PodcastsFree Speech
Mark Dalhouse and Ari Miller: The Groundwork of Campus Civil Discourse
ACTA’s College Debates and Discourse (CD&D) Alliance has launched more than 300 Braver Angels debates and workshops, engaging 11,000 students at...
Washington, DC – The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and the Independent Women’s Law Center (IWF) filed an amicus brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. The brief supports Speech First, a national organization dedicated to protecting students’ free speech rights, in its appeal of a district court decision that denied its motion to enjoin the University of Illinois from enforcing several policies that chill political speech on campus.
ACTA and IWF believe that the University of Illinois’s Bias Assessment and Response Team (BART) creates an environment that forces students to refrain from engaging in open and wide-ranging discussions of important social and political issues. Mountains of survey data and anecdotal evidence demonstrate that students frequently engage in self-censorship. They do so for many reasons, including the specific fear that they will be punished by administrators who deem their speech offensive. As such, the brief argues that the University of Illinois’s speech policies betray a core function of the American academy in the following ways:
“The academy’s mission is to prepare students to be engaged and informed citizens, but this cannot happen when ideas are sidelined, ignored, or even banned based upon political bias,” stated Michael Poliakoff, president of ACTA. “In the misguided belief that controlling speech will further social justice these strategically vague speech policies have become instruments designed to deter the expression of viewpoints that depart from the orthodoxy currently in favor on campuses.”
“Today, more than two hundred universities operate bias response teams, many of them on public campuses. The consequences of this trend are less diversity of opinion on college campuses and the impoverishment of our national marketplace of ideas,” said Jonathan Pidluzny, ACTA’s director of academic affairs. “Universities that discourage the free exchange of ideas are failing to prepare students to be responsible members of a democratic society, in which citizens are free to express their views and capable of doing so with respect and civility.”
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 6, 2019
MEDIA CONTACT: Connor Murnane
PHONE: (202) 798-5450
ACTA’s College Debates and Discourse (CD&D) Alliance has launched more than 300 Braver Angels debates and workshops, engaging 11,000 students at...
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