Provost Lee Bollinger, an expert on First Amendment issues, spoke last night about speech codes and the rights of students at private institutions.
Bollinger gave his speech, titled "First Amendment Rights at Private Institutions," to about 40 people in the 1930s room of the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences.
He said speech codes seem to be dying out even though they are not only allowed, but are required in terms of wise policy.
"Over the past 10 years many colleges and universities have moved to enact speech codes," he said.
Speech codes "must exist, but they are incredibly difficult to write," he said. "A number of colleges tried to come up with speech codes and have failed."
He described incidents at the University of Michigan in 1987, when he was a professor at the Michigan Law School, which led that school to enact a free-speech code.
The code was later ruled unconstitutional by a federal court. Other college speech codes, including one at Stanford University, also have been struck down in recent years by the courts.
The codes at colleges that have not been challenged tend to be "quite narrow," he said. The codes now seem to be dying out, but do have a place in regulating speech such as harassment or threats, he said.
Bollinger said although public universities are considered state institutions, the Supreme Court has refused to hold private colleges as state actors for the purposes of the First Amendment.
"The First Amendment doesn't apply to" private institutions, he said. "Dartmouth can say, 'No more dirty language on campus,' and that would be legal."
"A lot of us assume the Constitution applies so much more broadly than it does," he said.
Bollinger discussed key free speech cases of the Supreme Court, which distinguish between speech protected by the First Amendment and speech that is not.
"The line between protected and unprotected speech in the First Amendment is just not that clear," he said.
The few cases in which speech can be regulated include perjury, libel, sexual or racial harassment in the workplace, Bollinger said.He then mentioned five cases specifically dealing with schools.He listed three key cases in the late 1960s and 1970s, beginning with Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), which Bollinger said broadened students' free speech rights.
However, two more recent Supreme Court decisions -- Bethel v. Frasier, and Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier -- seem to indicate that the court is chipping away at the Tinker decision, reversing its previous stand, Bollinger said.
