image credit: lauruscollege.edu
Today is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, and “the act mandates that all publicly funded educational
institutions, and all federal agencies, provide educational programming on the
history of the American Constitution on that day.” Er, one day out of
the year? Nevertheless, Salena Zito reports some encouraging news:
"We must
not be afraid to be free," Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black famously said
in a dissent defending free expression. That appeal is germane today,
especially on college campuses, professor Daniel Cullen argues.
Cullen, a professor of political
science at Rhodes College, is working to engage liberal arts college students
on the critical importance of the First Amendment and free speech. It's part of
a program at 30 colleges and universities across the country [which] will be
marking Constitution Day on September 17, the 231st anniversary of its signing.
“It is a critical moment in
American society and culture to deeply reflect First Amendment traditions as
they relate to the Constitution,” said Cullen of the initiative sponsored by
the Jack Miller Center.
. . .
“There was a survey recently done
by the Knight Foundation that found a majority of American college students
today either believe incorrectly that the First Amendment prohibits hate
speech, or if it doesn't, then it ought to,” he says.
Simply put, it is an entire
generation forgetting that one of the proudest achievements of American
democracy is that we agree to tolerate the speech we hate.
“Nevertheless it's that proposition
that a majority of college students no longer accept. They don't think it's
something to be proud of. They think it's an error so the question is, ‘Why?’
And I think the best answer is that they, especially the iGen generation have
become highly sensitized to the harm that speech can do and the offensiveness
that often goes along with speech,” he said.
. . .
Yet Cullen remains hopeful, “What we do is we try and
separate truth from falsehood and truth from error, and students remain
naturally intellectually curious. They want to hear the arguments for important
moral viewpoints, even arguments for viewpoints that strike them as
fundamentally wrong.”
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