BY MARJORIE HEINS
Guest blogger Marjorie Heins is the author of six books about civil liberties and civil rights, including Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge, and, most recently, Ironies and Complications of Free Speech.
Some issues in the American free-speech universe never die. Does teaching “creation science” in public college classrooms violate the constitutionally mandated wall of separation between church and state? What about government funding for a student who wants to study for the ministry? What is the tradeoff when U.S. universities open campuses in countries that don’t recognize academic freedom? Should students who protest Israeli policies be branded as anti-Semitic? Should Shakespeare’s naughty parts be censored for kids?
The Free Expression Policy Project, or “FEPP,” which I directed until last year, addressed these issues and many others. I initiated the project after almost twenty years as an ACLU attorney, much of it in the free-speech trenches. FEPP began as a little think tank to address hot-button issues like obscenity and indecency laws with more rationality, historical context, and actual information than is often found in court battles or news reports of highly publicized incidents. In short order, FEPP’s concerns came to include controversies over arts funding, the domination of corporate media over our vaunted “marketplace of ideas,” the ongoing tension between copyright and fair use, and how Internet filters, now pervasive in schools and libraries, censor everything from “Super Bowl XXX” to pictures of sand dunes. (They look too much like curvaceous bodies.)
FEPP had funding for several years from a number of free-speech friendly foundations; it was part of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School until 2007; then I kept up the Web site for another ten years as an informational resource. It finally came time this year to bid it farewell, but a lot of the information and analysis on the site was worth preserving: it told stories and explained issues that continue to resonate in American culture and law. Attacks on anti-Israel protesters have only grown more vociferous and punitive, the meaning of the Constitution’s Establishment-of-Religion Clause remains in flux, and global campuses are proliferating–to name just three examples.
So I decided to put the best of the FEPP Web site into a small paperback book. The result is Ironies and Complications of Free Speech: News and Commentary From the Free Expression Policy Project, 2001-2017. It’s a record of the culture wars of the past two decades, a guide to their continuing relevance, and a handy primer for students. The five sections cover great court cases on academic freedom as well as book and movie censorship, loyalty oaths in universities today and in our recent past, murky questions about church-state separation in academia, attempts to crack down on violent entertainment, overzealous invocations of copyright control by the heirs of such luminaries as Tennessee Williams and James Joyce (issues of special import for teachers), the story of how the FBI and Ronald Reagan conspired to squelch the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and even how the ACLU tried to censor its own board of directors.
Probably my favorite piece is a report on how Google, invoking copyright and trademark law, tried to stop people from using the verb “to google,” while the Major League Baseball Players Association tried to stop players of fantasy baseball from using players’ names, batting averages, and other statistics without its consent (and presumably the payment of a hefty fee). Those threats failed, but many similar offensives by copyright bullies succeed every day. Intellectual property–copyright, trademark, and the like–used to be a quiet legal specialty, but in the 1990s, with yet another extension of the term of copyright control (now life of the author plus 70 years for individuals and up to 120 years for corporations), it became one of the major battlegrounds in our noisy, contentious political and cultural landscape.
All of FEPP’s detailed policy reports (on Internet filters, copyright and fair use, arts funding, media literacy, and the Information Commons) are available on the National Coalition Against Censorship Web site. The Contents and most of the Introduction to Ironies and Complications of Free Speech are available on Amazon.
i wonder why Free Speech issues so often devolve to far-out ideas like flat-earth theory or creationism, many of which can be debated on the terrain of science. (BTW, apparently there’s more evidence coming in that there MAY be some kind of extraterrestrial “life” out there.)
More important, though, are the attacks on Free Speech and Academic Freedom now coming from so-called “P.C.” “SJWs” who seem to want to shut down free expression of ideas, texts, and even individual words, instead of actually doing anything MATERIAL in the cause of social justice. Indeed, I would say that semantic and cultural debates actually DISTRACT from material needs and punishing those on your own team for (mainly) inoffensive slips of the tongue) is HIGHLY counter-productive.
Don’t think from the above that I’m some sort of right-wing troglodyte who wants to make minority students insecure by blurting out micro-aggressions and reading aloud from HUCKLEBERRY FINN. I’ve been a Marxist since I read DAS KAPITAL at age 10 and have worked for civil rights since I read AN AMERICAN DILEMMA at the same age.
I just don’t think that as a matter of logic, ethics, and brain chemistry that SPEECH ACTS (no matter how vile or wrongheaded) can ever be equated with PHYSICAL VIOLENCE.
Finally, I should explain that — sorta like the proverbial liberal who became a conservative when s/he was mugged” — I am changing my stripes somewhat after I was forced out of an adjunct Full Professorship at CCNY for using the term “hood” in class. Is THAT a fire-able offense? Full details at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/political-correctness-gone-amok-leftists-critique-tomasulo-ph-d-/.
There’s also a short article from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (“Politics makes strange bedfellows”) that features my situation in the context of professors who self-censor for fear of being stigmatized as “deplorable.” Access that at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/self-censorship-faculty-wall-street-journal-article-frank-p-/