OPINION & EDITORIAL
Seg Fees support true free speech
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Also by Rob Deters:
- SUVs and Earth Day do not mix (April 24, 2003)
- Lawlessness reigns in halls of Congress (April 6, 2005)
Related Stories:
- Seg fees hurt free speech (October 30, 2001)
- Do students care about seg fees? (November 27, 2001)
- Court flawed in student paper ruling (October 27, 2005)
- UW leaders ignore religious rights (October 10, 2006)
- Southworth's loss is your gain (October 4, 2002)
by Rob Deters
Thursday, November 6, 2003
“Finally, the weakness of Southworth’s claim is underscored by its setting within a university, whose students are inevitably required to support the expression of personally offensive viewpoints in ways that cannot be thought constitutionally objectionable unless one is prepared to deny the university its choice over what to teach.” - Justice Souter, concurring in Board of Regents v. Southworth, Supreme Court of the United States
Seg fees, an issue some may remember, and some may not.
In 1996 (the year I began as an undergrad here) a law student named Scott Southworth, along with two other conservative Christians, sued the University of Wisconsin over the use of segregated fees to support groups with whose speech he disagreed.
Mr. Southworth named 18 groups with whom he disagreed. They included WisPIRG, UW Greens, LGBT Campus Center, International Socialist Organization and other lefty acronyms. Mr. Southworth expressed his disappointment at having to support “abortion, homosexuals and extreme environmentalists.”
So a First Amendment claim was filed that made its way up to the Supreme Court, where, after win after win in lower courts, all nine justices dealt Mr. Southworth a body blow. That’s right, when it comes to freedom of expression, even this right-leaning Supreme Court didn’t buy Mr. Southworth’s argument in the slightest.
Mr. Southworth made a big mistake in his case that he won’t admit. He stipulated that the distribution of funds by SSFC is “viewpoint neutral,” a claim with which the Supreme Court picked up and ran.
The Supreme Court did find that the referendum process that allowed students to vote a group thumbs-up or thumbs-down on funding wasn’t viewpoint neutral. So that was removed, and we moved on.
Except, of course, we didn’t. Year after year, The Badger Herald posts editorials harping on the funding process of student groups and grousing about the failure of the opt-out system.
Let’s put this in perspective. You and I are here at school to get a world-class education. That will involve challenging our perceptions. Defending a position is scary when someone comes right back at you with a counterargument. We’d all love to argue with people stupider and less informed than us — it would make us feel pretty good about ourselves. Instead, we arrive on campus and find that our comfortable notions, our long-cherished views, are about to be attacked.
That makes some of us very defensive. It makes some of us change our mind. The variety of voices on campus makes students do something that has always scared conservatives. We think critically.
The First Amendment isn’t about building up walls around your mind. The First Amendment isn’t about having an intellectual fortress from which you keep others away with lawsuits and technical challenges. The First Amendment is about admitting that there are people with different views, listening to them and then deciding for yourself.
Now, the First Amendment doesn’t allow you to be compelled to speak, either. On that issue, Mr. Southworth tried to use cases where union members and bar-association members declined to have their fees used for political speech. The Supreme Court saw right through that argument.
We’re not on the job, we’re not in a union and the speakers (WisPIRG, MCSC) don’t speak for you, they speak for themselves. Our university is a totally unique environment. For four (or more) sweet years we will be taught, told, harangued and engaged.
Conservatives harp about having to fund student organizations on campus and list all the egregious wrongs those groups perpetrate (they’re racist against whites, they don’t like rich people, they hate polluters). What they really want to do is quash dissent.
I pay for groups that I disagree with. CFACT, I support your efforts to convince me that we should have more nuclear power plants. It’s not your views I disagree with, it’s the facts and arguments you present that hold no water with me.
Not only that, but similarly to seg fees, I pay taxes which support a government with which I vehemently disagree. Yet I believe in supporting the whole panoply of American life, which means I will always support directly or indirectly those with whom I disagree. Only people so naíve or insecure in their own beliefs would advocate only paying for government services with which they agree, and the same logic can be applied to seg fees.
I won’t ever tell conservatives that the First Amendment does not cover what they are doing or that through my contribution to segregated fees, their presence on campus doesn’t make the campus a better place.
I actually believe in free speech, and I’m not actively going about shutting down groups I do not like.
The only ones worried about progressive student groups are those whose views don’t compete well in the marketplace of ideas. You know who you are.
Rob Deters (rvdeters@wisc.edu) is a second-year law student.
Anonymous (November 8, 2004 @ 10:59pm):
SEXUAL HARRASSMENT COMPLAINT
From
