For freedom at URI
01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, April 25, 2007
The First Amendment, the foundation of our freedom, was designed to protect unpopular and even offensive speech. When the government bullies people to shut up, or recant, it is violating that basic right.
Robert Carothers, president of the University of Rhode Island, grasps that fact, which should be obvious to any American but all too often is not. In the face of very strong forces of political correctness at his campus, he is ordering the Student Senate to cease bullying the College Republicans.
The Republican club ran an ad in the student newspaper for a $100 “White Heterosexual American Male” scholarship, a satire on real scholarships based on race or sex. While few on campus agree that special help for minorities is wrong, certainly the idea of affirmative action can be robustly debated under the U.S. Constitution.
A subcommittee of the Student Senate, seemingly unaware that the First Amendment protects the rights of people to challenge accepted wisdom, ruled that the ad violated URI’s anti-discrimination bylaws and demanded that the College Republicans apologize in the student newspaper. Ryan Bilodeau, president of the club, appealed that ruling, and the Senate denied the appeal.
The possible punishment for refusing to comply is the loss of student-activities money ($250 a year) from the university and access for the organization to university facilities.
Since URI is a government institution, liable to be held responsible for violating constitutional rights, Mr. Carothers wisely stepped in. “After a full review of the constitutional questions involved here,” he wrote in a boldly worded memo to the Senate, “I must advise you that the action of the Student Senate to require the College Republicans to make certain representations that are clearly not their own . . . is a sanction that does not meet constitutional standards as laid forth in the First Amendment.”
Will the full Student Senate listen? It meets today on the issue.
What URI students should understand is that vigorous debate, and a tolerance for the expression of unpopular ideas, is essential to intellectual and political freedom. Ultimately, the greatest protection for any minority lies in its freedom to get its story out — often in the face of government agents who seek to stifle the free flow of information. Unless we wish to live under a totalitarian system, it is crucial that we defend that freedom.
