Demonstrating what free speech is all about

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 1 October 2017

I'm an unapologetic defender of free speech. However, free speech doesn't mean free pass. Colin Kaepernick is today's example of one using their platform to speak out on a controversial topic and to challenge the status quo and be harshly punished for it. He's unemployed in an industry that is desperate for his skills. He’d be better off had his offense been to beat up his girlfriend or to abuse his kid (those talented players are still employed and will play). Instead, Kaepernick broke no laws, indeed he acted within a constitutionally protected area, like those who wish to brandish a firearm. Except, those protections only protect you from the government, not your private sector employer.

And I agree with all of it. I think it's unfortunate that Kaepernick is not playing. But that's the system. Thankfully, our Supreme Court has upheld protections against flag burning when government has tried to criminalize it. I hope it never tries to criminalize a private actor from responding to public speech, whether it be with more speech or a firing.

President Trump is probably not breaking laws by encouraging NFL owners to fire those who decline the ritual of standing during the national anthem but it's a mistake similar to what President Obama did with criticizing the police in the Henry Louis Gates incident. I think Obama realized it and offered the beer summit for those officers to discuss it along with Gates. It was six months into his term and it was an admission of a mistake. Perhaps President Trump will do something similar.

Free speech is threatened. Not by bullies like Trump or corporate entities who fire folks who say controversial things that employers disagree with (Google, NFL, various media outlets) but from within. A Brookings study surveyed college students and their views and understandings of free speech. The findings are "concerning." I find myself more in agreement with conservative than liberal students. I'd urge my colleagues to read the results of this paper and think hard about what they convey to their students. Silencing racists, misogynists and heterosexists will not win the rhetorical, symbolic or political debates. I find too many students able to recite but not reason.

Disagreement is not the same as offending. But that distinction seems to be dissolving and it has a corrosive effect on speech. Disagreeing is how we strengthen our arguments. We must read and understand what the "other side" says in order to craft our arguments. Not shout it down or pass administrative rules to silence it. Our public universities should be raucous and not for the faint of heart. It should be about challenging everyone. Private colleges are the enclaves of "like me," not public universities because "we" are for all including atheists and fundamentalists, racists and anti-racists, the misogynist and feminist, capitalist and socialist. If our students think disagreeing is offending then we have a silent campus. And that should outrage the faculty.

Richard Spencer, a prominent leader and spokesperson for the alt-right wanted to speak at my alma mater, the University of Florida. As a student there in the '70s it was a cauldron of free speech and an important part of my education. UF turned Spencer down. I wrote as an alum that UF should welcome his controversy as an opportunity. UF changed course in face of a threatened lawsuit but has a lot of lawyerly language to no doubt create "outs" for them as they negotiate with Spencer.

Another alma mater, Virginia Tech, is in the news for what the basketball coach did with his team who failed to follow the required robotic response to the national anthem. When did the Star Spangled Banner become only about vets and the serving military? In any case they serve so people can stand or sit during the national anthem. But Coach Williams used more speech to try to convince his players to do what he wanted. That’s better than a threat like President Trump is urging. President Trump is no defender of free speech.

I'm sure Richard Spencer has a search engine that identifies every time his name appears on the internet. I disagree with all that you say and stand for. But I'll defend your right to say it to the end. ISU has a banquet facility for hire, rent it and speak here. You'll find many in the community sympathetic to your beliefs. And I think ISU needs to demonstrate what free speech is all about.

Thomas L. Steiger is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for Student Research and Creativity at Indiana State University. Email thomas.steiger@indstate.edu.

As 'privatization' expands, the public sphere erodes

previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 13 December 2015


Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-party series of essays about free speech on college campuses.

Two other forces have brought us to the point where students feel threatened on ISU’s and other campuses by “street preachers” and “unsafe” in the face of passionate disagreements and potential objectionable Halloween costumes. And they are related. The first is the incredible narrowing of the “public” as well as the tarnishing and demeaning of all things public.


“Private” is good, while “public” is bad. What public institution is held up with pride in the United States anymore? Certainly not democratic government or our courts. Even the military is forced to increasingly privatize. Public education once used to be held up, but not anymore with those who are entrusted with our public institutions working effectively to undermine them. Public lands are constantly under fire to be privatized. National, state and municipal Parks’ budgets are cut and cut until they are no longer truly public because to stay in operation they have to charge user fees and then “privatized.”


Who doesn’t love Disney World? But you don’t have freedom of speech there. Try wearing a provocative piece of legible clothing without a Disney trademark. Go to a town square, and you can start talking loud about the mayor if you want, except there are no people anymore in the town square, they are at the mall. So, go to the mall and start on about the mayor being a crook; you will be escorted out. Public might as well be “pubic” in today’s America. Facebook isn’t public, not only can people “block’ you but Facebook can violate your constitutional rights by shutting you out, except it’s not your constitutional right, you have to play by Facebook’s rules and that is their right as (private) property owners. Even the Livefyre commenting feature on the Tribune-Star’s website where this essay appears has “rules” about speech.


As we de-public our democracy, we create fewer and fewer spaces where those cherished rights can be exercised. You don’t have rights to free speech in the workplace (unless you work for the government, oh right, not even there, ask the Terre Haute police officer about his political statements contrary to the current administration’s favor). You don’t have rights to free speech in a private home at the dinner table. As a culture we might emphasize it, but it mostly only works when people are relatively equal. Your boss or your mom aren’t going to respect your mouthiness as free speech, its back-talking or insubordination and you get grounded or fired for it.


