WASHINGTON — Banning hate speech on college campuses would stifle free speech, impede research on controversial issues and creates a culture of victimhood, a Boise State University political science professor said Tuesday at a Heritage Foundation event about “Hate Speech” on Tuesday.
“Universities are built on the view that all disparities between sexes, races and orientations are traceable to oppression and discrimination. In fact, questioning those assumptions equals a hate crime,” said professor Scott Yenor told the audience at the conservative think tank.
Yenor argued that placing bans on certain types of speech would limit scientific studies at the universities because the results of the studies may not be deemed socially acceptable. As an example, he said several tenured professors studying transgender individuals emailed him their concerns that these bans would limit their research.
“If transgender ideology imposes its views that gender is a pure social construction, then scientific discoveries in the areas of human biology will become politically incorrect,” he said.
But Katrin Wehrheim, a mathematics professor at the University of California-Berkeley, said banning hate speech is not about the First Amendment.
“None of this is about free speech. What should be banned from campuses – and in fact anywhere – is white supremacist violence and denial of the genocides that this country was founded with,” Wehrheim said. She was among a group of Berkeley professors who threatened to boycott their classes if alt-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos and conservative author and pundit Anne Coulter were allowed to speak on campus.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropology professor at Berkeley who teaches a class on free speech and hate speech, said there should be certain restrictions on free speech.
“You cannot legislate compulsory pacifism or compulsory civility. But surely university officials can and must protect the culture of the public university, which has no obligation to let everyone speak in our lecture halls,” Scheper-Hughes said.
Scheper-Hughes said that Yiannopoulos and Coulter, who both canceled their events at Berkeley last year after security threats, should have been allowed to speak at the university. However, she does not believe a formal lecture hall should have been granted.
“Milo is not a scholar or a public intellectual, but a vulgar entertainer-provocateur. As an offensive comedian he could have performed his act through Cal Performances, which has sometimes hosted other offensive comedians. That’s where he belongs, not in one of our university lecture halls,” she said.
But Nadine Strossen, a law professor at New York University, said public universities cannot interfere with anyone’s speech due to content neutralities laws that prohibit the government from being able to limit certain types of speech based on its content.
“More harm is done when the government has the power to punish speech rather than allow that speech to go forward,” she said.
Heritage Foundation research Arthur Milikh agreed.
“The radical goal behind banning speech is to silence the human capacity for judgment,” Milikh said.