Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2009
What is the proper role of politics in higher education? Many policies and reforms in the academy, from affirmative action and a multicultural curriculum to racial and sexual harassment codes and movements to change pedagogical styles, seek justice for oppressed groups in society. They understand justice to require a comprehensive equality of membership: individuals belonging to different groups should have equal access to educational opportunities; their interests and cultures should be taken equally seriously as worthy subjects of study, their persons treated with equal respect and concern in communicative interaction. Conservative critics of these egalitarian movements represent them as dangerous political meddling into the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. They cast the pursuit of equality as a threat to freedom of speech and academic standards. In response, some radical advocates of such programs agree that the quest for equality clashes with free speech, but view this as an argument for sacrificing freedom of speech.
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17 Use of this model by civil libertarians does not imply that they also support free markets in commodities, as political libertarians do. Most civil libertarians are liberals, not political libertarians. My target is all libertarians, whether civil or political, who are attracted by a market model of free speech. In drawing attention to some of the disturbing implications of this model for speech, I aim to persuade liberal civil libertarians that the same reservations they typically have about free markets in commodities apply to free markets in speech. I also aim to persuade political libertarians that free markets in speech are not sufficient to ensure freedom of speech for all, and can even reinforce cultures inimical to free speech.
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37 Some of the most interesting cases of a free-market-driven abolition of civil society appeared in the nineteenth-century company towns of the United States. They embodied a culture of class-based inequality incompatible with the egalitarian demands of civil society. George Pullman, the owner of the company town Pullman, Illinois, owned all spaces of public and private association-including church buildings, schools, parks, businesses, municipal buildings, and houses-and asserted the property right to determine what went on in them. Company towns are a social order likely to return in the kind of free-market regime endorsed by political libertarians. On Pullman, see Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice (New York: Dasic Books, 1983), pp. 295–99.Google Scholar
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39 “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. …”
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46 U.S. constitutional doctrine defines “fighting words” as speech that is not an essential part of the expression of ideas and that is so insulting that it provokes the average person to fight. Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. 315 U.S. 568 (1942).Google Scholar
47 This was the opinion Judge Avern Cohn correctly reached about the University of Michigan's student speech code in Doe v. Michigan, 721 F. Supp. 852 (E.D. Michigan, 1989).Google Scholar
48 Spray-painted on the office walls of an African-American student and secretary at the University of Colorado, Denver; see The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, vol. 1 (1993), p. 107.Google Scholar
49 Matsuda, et al. , Words that Wound.Google Scholar An Illinois law against group defamation was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Beauharnais v. Illinois, 343 U.S. 250 (1952).Google Scholar The “fighting words” doctrine is articulated in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942).Google Scholar
50 Gates, , “Let Them Talk,” pp. 39–40.Google Scholar
51 Ibid., p. 49.
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