The University of California, where the free speech movement started and students now argue over how far unrestricted expression should go, announced plans Thursday to launch a national center to study 1st Amendment issues and step up education about them.
“There have been more serious issues about the 1st Amendment on campuses today than perhaps at any time since the free speech movement,” UC President Janet Napolitano said in an interview. “The students themselves are raising questions about free speech and does it apply to homophobic speech, does it apply to racist speech? We have to consider the student concerns but return to basic principles about what free speech means and how do we better educate students about the extent of the 1st Amendment.”
The National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement will be based at UC’s Washington, D.C., center, and will sponsor as many as eight fellows a year to research such issues as whether student views on free speech are changing and what role social media and political polarization play in shaping perspectives on the 1st Amendment...
The center’s advisory board will be headed by UC Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman and UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a renowned 1st Amendment scholar. The pair co-wrote a book, “Free Speech on Campus.”
Other board members include former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer; New York Times columnist Bret Stephens; John King, president and chief executive of the Education Trust and former U.S. secretary of education; Anne Kornblut, director of strategic communications at Facebook; Geoffrey R. Stone, a 1st Amendment scholar and professor at the University of Chicago Law School; Avi Oved, a UCLA law student; and Washington Post columnist George Will...
Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-uc-free-speech-center-20171026-story.html
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