About 50 percent of college students think interrupting on-campus speakers with controversial viewpoints is acceptable, a recent study by the Brookings Institution found.

The study, which surveyed 1,500 undergraduate students at universities and colleges in the United States, also indicated that 19 percent of students think violence is an appropriate means of blocking speakers from campus.

“If you begin shutting people down, the next person will be you,” said Joel Kaplan, a professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Kaplan’s expertise includes First Amendment and communications law.

“It’s not an unnatural reaction,” Kaplan said. “(College students) agree in principle to free speech, but they only support free speech if it’s speech they want to hear.”

Kaplan compared this concept to a lesson he once taught in class. He asked students whether it was right to allow Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977. Skokie, a Chicago suburb, was home to about 40,000 people of the Jewish faith. There were nearly 5,000 Holocaust survivors in the city.

The class was reluctant to say yes, Kaplan said. To them, the march was not an acceptable form of free speech. Students, though, were supportive of the Freedom Riders marching between Selma and Montgomery to protest racial injustice.

“(But) you can’t have it both ways,” Kaplan said. “If you want freedom of speech for certain groups, you have to have freedom of speech for all groups.”

Nina Iacono Brown, a Newhouse professor who specializes in First Amendment law, said hate speech is largely protected. Hate speech, though, can lose protection when it falls into one of three categories, she said. Hate speech is unprotected when it aims to incite violence, Brown said.

Students should not protest speakers, Brown said. Rather, students should engage with them.

Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech, said Brookings’ study could be attributed to the country’s political climate.

“The country is polarized,” Gutterman said. “And, we’re in a position where there’s not a lot of dialogue.”

College students should not resort to violence when facing rhetoric they disagree with, Gutterman said. Shouting down speakers, or threatening violence, is not in the spirit of free speech values, he said.

“People have to have a little more acceptance of other viewpoints,” Gutterman said. “Even if you disagree with them.”

When asked if he thinks U.S. democracy is eroding, Gutterman said he hoped the study’s findings were simply a minor setback — and not a precursor to anything else.

“American society has gone through these wrinkles before,” Gutterman said. “We’ll prevail in these debates with some reasoning and common sense.”

Published on October 8, 2017 at 8:21 pm

Contact Jaden: jtconsta@syr.edu