeks following the resignation of the president of the University of Missouri, national news media reported that student activists at Yale University, Amherst College, UNC, and others had taken up the language of microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces to save themselves from a political climate on their campuses that marginalized and belittled them.^[1] Pundits and editorialists posited that the far left was encouraging a dismissive attitude towards free speech on campus. In turn, those on campus who called for a return of free speech and for students to realize that safe spaces did not exist outside of college were cast as bigots by many on the left. This misrepresentation of student activists as coddled and pharisaic, vindictively protective of their beliefs and ideas at the expense of others’, has shifted the political uses of free speech language from that of the left to the right. In a bizarre paradox, the language surrounding the concept of free speech has ceased to be an activist’s tool of expression and openness and instead has been “co-opted by dominant social groups, distorted to serve their interests, and used to silence those who are oppressed and marginalized.”^[2] Happening simultaneously is an attempt by conservatives to radically undercut students’ right to speak by moving the discussion around their activism away from the words, to the way the words are expressed, in effect policing the speech so that tone and delivery becomes the issue. In this way, the term, “free speech,” has been distorted significantly through misuse and misdirection.Little attention has been given to the ambiguity of the notion of freedom of speech, used today to refer both to the political right it enshrines, guaranteed by the First Amendment, and the ethical ideal it embodies. Nor has there been much attention paid by the broader left or right to the understanding of how the fifty years since Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement has created enough rhetorical slippage so that the term free speech no longer resembles the political right that was protected in Tinker v. Des Moines or even Dickson v. Sitterson. More than likely, the activists of the Speaker Ban movement would not recognize the current political uses of “free speech” as part of their political legacy at UNC. In 1963, the Speaker Ban law used the removal of the right to free speech to punish students involved in civil rights protests; more generally, conservatives used restrictions on free speech as a weapon against students who were fighting for racial justice.
  
  In 2016, the national preoccupation with “free speech” places the term, now fully recognized as a social weapon, in the hands of conservatives, who use the political heft of the term to discourage minority groups from full participation in the community life of their campuses. An accompanying term, “political correctness,” is also at play, presented as an opposing force to free speech, wielded by students to silence their dissenters. But framing free speech and political correctness as adversarial creates a fictitious dichotomy which seeks comfortable conversations and political discourse that supports a status quo. If it is possible to conceive of free speech and political correctness as allies, bouying up together the ability for marginalized people to feel as though they are part of their campus communities, we can understand that political correctness actually expands the right to free speech. In this way, we can end the subordination of minority groups through decontextualized free speech absolutism and the diffuse conception of political correctness as a way to diminish tolerance, instead of bolstering it.
  
  Nevertheless, with the widespread ideology of political correctness held up to the legacy of the Speaker Ban actors as free speech activists, their movement opens itself to contemporary criticisms: Despite their conviction that they were suing their University for the right reasons, they were not protecting their own right to free speech, but rather the right for their various student organizations to bring whatever speakers they choose to campus. The plaintiffs were all white, eleven men, and one “girl,” Eunice Milton Benton, whom several interviewees admit was added to the roster of plaintiffs to provide for some diversity.^[3] And though a few of the Speaker Ban activists had been involved in civil rights protests in other locations and at other times, none of the plaintiffs themselves had been involved in the protests in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, which were the catalysts for the passage of the law. It is unfair to place the Speaker Ban activists in relation to contemporary activists as the paragon for student activism at UNC. In many ways, more than the critiques listed here, resonating deeply through the oral histories are the youthful and privileged reminiscences of men who have had successful careers as attorneys, judges, and journalists, not in spite of their involvement in student activism around free speech, but in part because of their involvement in the movement. However, the themes of conviction, a sense of place in local and national contexts, and organizing logistics remain important for contemporary activists without giving the Speaker Ban activists any kind of didactic power over current meanings of free speech.
  There remains, though, a distortion involved in critiquing the Speaker Ban activists with a contemporary definition and understanding of free speech ideology as a tool of the race-blind bigot. The right to speak and be heard defended by Speaker Ban activists in the 1960s is distinct from the right to speak and be heard that is part of the struggle today on UNC’s campus for inclusivity. When we acknowledge the rhetorical slippage of the term “free speech” and view it as a political tool as much as a right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, we are better able to draw from the shortcomings and achievements of the Speaker Ban activists. And when using this part of the University’s past, we must focus as much on the implicit right we have to listen as much as we focus on the right to speak. The term “free speech” assumes for both student activists and their detractors that if the other will listen, we can achieve a sustained political discourse. Perhaps “free speech” might best operate when accompanied by more explicit instructions to engage in active listening. However we negotiate the limits and definitions of free speech on the University’s campus today, we ought to remember that the political legacy of free speech at UNC involves both speaking and listening.

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  [1] Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” The Atlantic, September 2015.
  [2] Manne, Kate and Jason Stanley, “When Free Speech Becomes A Political Tool,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 November 2015.
  [3] Interview with John E. Greenbacker Jr by Charlotte Fryar and Alexa Lytle, March 2, 2013 in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.