Texas senators consider bill on campus speech policies

Texas senators have waded intothe polarizing debate over campus free speech.

Sen. Dawn Buckingham, a Lakeway Republican, introduced a bill this week that would forbid public universities from punishing students for engaging in expressive activities and requires these schools to adopt policies outlining students' right to assemble, protest and circulate petitions.

Freedom of speech is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the Texas Constitution. The bill, Buckingham said, seeks to reemphasize what is permitted on campuses.

As provocative speakers have been invited to campuses, universities across the state and nation have grappled with how to balance the right to free speech and student calls for sensitivity. Students have called for more restrictive speech policies and urged their schools to cancel planned controversial speakers, arguing that they cause discomfort and evoke feelings of alienation particularly among minority students.

Buckingham's bill, which was left pending on Wednesday in a higher education committee, resembles similar proposals this year in North Carolina, North Dakota and Colorado's state capitols.

Jeffrey Herbst, president and CEO of the Newseum, said recent public controversies at University of California at Berkeley and Middlebury College in Vermont have "gotten state legislatures interested" in campus speech.

At Berkeley, demonstrators set fires and smashed windows in February to protest a speech by far-right writer Milo Yiannopoulos, and at Middlebury, students drowned out political scientist Charles Murray's address by pulling alarms and chanting.

President Donald Trump in February weighed in on the issue. "If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?" he wrote on Twitter.

The university again came into the headlines this month after campus groups invited conservative commentator Ann Coulter to speak. Coulter said Wednesday that she is canceling her planned speech at the Berkeley campus, the New York Times reported, because she had lost the backing of conservative groups that had initially sponsored her appearance.

This year has brought questions of free speech to Texas campuses, too. Outcry followed the announcement that white nationalist Richard Spencer would speak at Texas A&M University in College Station last year. More than 10,000 people signed a petition asking the university to cancel the event after Spencer evoked Nazi salutes at a high-profile speech in D.C.

The university stood firm: Leaders said that they found Spencer's views reprehensible and did not invite him to campus, but they said they could not block him from speaking. Since then, Texas A&M has amended its speaker policy to require outside speakers to be sponsored by recognized Texas A&M organizations.

Meanwhile, some Texas universities have been plastered with white nationalist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant posters since Trump's election in November. Rice University and University of Texas at Austin administrators cited campus policy as they removed those fliers, saying that they were in restricted places.

And this week in Houston, University of St. Thomas students called for Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, to not speak at next month's commencement. They are concerned about Dolan's role in handling sexual abuse allegations when he was archbishop from 2002 to 2009 of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwauke. Under his leadership as archbishop of Milwaukee, abusive priests were paid up to $20,000 for agreeing to be removed from the clergy.

At the committee hearing on Wednesday, senators asked whether the bill was necessary given existing free speech protections.

Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, said the bill would allow lawmakers to take a stand against student intimidation that he said discourages conservative voices. "If you have one group so forceful that they don't allow another group to express their opinions, we've lost a battle."

An initial version of the bill forbid university employees from disinviting campus speakers at students' request. That provision was struck in a committee substitute, which Buckingham said was created after input from universities.

Herbst, who published a report on campus speech through the Newseum this week, said that the debate over campus speech was a symptom of broader changes in how millennials see the First Amendment's importance.