Disturbing Parallels Between University Speech Codes and Old South Limits on Free Speech

Members of the leadership of the Faculty Senate of the University of Alabama

My article (co-authored by Charles W. Nuckolls) has appeared at the History News Network. It discusses some remarkable parallels between the current faculty senate of the University of Alabama and the Mississippi state legislature of the 1950s:

"In the South,” Faulkner said, “the past is not dead. It isn't even past." How true, especially when the segregationist legislation of the early 1950s reappears in the guise of protection against hate speech. Recently, the Faculty Senate of the University of Alabama passed a resolution calling for restrictions on speech that might be offensive to someone. The irony is that the new rules duplicate, almost word for word, laws passed by hysterical southern legislators in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision of 1954.

The resolution calls on University officials to “develop clear policies restricting any behavior which demeans or reduces an individual based on group affiliation or personal characteristics.” The pretext for passage was an incident involving alleged anti-gay comments by a comedian at an event sponsored by the University. Just why a university should pay professional comedians to entertain the students is another question.

But the resolution goes further. It covers “any approved University program or activity.” If taken literally, of course, the effect would be to punish football fans at Alabama games who shout slogans that “demean” or “diminish” players on the opposing team. Not a single member of the Faculty Senate voted against the proposed measure, although one fretted unconvincingly, “I think I know what is right and wrong but it’s all that stuff in the middle.” If the members of the Alabama Faculty Senate thought this attempt to restrict free speech was original, they were wrong. In making their vote, they had cast their lot with a long and unsavory tradition in the Deep South. In 1956, for example, a bill debated by the Mississippi state legislature had remarkably similar wording to that approved by the Faculty Senate. It proposed making it a criminal offense to use “oral or printed” words “which tend to expose a person to hatred, contempt, or ridicule, to degrade or disgrace him in society.”

Read the rest here .