In this video someone from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) speaks about the "laughably unconstitutional" rules regarding free speech and censorship that are ubiquitous universities. Count NCSU in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEOudgLWlDo

I've heard many examples of disciplinary action screwing up the lives of college students over the years, and I relate to that through many personal experiences from my own college years. Administrators wanted student council to do nothing more than add legitimacy to their own views. Oh, did I mention NCSU administrators proved themselves to be corrupt in several cases.

When I recall my college years I see The Wolf Web as standing for everything wonderful and good. But it did so by being seedy, as do many sites. The university always hated TWW. The Soap Box, for all its flaws, was ahead of its time and was one of my only real means of outward participation in public debate. No one cared, lots of haters, no one actually looking at something like TSB as an important part of what a college education should be.

We had a unique place in history as the first internet generation. Higher education institutions should have been the first to host no-holds-bar message boards, granting full anonymity. It never happened. We failed history and American educational institutions will fall into obscurity because of it.

10/18/2010 10:12:55 PM

Speach

10/18/2010 10:23:49 PM

FREADOM OF SPEACH

when i broak my kne

10/18/2010 10:30:32 PM

without watching the clip, i'm going to guess that I'm probably sympathetic to most of their concerns

but as far as "laughably unconstitutional" goes, I'm guessing they are referring to the 1st Amendment, which is a restriction upon Congress.

10/18/2010 10:45:56 PM

but see NCSU is a public university that receives taxpayer dollars from Congress and the North Carolina legislature and the 14th amendment has been interpreted to impose First Amendment restrictions onto the state governments too

10/18/2010 11:00:34 PM

^...But it's also a university in competition with other public and private universities, and as such, makes an effort to make sure that its name is generally associated with things that it wants to be associated with. And besides that, they're technically not banning people from saying certain things, only banning them from saying those things if they want to remain a part of the university (Yeah, it's a mostly-meaningless distinction, but the fact remains that a college education isn't considered a right, so they're not taking anyone's rights away when they boot them from the school -- ultimately the student chooses to remain in the university and chooses to be subject to the university's rules. [although given a sufficient lack of universities that don't impose speech restrictions, one could certainly argue that there's not really much of a choice at all for someone with controversial views wanting a college education]).

I'm not going to say that restricting student speech is morally right (because I don't think it is), but the issue is more complex than just university=government and therefore the university cannot make rules about what you can and cannot say on its premises. While it would be great if all public universities didn't compete and all offered an equally high-quality education, or if people weren't so sensitive and/or impressionable and didn't associate something said by one student with the university itself, neither of those things are realistically the case.


Personally, I'd rather see the universities (as publicly funded institutions whose students pay to attend) take whatever hits came as a result of students/faculty saying whatever they please.


Disclaimer: I haven't watched the video... But this seems like a pretty similar issue to the one that got brought up a few years ago when that one redneck kid wrote something dumb on the free expression tunnel, in that the university's actions hinge on the expectation that the actions of students (or faculty and staff) will reflect back on the university itself.

[Edited on October 18, 2010 at 11:36 PM. Reason : .]

10/18/2010 11:19:17 PM

Also having not watch the clip (yet), I can say that from my early days of undergrad to my next to last semester in grad school I have seen a steady increase in the use of message boards that have helped to foster discussions that wouldn't necessarily happen within the allotted window of class time, and where people share links to information & thoughts in a way that you can't easily do in a class room. Its gone from having some virtual classroom presence being an abnormality to not having one being the abnormality, which I view as a positive progression.

(and of course there's the whole honor code contract thing that you sign on to, which I assume is different depending on which school you decide to go to whether you pick on that's large like NCSU, private like Duke, crazy like Liberty University, small, a community college, & depending on state/region etc)

I think one of the big reasons that they aren't quite so wild as tdub is because the lack of anonymity. And I think social networking websites like facebook have helped shift the norm toward participating online in a non-anonymous way.

More broadly, I think lots of different aspects of people's lives are adjust to social networking photos being out there, whether it is a job making a hiring decision, a candidate running for office, or a university dealing with students. And for what its worth I think we should focus on the merit rather than random party photos or what have you, and I think that will become the norm as time passes with people having facebook photos of going to parties, drinking under 21, or dressing up in silly or suggestive halloween costumes, etc. I think as older generations are replaced by younger ones, caring about that sort of thing will be diminished.

[Edited on October 18, 2010 at 11:29 PM. Reason : .]

