My comments about SFSU's questionable decision to remove the GUPS website have caused some controversy, but that's a good thing. The more we hash out the complicated issues surrounding civil liberties on campus, the more debate we have, the better off we will all be.

One point that can't be made too strongly, and a major reason why campus speech codes keep getting thrown out of court, is that it is simply impossible to define "hate speech" effectively and fairly. Once you start trying to regulate the content of someone's expression, as opposed to the time, place, and manner of that expression, you enter the zone of authoritarianism. One person's hate speech is another person's heartfelt belief; no one has the authority to adjudicate matters of private conscience, no matter how well-meaning or community-minded he or she may be. It is that simple, and it is a truth our campuses have worked very, very hard in recent years to make us forget--or, in the case of younger students, never know. Universities were not created to be "nice" places where nobody ever gets their feelings hurt or has their ideas challenged. They were created for the purpose of education--and real education, true education, education in independent, meticulous reasoning, cannot occur in an environment where everyone is more concerned about not causing offense than about pursuing truth.

You may say that there are cases where it is absolutely, unequivocally clear that all that is being expressed is hate, and that it is right and fair to punish in those cases. You may say the GUPS website is a classic example of such a case. I will say to that that I know first hand just how slippery the slope of "hate" can be. Last year, I posted a web site that offended certain graduate students in my department. The site didn't contain anti-Semitic gifs, or links to terrorist fronts, or even any profanity or porn. What it did do was voice strong words about graduate student culture in the humanities, which I find to be enormously unhealthy and counterproductive on a number of levels, and to offer advice to graduate students for getting through grad school with their minds and spirits intact. Certain students did not like the site. They complained to departmental administrators that they felt "menaced" and "threatened" and "targeted" by it--language that will be familiar to those following the SFSU situation. And guess what? I got a call from the then-graduate chair suggesting that I risked losing my job if I didn't remove the "offending pages."

What I posted was entirely within my rights, and was very, very far from what any reasonable person might define as "hate speech." And yet the rhetoric of hate speech was invoked to condemn what I had written, and it stuck--because "hate speech" is fundamentally in the eye of the beholder; because it is an eminently abusable category; because it is whatever the would-be censor wants it to be. Students felt threatened and menaced; therefore, I was threatening and menacing them.

My point? We have to defend the expression of groups like GUPS if we want to be sure our own expression is protected. These are tough truths to swallow when one is on the wrong end of bigoted and nasty expression, but they are the truths we have to swallow if we are to preserve the liberty that makes our lives so preciously free.

I'll blog more about the rights issues that surround student groups, and the student fees that pay for those groups, within a day or so. In the meantime, if you are looking for more to read on the subject of hate speech on campus, see the ACLU's briefing paper on the subject. It runs through the relevant case law, and it also explains why it is not only illegal, but morally and politically undesirable, for public schools to attempt to limit or regulate the content of student or faculty expression.