20-1. Speech story:
Instructions: Burl Osborne, former editor of the Dallas Morning News, made this speech a few years ago at a convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. in Washington, D.C. when he was president of the organization. Write a story based on this speech as though it were given yesterday to students at your university. You may print this story or copy and paste the text into a Word document.

On college campuses all across the country there are growing restraints on free speech and academic freedom. It is troubling that the attacks are coming from those who once defended the right to free expression ­ and who achieved their own status by exercising it.

Trying to squelch unpopular speech isn't a new idea, of course. In the era of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, supposed Communists and their sympathizers were the targets and the security of the United States was the excuse.

More recently, proposed laws would have imprisoned those who burn the American flag as a form of political protest. Congress made such a law, which the Supreme Court struck down. There was talk of a constitutional amendment but that also was beaten back ­ at least for the moment.

Most people don't want to endanger democracy or burn the flag. But it is just plain wrong to try to protect democracy by denying its principles, or to try to protect the flag by denying the rights that it stands for. In these, and most, cases, the urge to censor is the reaction of well-intentioned people to the expression of views they find repugnant.

Censors are always certain they are acting for the common good. The current wave of censorship has all these characteristics. The common good for which the censors would supersede the constitution is protection from being offended, insulted or ridiculed. The goal is to eliminate prejudice, particularly that based on race, gender or sexual orientation. That is an admirable goal. Using censorship as a tool to achieve that goal is not an admirable strategy. Yet censorship has become the strategy of choice.

A growing number of campuses now forbid offensive speech or expression, with penalties ranging from censure to expulsion to thought-remedial visits to a psychologist. Behavior that complies with what is deemed to be proper is politically correct. Censorship is the discipline imposed on the politically incorrect. The core activities of a university, the competition of ideas and the pursuit of academic inquiry, can flourish only with the right to express any opinion or ask any questions without regard to the correctness of the premise.

It is one thing to disagree with an opinion and defeat it with logic. To deny the mere expression of a bad idea is quite another.

We find ourselves accepting intolerance of disagreeable or offensive speech in order to fight intolerance of other kinds. Here are some examples culled from journals and magazines during the last several months. I disagree with many of the views that are expressed, but I disagree more with the notion that one shouldn't be permitted to express them at all.

• At the University of California at Berkeley, a professor wrote in a magazine that he believed the school's affirmative action program discriminated against white and Asian applicants. Students who disagreed disrupted his class and the university gave him to wonder whether or not he would be permitted to continue teaching.
• In the New York University law school, the moot court board assigned a case concerning the custody rights of a lesbian mother. Students temporarily forced withdrawal of the case on grounds that arguments against the mother would be hurtful to a particular group.
• The University of Connecticut prohibited "inappropriately directed laughter" and "conspicuous exclusion of students from conversations." A woman student was banned from campus for posting a sign on her dormitory door that was judged to be offensive and thus in violation of the student code.
• The student senate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison protested an "All-American Halloween Ball," on the grounds that masked students might anonymously insult others.
• A University of Michigan student read a limerick containing joking references to homosexuality. He was required to publish a written self-criticism, "Learned My Lesson," in the student newspaper.
• At Harvard, a student displayed a Confederate flag to demonstrate what she described as a surge of Southern pride stimulated by the war in the Persian Gulf. An African-American student was offended and displayed a swastika to demonstrate his view that the Confederate flag is a hateful sign. Jewish students were offended because of the swastika's Nazi symbolism. The first student was offended because the Confederate flag didn't mean to others what it means to her.
• At Smith College, students were given a list of terms of oppression, including, with appropriate references to racism and sexism, some others that required new words because the victims, as the handbook took note, may not yet know they are oppressed.
  • Ableism, for example, is defined as the oppression of the differently abled by the temporarily abled.
  • Classism is the oppression of the working class and non-propertied by the upper and middle classes.
  • Lookism, is, in part, the construction of a standard for beauty or attractiveness.

In the course of collecting written material on this subject, I ran across a tongue-in-cheek forecast of particular interest to me. It predicted that the next ism might be heightism, whose victims would no longer be called short, but instead would be known as the vertically challenged.

I take the entire subject very seriously. But I have to say that if we hope to make good on this country's promises of freedom to speak one's mind, then we are not going about it in a very productive way. What we should be doing is defending and promoting the right of free speech; that is the best way to persuade each other of the moral validity of the civil treatment of everyone.

These concerns are especially important to journalists because censorship on the campus today will be censorship in the newsroom tomorrow. Campus newspapers are speaking out on this subject in places like the University of Colorado in Boulder. In others, I suspect the fear of offending has kept them quiet; they need First Amendment protection, too.

Last night several editors met for dinner at the Cafe Budapest. The group was met by an elegant, silver-haired woman in a flowing white gown. She was the owner of the restaurant, Dr. Livia Hedda Rev-Kury. As she welcomed the party, Dr. Rev-Kury asked about the "Celebrate the First" button that editor Frank Sutherland was wearing. "It celebrates the First Amendment," he said.

"Would you like to have it?" he asked.

"Oh, yes," she responded.

As she took the button, she said, "I know a little about the First Amendment," and she paused. "You know, I love America more than you do."

"Why is that," the editor asked.

She rolled up her sleeve and extended her arm. "You see, I have these numbers...." That was one more First Amendment minute given to us by a survivor of Dachau and Auschwitz and citizen of the United States. The tattoo she carries is a permanent reminder of the value of the First Amendment. We need to somehow tattoo that value on our souls. We need to figure out how to reduce prejudice without sacrificing individual liberties and freedom of thought and expression.

Published with permission of Burl Osborne..