10/18/2010 11:22:47 PM

I'm for Free Speach as much as the next guy, but there's no way I can begin to take this seriously.

"American educational institutions will fall into obscurity" because we failed to host fully-unmoderated and anonymous message boards?

Really?? come on, dude. find a real issue to get upset about.

10/19/2010 12:28:43 PM

Quote :

"Free Speach is Dead at Universities"

apparently so is spelling

10/19/2010 12:58:13 PM

Quote :

"but as far as "laughably unconstitutional" goes, I'm guessing they are referring to the 1st Amendment, which is a restriction upon Congress."

come on ... for a long time the first amendment has been interpreted to apply to any government-controlled body. That's why the Hee-haw County School Board can't mandate morning prayer.

10/19/2010 6:11:40 PM

Quote :

"come on ... for a long time the first amendment has been interpreted to apply to any government-controlled body. That's why the Hee-haw County School Board can't mandate morning prayer."

Exactly. If it were interpreted strictly any individual state could restrict freedom of speech right and left. As many did historically.

10/19/2010 9:33:09 PM

To summarize the argument in this thread:

tl dr

10/20/2010 1:43:30 PM

Quote :

"And besides that, they're technically not banning people from saying certain things, only banning them from saying those things if they want to remain a part of the university"

No, this is still unconstitutional, and the courts have ruled so. You would be surprised how quickly a disciplinary situation here can evolve into university representatives violating the law. I'll break this down into specifics:

Action at the school

It is quite common for college students to vandalize university property, or just behave destructively. There was one student in the news a few years ago who was dismissed for coming home on a weekend night and messin junk up in the dorm. Problem was, they never had any semblance of process or evidence or testimony to make the decision, and it resulted in barring him from the school, not just the dorm. Courts ruled that the university was liable for the obvious damages due to him being thrown out of school half way through along with the corresponding stigmatization.

Outside of school

This is where we are right now, TWW and Facebook are obviously separate from school. We all know where this is going - Facebook drinking pictures. According people making decisions on behalf of NCSU in the past, disciplinary action based on semi-public pictures (this is what Facebook usually is) is perfectly ok. Pictures don't need to be on campus, may require in depth searching, and need not constitute underage drinking.

This may, in fact, be legal. However, they can't institute disciplinary action (provided this action has definable damages to you) because they don't like you or have a personal vendetta against you. Keep thinking about the 'character' argument and you'll see a fine line.

Additionally, political views can easily fall into the 'character' argument. An outspoken racist segregationist may just not be the quality a university wants.

Quote :

"Disclaimer: I haven't watched the video... But this seems like a pretty similar issue to the one that got brought up a few years ago when that one redneck kid wrote something dumb on the free expression tunnel, in that the university's actions hinge on the expectation that the actions of students (or faculty and staff) will reflect back on the university itself."

Those writings could have be construed as a threat. The racist bigot who wrote it had every right to be a racist bigot, but he (or them) was stupid, and created a monumental legal issue for himself by saying something that was obviously not within his ability to carry out but was still a threat of physical harm to someone else.

Speaking completely based on correlation, racists seem to be not very smart. But anyway, any threat is not protected speech and doesn't fall in this topic.

Quote :

"and of course there's the whole honor code contract thing that you sign on to, which I assume is different depending on which school you decide to go to whether you pick on that's large like NCSU, private like Duke, crazy like Liberty University, small, a community college, & depending on state/region etc"

Is enrollment in private schools legally similar to an employment contract? Someone can fire you simply because they don't like you (but that depends on the state you're in, in NC I think this is the case). That pretty much includes personal vendettas. My understanding is that for one reason or another, that level of whimsicalness used in dismissing a student from a public institution can make the person who did the dismissing liable for personal damages to the student.

[Edited on October 20, 2010 at 2:04 PM. Reason : ]

10/20/2010 2:03:08 PM

Quote :

"But anyway, any threat is not protected speech and doesn't fall in this topic."

I wasn't referring so much to the specific actions of the idiot kids as I was to the more hypothetical side questions that got raised during the whole mess, that is, "Is it right for a university to take action against a student for saying something controversial/undesirable?"

...In terms of the specific situation, it was different both in being a threat to the president and in being written down (which supposedly had some sort of legal bearing on things, if I remember correctly).

10/20/2010 9:08:56 PM

Too bad we don't have a tunnel where we can express ourselves freely.

10/23/2010 7:00:08 PM