University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone.
Courtesy photo
Public university general counsel beware white supremacist Richard Spencer, who led the Charlottesville, Virginia, rally that ended in violence last weekend, may soon try to speak in a campus building near you. But GCs seem reluctant to talk about this problem in public.
Calls to 11 offices of general counsel across the country Thursday elicited not one response about the free speech issue. Yet, the problem appears to be growing.
Michigan State University announced Wednesday that it is trying to decide how to handle a request from Spencer's group, the National Policy Institute, to rent a room for a speech on its campus in East Lansing. Calls to MSU general counsel Robert Noto were referred to the communications department, which did not immediately return messages.
Meanwhile, the University of Florida on Wednesday switched its position from granting Spencer permission to speak, to announcing it would deny him a permit. A Spencer supporter has vowed to file a lawsuit. GC Amy Hass declined comment.
Spencer already won a similar lawsuit at Auburn University in April.
The white nationalist leader also has asked to speak at the University of Chicago. And who knows where else? The Spencer-related turmoil is all part of a much greater free speech debate swirling around the country's colleges and their general counsel.
The turmoil includes recent incidents of free speech protest-related violence or disruptions of unpopular speakers at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, in May; at Middlebury College in Vermont in March, and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in February. Messages seeking comment from general counsel or other executives at these universities were not returned.
The debate became so heated that in June the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the assault on the First Amendment on college campuses.
Veteran First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, formerly counsel for The New York Times and now senior counsel at Cahill Gordon & Reindel in New York, testified at the hearing. The answer to the suppression of almost any speech, the First Amendment answer, cannot be to limit expression but to discuss it, not to bar offensive speech but to answer it. Or to ignore it. Or to persuade the public to reject it, Abrams said.
Also testifying was UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who urged universities to keep their doors open to unpopular speakers. Volokh said banning a speaker is an abdication of the universities' responsibility to educate to teach their students about the importance of responding to speech with arguments, and not with suppression.