Rutgers University should restore funding to its student newspaper
after it violated the constitution by allowing students who don’t like what the
paper publishes to vote to defund it, a First Amendment group claims.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) on Monday called for Rutgers to restore more than $500,000 to
The Daily Targum, which lost
its student fee funding through a referendum
last month.
That referendum violated the constitution because it let students
decide how public money is spent based entirely on whether they agree with what
a student group does, said Adam Goldstein, a program officer at FIRE, a
non-profit free speech advocacy group.
Students, including a conservative group that dismissed The Daily
Targum as “fake news,” aren’t legally allowed to defund a public university
newspaper just because they don’t agree with the content, he said.
The fact that The Daily Targum, and
probably other campus newspapers, is publicly funded in a public university
complicates the issue. If a majority doesn’t want to fund it, they shouldn’t
have to. On the other hand, the minority that contributes to the public funding
shouldn’t be forbidden from doing so. Rescinding the funding thus violates the
minority’s rights. In a privatized setting, where campus newspapers are
privately funded, any individual can refuse to fund the paper by not
subscribing, leaving others free to subscribe.
That said, I think there’s a broader political
philosophy lesson here. It is that broader context that I chose to focus on
when I posted these comments:
Though public funding muddles
the issue, this episode highlights the anti-liberty nature of democracy.
Every individual possesses
certain inalienable fundamental rights. These rights include but are not
limited to freedom of speech, which underpins press freedom. Inalienable means
no person’s rights can ever be subject to a vote. That is the basis for the
American constitutional republic, of which the democratic process is an
important but limited part.
The Rutgers case is an easily
observable example of democracy, with free speech rights directly rescinded by
vote. Much more insidious is the attacks on free speech through indirect
democracy, with voters electing politicians to covertly attack free speech
rights. Catchphrases used to justify or sneak in free speech limitations
include "dark money"; "new neutrality"; "fake
news"; "hate speech"; "campaign finance reform";
“corruption of our democracy”; "offensive content"; "election
manipulation"; "harmful online content"; "social media
addiction" [aka "internet addiction", et al]; "dehumanizing
speech"; “extremism”; “political bias”.
In a republic, politicians
are forbidden to violate individual rights, even though elected. Democracy is
limited by constitutional limits on government power, such as we have with the
First Amendment. Let’s hope FIRE is successful in rolling back this bit of
democratic tyranny at Rutgers. And let’s hope the First Amendment continues to
protect us from the broader political attacks on free speech that permeate our
media and culture.
Politicians of all stripes
are always itching to democratically stifle our rights. Don’t let them. We must
remember that freedom is not the right to vote. Freedom is the right to live
your life regardless of anyone else's vote.
Related Reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment