First Amendment experts said President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring protection of free speech on college campuses is largely a symbolic enforcement of conservative Americans’ concerns and is unlikely to change current practice.

The order threatens to pull federal research funding and education grants from colleges and universities that don’t protect “free inquiry.” It comes after multiple incidents of conservative students and speakers being threatened with violence or subject to violence over the last several years.

“While this is probably politically popular, its practical effect might not be very much,” Clay Calvert, the Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication at the University of Florida, said.

Public colleges are required to abide by the First Amendment, but private universities like Syracuse University are only bound to their own rules regarding speech. Requiring public universities to adhere to the guidelines of the First Amendment is “purely gestural” and redundant, said Howard Schweber, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“On the free speech side or academic freedom side, the executive order literally does nothing,” Schweber said.

Roy Gutterman, an associate professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and director of the Tully Center for Free Speech, said the order was designed to signal to Trump’s base that conservative speech would be protected on campuses.

Gutterman said there is some validity to conservatives’ concerns, as speakers have been shouted down and disinvited from events at colleges. The University of California, Berkeley settled a lawsuit accusing the school of treating conservative speakers differently than liberal speakers in December 2018, Reuters reported.

Trump announced he would sign the executive order at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, citing an incident where a conservative activist was punched in the face while at UC Berkeley.

“To that regard, I almost praise the president for at least articulating a public stance on fostering free speech,” Gutterman said. “However, I’d probably say he’s getting close to content discrimination and picking a side in a free speech battle.”

Schweber said stories of conservative speech being shut down are “highly exaggerated and prone to a lot of demagoguery.” Small actions can get amplified by the internet and the news cycle, he said, and become overblown for political reasons.

The current guidelines for what could be considered discrimination of speech are unclear, Calvert said. The 12 federal agencies responsible for determining discrimination could look for enforcement of speech codes, instances of speakers being disinvited from events or free speech zones being too small or narrow, he added.

If the guidelines for enforcement of the executive order are unclear, it could be unenforceable, Calvert said.

“A lot remains to be seen down the road because the agencies themselves have to create their own guidelines and then they have to implement them,” Calvert said.

Experts said they cannot forsee any blowback from colleges or other groups because the rules are unclear at this point.

SU Chancellor Kent Syverud said SU will “continue to vigorously protect freedom of expression,” in response to the signing of the executive order.

“I don’t know how any of this is going to play out,” Gutterman said.

Published on March 31, 2019 at 10:54 pm

Contact Kennedy: krose100@syr.edu | @KennedyRose001