by Samantha Harris
November 20, 2007
It is important to emphasize here that it is controversial expression that it is the First Amendment’s highest duty to protect. By political definition, popular views need no protection. It is unpopular notions that are in the greatest peril — and it was primarily to protect their expression that the First Amendment was adopted. The Framers of our Constitution believed that a democracy could remain healthy over time only if its citizens felt free both to invent new ideas and to vent thoughts and feelings that were thoroughly out of fashion. Fashion, it was understood, is an agent of repression — and repression is an agent [of] democracy’s death.
For purposes of First Amendment analysis there are very important differences between primary and secondary schools, on the one hand, and colleges and universities, on the other. As the courts often have acknowledged, the state does not require higher education and has much less interest in regulating it, the students in colleges and universities are not children, but emancipated (by law) adults, and, critically, the mission of institutions of higher learning is quite different from the mission of primary and secondary schools. As courts have emphasized, “the vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools [of higher learning].” Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169, 180 (1972) (internal citation and quotation omitted). As our highest court has said, “[t]he college classroom with its surrounding environs is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas. . . .’” Id. Supreme Court precedents “leave no room for the view that, because of the acknowledged need for order, First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses than in the community at large.” Id. (internal quotations omitted). Indeed, the core principles of the First Amendment “acquire a special significance in the university setting, where the free and unfettered interplay of competing views is essential to the institution’s educational mission.” Doe v. Univ. of Mich., 721 F. Supp. at 863 (citing Keyishian v. Bd. of Regents, 385 U.S. 589, 603 (1967)).
There also is an emotional dimension to the effectiveness of communication. Speakers, especially speakers on significant or controversial issues, often want their audience to understand how passionately they feel about their subject or message. For many speakers on religious or political subjects, for example, having their audience perceive and understand their passion, their intensity of feeling, can be the single most important aspect of an expressive act. And for many people, what matters most about a particular instance of communication is whether it inspires emotions in the audience, i.e., whether it has the emotional power to move the audience to action or to a different level of interest in or commitment to an idea or cause. For such people, the effectiveness of communication is measured by its emotional impact, by the intensity of the resonance it creates.
How is all this relevant to our review of the University’s civility requirement? Civility connotes calmness, control, and deference or responsiveness to the circumstances, ideas, and feelings of others. […] Given these common understandings, a regulation that mandates civility easily could be understood as permitting only those forms of interaction that produce as little friction as possible, forms that are thoroughly lubricated by restraint, moderation, respect, social convention, and reason. The First Amendment difficulty with this kind of mandate should be obvious: the requirement “to be civil to one another” and the directive to eschew behaviors that are not consistent with “good citizenship” reasonably can be understood as prohibiting the kind of communication that it is necessary to use to convey the full emotional power with which a speaker embraces her ideas or the intensity and richness of the feelings that attach her to her cause. Similarly, mandating civility could deprive speakers of the tools they most need to connect emotionally with their audience, to move their audience to share their passion.
In sum, there is a substantial risk that the civility requirement will inhibit or deter use of the forms and means of communication that, to many speakers in circumstances of the greatest First Amendment sensitivity, will be the most valued and the most effective.
We must assess regulatory language in the real world context in which the persons being regulated will encounter that language. The persons being regulated here are college students, not scholars of First Amendment law. What does a college student see when he or she encounters section 41301? That student sees a long list of mandates and proscriptions, most of which seem to describe, in terms relatively familiar to the student and with a fair amount of particularity, various forms of “Unacceptable Student Behaviors.” After seeing all these prohibitions, a student who is particularly thorough and patient also could read that nothing in the Code “may conflict” with a cited state statute that prohibits universities from violating students’ First Amendment rights.
What path is a college student who faces this regulatory situation most likely to follow? Is she more likely to feel that she should heed the relatively specific proscriptions of the Code that are set forth in words she thinks she understands, or is she more likely to feel that she can engage in conduct that violates those proscriptions (and thus is risky and likely controversial) in the hope that the powers-that-be will agree, after the fact, that the course of action she chose was protected by the First Amendment? To us, this question is self-answering — and the answer condemns to valuelessness the allegedly ‘saving’ provision in the last paragraph of the Code that prohibits violations of the First Amendment.