Most of those corporate sponsored SEC football schools, like Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, Auburn, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi State, Tennessee, and Texas A&M, are all government schools established as Land Grant Universities by the Federal Government following the Civil War to specifically further the industrialization of the country, but today, they are more like private schools because the states are getting out of the public anything business (even prisons as they are rapidly being privatized). And with that privatization comes the inevitable treating students as “customers.” And customers are treated well are they not?


I mean, if an employee is treated shabbily by a boss, we hardly care. Just look at the waning public support for unions. But if a customer is treated poorly by a business, it’s known and in some cases, some treatment is considered illegal, such as refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, or refusing to serve a customer with the wrong religion or skin color. Public institutions treat people shabbily, like the IRS, while our universities recruit students as though they are heading off to a private resort and given the debt that so many students carry even in public (government) colleges. No wonder they feel the right to exclude offensive individuals from their “private” space, especially the obnoxious and biased press.


No, it’s not the “pussification” of America nor is it the” progressivism” of higher ed or the continued insensitivity of the dwindling white power structure of academia, it’s the systematic devaluation of and shrinkage of the “public” in our society. Free speech only ever existed in the public sphere which once was ubiquitous, especially with such incredible institutions as education and a press that served the public. But today, public is an insult and everyone unquestioningly assumes the superiority of “private.”

The result is a loss of social space to exercise free speech or to have a free press. Besides, the “press” is so vilified today. For some, it’s the press that is the “enemy.” Mizzou students formed a ring around protesters to protect them from the intrusive eye of the press. Later some of them will be the legislators who pass laws that make it a crime for journalists to take pictures of factory farms to show the public the conditions of the animals that become bacon and hamburgers. As our “public” rights erode, “private” rights expand.

Free Speech is Taking a Beating on Campus

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of two columns from Thomas L. Steiger on the subject of free speech on college campuses. 

The events at the University of Missouri and Yale last month have pushed questions of free speech and freedom of the press into the limelight. I’ve been thinking about free speech and its meaning in our society today since ISU’s “microdrama” surrounding free speech when the Chief of ISU Public Safety sent an email to all students pointing out that the evangelizing by Terre Haute’s own fiery modern circuit riders, Brother Jed, Sister Cindy, and I’m sure in spirit, “Mad Max”, was protected speech under the US Constitution.




I don’t know what precipitated it, but I’m guessing that some ISU students who didn’t like the street preacher’s insults of “fornicator,” “whore,” “whore monger,” and “sinner” either complained or perhaps got physical, because the preachers were then relocated with a barricade around them with a sign that read “THIS IS PROTECTED SPEECH YOU HAVE THE OPTION TO LISTEN OR IGNORE WALK AWAY OR STAY YOU MAY ALSO PARTICIPATE THREATENING OR INTIMIDATING CONDUCT WILL NOT BE ALLOWED.”




I was surprised by this and began watching the students interact with the street preachers. The angry students worry me. I saw no one trying to use humor to argue back. I know our students are religious and many know their bibles and have paid attention to the lessons of their home church, but few tried to argue with the preachers at that level, instead people were googling things to hurl back to the preachers.




Brother Jed, Sister Cindy and (now departed) Mad Max first insulted me when I was a 17-year-old freshman at the University of Florida. Holding court on the Plaza of the Americas with often 100s of students mocking back at them was great entertainment in a pre- Internet time. I recall Jed calling me a whore monger. I actually was familiar with the term, my preference for 1940s serial detective novels taught me a lot. As an awkward 17-year-old on a campus of 60 percent males, I wished I was a whore monger.




Jed, if you have never seen him, has quite an act. It’s dramatic and very physical. We learned to imitate it and often would line up behind Jed and go through his motions with him. Sometimes he would get agitated with us. We never threatened him. We mocked him; laughed at him and each other. I don’t recall any anger. I saw intense anger, perhaps hatred, as ISU students yelled “you preach hate” at the street preachers.




Because of the threatened boycott of one of the sacred rites of fall advertising, SEC football, by 30 African American gladiators (football players) the attention of the nation was momentarily fixed. The hunger striker never seemed to make the news. But, by god, threaten Saturday football in the SEC and stuff happens. A university president and chancellor are toppled. But it was the student reporter getting poor treatment and a liberal journalism prof stopping the reporter from doing his job that really hijacked the show. Follow that up with the controversy at Yale over Halloween costumes and you now have this essay.




Conservative reactions to the Yale incident, where the Yale administration sent out an email to the students to be culturally sensitive regarding their Halloween costumes and a faculty member who thought the Administration’s official email was a bit heavy handed and encouraged the students to express themselves and for others to just look away or ignore a costume they didn’t like, led to an eruption on campus where the faculty were harangued, apologies demanded, threats made, etc. Look it up, it’s a fascinating peek into the lives of some of our most privileged students.


Conservatives have jumped on this with their usual memes around such topics with the “pussification” of America, which is nothing more than a not-so-subtle complaint about women’s greater equality. One thing has changed on American college campuses, there are more women than men today and while there are still some areas that are still heavily male, they are dwindling.




Another conservative meme, one artfully crafted by that noted sociologist George Will (anyone who knows him will smile at me calling him a sociologist) blamed “higher ed progressivism” for the debacle at Yale. Really? So a year or two at Yale causes this? Never mind the 12-14 years of private school education among a select “people like us” atmosphere. Or that Yale students aren’t like “government” school university students who attend “public” (said with derision) universities where the grounds are public property and free speech must be respected. It’s not just a school policy as it is at Yale, but American Constitutional Law that protects it at a government school like ISU.


Liberals are having a hard time responding to these issues. They can’t seem to deal with the contradictions. It’s OK, use the contradictions to move the discussion along. Use data, evidence, and reason. Oh, and throw in “nuance.” That’s always a winner.




Next week: As public rights erode, private rights expand.