More On Thought Control Spartan Style

There is a good post today on Michigan State's "re-education" program over at Fire.

On Monday, the Michigan State University (MSU) student newspaper The State News published an article about the school’s Student Accountability in Community (SAC) program. The article, which details some of FIRE’s concerns about the program’s constitutionality, includes distressing quotes from MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon:

“You don’t get into the program because you choose to; you’ve gotten there because you’ve been found guilty of something,” she said. “It’s sort of like when you go to an alcohol diversion program. You don’t have a First Amendment right to control the content of your alcohol diversion program.”

“You don’t have a set of rights to control what kinds of community service you do necessarily.”

Unfortunately for MSU students, these quotes demonstrate not only that President Simon is deeply misinformed about exactly how the First Amendment works in relation to public universities like MSU, but also that President Simon doesn’t really understand how the SAC program works, either.

First, let’s tackle the First Amendment. Put simply, the First Amendment protects citizens from being punished for speech by the government or its agents. As a public university, funded by taxpayer dollars, Michigan State University is certainly a government actor, and thus bound by the First Amendment. Therefore, Michigan State cannot constitutionally punish students for engaging in protected speech.

Now as clear as that constitutional prohibition is, the SAC program ignores it. According to SAC program materials, examples of “situations that would generally be appropriate for SAC” include “[h]umiliating a boyfriend or girlfriend,” “disrespecting other students’ academic freedom,” “[i]nsulting instructors or teaching assistants,” and “making sexist, homophobic, or racist remarks at a meeting.” Whether or not this kind of speech is admirable, polite, or desirable is completely immaterial. The point is that these examples are clearly protected by the First Amendment, and until the Constitution is amended otherwise, such instances of protected speech have absolutely no business being grounds for a mandatory SAC referral. Because a mandatory referral to the SAC program means that a student’s registration is put on hold until the student has paid a fifty-dollar fee, a student who refuses to participate in the program is effectively expelled. If that isn’t punishment for engaging in protected speech, I don’t know what is. (Check out Greg’s column from last Wednesday’s The Detroit News for more on precisely how the SAC program violates constitutional rights.)

Now on to the real heart of the matter here, which is President Simon’s misleading characterization of the SAC program. First, President Simon makes clear that the SAC program is punitive: “You don’t get into the program because you choose to; you’ve gotten there because you’ve been found guilty of something,” she says. Found guilty of what? Yelling an insult? Getting into a heated political debate? It is chilling to see how easily Simon skips past the constitutional problems raised by classifying protected speech as something a student could fairly “be[ ] found guilty of” at a public university in the United States.

What is amazing is that MSU is treating speech as if it is something you can regulate as long as you have due process. Their defense is, "We didn't just punish students for their speech. We had a show trial first...THEN we punished them." An educated person should not be able to find this plausible as the meaning of the 1st Amendment. Yet, somehow, they do.

Maybe they had the education but it just didn't take?