Anti-War Protests

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The college campus has long been a place where protests were born. Civil rights protests helped changed the fabric our society, and anti-war protests helped bring the conflict in Vietnam to an end. The latest conflict on campus is the battle over free speech. Though liberals had long believed they were victimized by conservatives (like in the anti-war protests), these days it is the liberal faction that is shutting down speech it finds offensive. From Harvard to Iowa to Berkeley, groups have shut down speakers, prevented events from taking place and demanded the creation of so-called safe-spaces where students believe that they will be protected from speech that is hateful or harassing. The problem with the aims of the goals of the modern protests is that while many believe that they are protecting the rights of students to be free from harassment and hate, they are, in fact, violating the very rights they seek to protect. There is no excuse to deny someone the right to voice their opinion if they have been scheduled to do so, be it in a classroom, …show more content…
Schill, President of the University of Oregon, was shouted down by students during his State of the University address in October of this year, he was prompted to compare the students to the fascists of Italy under Mussolini. The students had shut down his speech because they disagreed with his corporate connections, but did they have a right to censor Schill? Howard Gillman and Erwin Cherminsky, dens of Law at the University of California Irvine and Berkeley Schools of Law respectively, argue in the “Chronicle of Higher Education” that the students had used the ‘hecklers veto’ a common tactic, but an unconstitutional one. Simply put: “Individuals do not have the right to prevent others from speaking” and universities have the right to protect speakers at scheduled events. The protester's argument that they should be able to shut down hate speech if the government refuses to do so is simply