Hate speech and the First Amendment

"Free speech," though one of the more ubiquitous legal terms du jour, is also widely misunderstood. There are a number of mentalities behind this ignorance, perhaps none so simply observed as in the title of the famously liberal writer Nat Hentoff's book on the subject: "Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee." Our society at large has a long tradition of seeking to carve out free speech exceptions, but the courts, far more often than not, have ruled to protect, in the words of the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, "freedom for the thought we hate."

While double standards in the arena of free speech abound in all sectors of civil and governmental society, nowhere is the gap between theory and practice greater today than on our college and university campuses. Academic institutions stubbornly maintain, in the face of often overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that they value the right of free speech as a component of sacrosanct "academic freedom." College presidents repeat this routine cant whenever their commitment to free speech is questioned, despite the fact that, as I've observed on several occasions, their students can freely say things outside the campus gates that would be punishable within them.