I WA N T A R E F U N D
Compelled Speech Students pay the bill when it comes to free speech, but what if they didn’t have to? By Grace Adee and Ufon Umanah
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n Fall 2017, Columbia University College Republicans (CUCR) hosted “free speech month,” in which they invited controversial far-right speakers such as Tommy Robinson and MIke Cernovich to campus amid student body protests. In response, the Columbia Black Students Organization (BSO) petitioned for the Student Governing Board (SGB) to derecognize and defund CUCR. In their statement, BSO argued that by inviting speakers that “normalized complacency and acceptance fo white supremacy” and put forth “ideas that are fundamentally based in our dehumanization, a hindrance to free speech.” SGB and the administration did not take this petition particularly seriously and no actions were taken to derecognize CUCR. These actions are consistent with two pervasive ideas on Columbia’s campus: that First Amendment principles of freedom of speech would be violated if CUCR was defunded, and that first principles apply to Columbia’s campus in much the same way that they apply to public universities and the country more generally. However, the truth is far more complex than that, and could potentially make viable aspects of BSO’s petition to derecognize CUCR. The Supreme Court case Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v. Southworth (2000) sets a complicated precedent for situations such as this. The University of Wisconsin had developed a system similar to Columbia’s in which a committee of student appointees were in charge of allocating funds to student organizations. Many of the student clubs that recieved funding were political groups. Southworth, a conservative student, felt that the University could not compel him to pay a student fee when it was used to fund liberal advocacy groups on campus, arguing that compelling him violated his rights to freedom of speech and association. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Southworth, deciding that because the political groups weren’t germane to the University, forcing the student to pay the activities fee was a burden on his First Amendment rights. However, when the case advanced to the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy
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dismissed this part of the ruling considerably, writing in the majority opinion that “it is not for the Court to say what is or is not germane to the ideas pursued in an institution of higher learning.” However, he went on to suggest that “if the standard of germane speech is inapplicable, then, it might be argued the remedy is to allow each student to list those causes which he or she will or will not support.” But while the majority opinion maintained that an optional or refund system as a remedy would be constitutionally permissible, they ruled that this should not be required in order to protect the free speech of university students, arguing that “the restriction could be so disruptive and expensive that the program to support extracurricular speech would be ineffective.” In other words of the practical difficulties of implementing such a remedy, the Court decided that such measures would probably end up restricting free speech for students by rendering programs to support university activism and politics impossible to support. What does this have to do with movements to defund CUCR? The idea that students could have the First Amendment right to withhold their support for a student political organization with which they disagree is fundamentally connected to the question of whether petitions to derecognize CUCR are viable. While it is unlikely that Columbia’s free speech policies would allow for CUCR to be directly derecognized by SGB, the Wisconsin case indicates that there is a precedent (albeit a complex and controversial one) for the petitioners to request back the portion of their student life fee that would have otherwise gone to CUCR. In 2017, the year Free Speech Month occured, CUCR received $4640 for SGB; divided evenly among the students of the four undergraduate colleges, corresponding to 40 cents per student. Although it is unclear exactly how many people signed BSO’s petition initially and precisely how many students would be interested in this kind of compromise today, this could potentially make a significant dent in the budget of a student organization such as CUCR––if there were 1000 signatories who requested a refund, for example, that would be $400 that CUCR would never see.
The Blue and White
