Opinion: Free speech zone shouldn't be limited

TALLAHASSEE -- On the evening of March 25, 12 students tried to demonstrate in front of Westcott, the administration building at Florida State. The university promptly had them arrested.

These students weren't loud or violent. They weren't assaulting the professors or trampling the azaleas or even taking the name of Bobby Bowden in vain. They were protesting the university's policy toward sweatshop-made merchandise -- FSU, like many colleges, has a multimillion dollar contract with Nike. The students want the university to join the Workers' Rights Consortium, a group which, they say, will more fairly monitor factories in the Third World. Florida State currently belongs to the Fair Labor Association, but the students insist that organization is influenced by the very companies it's supposed to oversee.

A difference of opinion, clearly. But the reason these students got hauled off to the Leon County lock-up, and only released after posting $500 bail each is that they were not operating in a 'free speech zone."

You would have thought that, under the U.S. Constitution, pretty much the whole country is a 'free speech zone." You would have thought that an institution headed by Sandy D'Alemberte, a distinguished First Amendment lawyer, would cherish free speech in whatever "zone." And you would have thought that a campus with a long and honorable history of advocating equal rights for blacks and women, questioning the Vietnam War, and fighting press censorship could handle a dozen kids pitching pup tents on the grass.

As Rick Johnson, a Tallahassee civil rights lawyer, FSU graduate, and veteran activist says, "Used to be we had a sea of freedom with some islands of restrictions. Now it's a sea of restrictions with some islands of free speech."

At FSU, those islands of free speech are few and far between, away from vice presidents and deans, away from the public. Herding dissenters to some discreet "free speech zone" over by the old gym clearly inhibits and impairs their ability to express their views. The March on Washington D.C. wouldn't have had quite as much impact if it had been re-routed to Takoma Park, Maryland.

Now the university is having a hard time explaining itself. FSU's chief of police, Carey Drayton, lamely told a reporter that alums like to come take photos around FSU's front gate and fountain, so the authorities need to "keep it looking nice," that is, uncluttered by unsightly undergraduates waving placards. To do Chief Drayton justice, however, he seemed rather embarrassed by having to arrest 12 polite young people (one of whom is the son of Times columnist Martin Dyckman) waving American flags and singing We Shall Overcome. Indeed, he said they were so "cooperative," he wants to testify on their behalf. Still, the students could be expelled for exercising what most of us would consider their right to peaceful assembly.

The workers in Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nicaragua who sew the baseball caps and sweat shirts which net millions for FSU, UF, USF and other colleges can make as little as 10 cents an hour. It's good to see Gen X-ers, children of privilege, concerning themselves with the wretched conditions in the sweatshops of the developing world.

But the issue of "free speech zones" is also vital. The front of the administration building -- the campus equivalent of a capitol building -- is surely the kind of "traditional public forum" which the courts have ruled an appropriate place of protest. Steve Gey, a constitutional scholar at FSU's law school, agrees and adds, "Universities are more obligated than the rest of government to allow a range of speech. At universities 1,000 schools of thought contend every week."

Florida State was once called "the Berkeley of the South;" it was the birthplace of the Center for Participant Education, a "free university" which taught everything from photography to civil disobedience. Westcott, a grand castellated red brick pile at FSU's front gate, has been an important site of dissent for at least 50 years. Rick Johnson remembers camping out there for about three weeks in 1968 to protest the censorship of the college literary magazine (there was a short story that included "dirty words"). He and his colleagues were not arrested.

A university should be a place where uncomfortable ideas and some uncomfortable behavior (as long as it isn't violent) should not just be tolerated but embraced. Assumptions should be challenged, dogma undermined, orthodoxies shredded. Florida State should welcome vigorous debate over how the university makes and spends its money -- even if it irritates the swooshmeisters of Nike, even if it temporarily messes up the view around that pretty fountain.

Way back in 1969 some students in Iowa fought for their right to wear black armbands to show their disapproval of the war in Vietnam. The majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court said: "Under our Constitution, free speech is not a right that is given only to be so circumscribed that it exists in principle but not in fact. Freedom of expression would not truly exist if the right could be exercised only in an area that a benevolent government has provided as a safe haven for crackpots."

- Diane Roberts, a former Times editorial writer, is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.

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