Sessions says justice department has helped preserve free speech on campuses

“Today, freedom of speech and thought have come most under attack on the college campus,” Sessions said at a forum on free speech in higher education hosted by the Justice Department. “The most important time to defend a valued right is when it is being attacked or eroded.”

Sessions said the Justice Department has written statements of interest in four lawsuits against colleges and universities over free speech-related cases, including at the University of California, Berkeley; Pierce College in Los Angeles; Gwinnett College in Georgia; and the University of Michigan. The Justice Department has sided with students in the cases who say campus policies have stifled their ability to speak freely.

Sessions said the statements of interest, legal tools used to interject the federal government into private disputes, have had an effect. Michigan changed its policy, and in other cases, judges allowed the lawsuits to go forward after the Justice Department stepped in, he said.

Sessions cast the Justice Department’s decision to act in grand terms, painting a picture of a society at risk of ceding its fundamental freedom to tyrannical elements that police speech.

“We have reached a pivotal, perhaps even an historic, moment,” he said. “It is time to stand up to the bullies on campus and in our culture.”

His language amplified an increasingly popular argument among conservatives that right-wing thought has long been stifled, especially on college campuses.

“Free speech shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but it has been drawn into the larger dynamics of polarization in this country,” said James Kirchick, a free speech advocate and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Justice Department officials at the event said they did not aim to make free speech a partisan issue.

“Some may be skeptical of the division’s motives or the cases in which we have gotten involved,” said John Gore, acting head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “We in the civil rights division are proud to stand on the side of the First Amendment on behalf of students, faculty, staff, groups and anyone else whose speech has been stifled, stymied, sanctioned or suppressed by unconstitutional campus speech codes.”

But Sam Spital, director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., said the department was “engaged in an ongoing attack on civil rights.”

“Universities have anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies for good reasons,” he said in a statement. “Campuses that are predominantly white can be very isolating for students of color, and having speakers on campus who champion ideas of white supremacy create hostile environments that pose a concrete and urgent threat to all students having an equal opportunity to learn on campus.”

The Justice Department’s support for campus free-speech cases could help change what Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Education Committee, described as increasing skepticism among conservatives that college is a worthy pursuit.

“I’m as big a defender of our system of higher education as exists,” Alexander said, but trampling on free speech “will undermine it.” Alexander, an influential voice on education policy, said at the forum that colleges need to recruit not only underrepresented minorities, but also underrepresented viewpoints.

During the forum, Justice Department officials and several speakers also recast the fight for free speech, which has long been associated with progressives, as a fight against liberals who are interfering with conservatives’ First Amendment rights.

In the lawsuit against the University of Michigan, students took on the school’s effort to forbid harassment and bullying and other acts motivated by bias that could be interpreted as demeaning or hurtful. “These rules, it seems, are enforced by a group of campus bureaucrats and campus police with the Orwellian name of the Bias Response Team, or BRT,” Sessions said.

Conservative views are well established in government, of course; Republicans control Congress as well as the White House, and a conservative legal organization, the Federalist Society, has grown in power in recent years, vetting President Donald Trump’s picks for the federal courts, including Brett Kavanaugh, his Supreme Court nominee.

And the conservative student group Turning Point USA hosted a high school leadership gathering in Washington this summer, where Sessions spoke, along with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Nikki Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations.

In a separate speech Monday, DeVos called out Arkansas State University and Lawrence University in Wisconsin for policies that she said stifled free speech, indicating that the Education Department is also monitoring schools for speech violations.

But unlike Sessions, DeVos said it was not her department’s place to use the power of the federal government to go after the schools. Rather, she said, “what’s happening on campuses today is symptomatic of a civic sickness.”

“No one wants to be wrong,” DeVos said. “It is much easier to feel comfortable in saying there is no truth, nothing that could challenge what we want to believe.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Sessions says justice department has helped preserve free speech on campuses

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions made clear Monday that the Justice Department will oppose colleges and universities that stifle free speech on campus, a cause championed by conservatives who say their voices are silenced in higher education.

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