I am so pleased to be here at Georgetown Law and to be speaking at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution where the exchange of ideas is both welcomed and encouraged ... We hope you will take part in the right of every American: the free, robust, and sometimes contentious exchange of ideas.

As you exercise these rights, realize how precious, how rare, and how fragile they are.  In most societies throughout history and in so many that I have had the opportunity to visit, such rights do not exist.  In these places, openly criticizing the government or expressing unorthodox opinions could land you in jail or worse.
  
Freedom of thought and speech on the American campus are under attack.  

The American university was once the center of academic freedom—a place of robust debate, a forum for the competition of ideas.  But it is transforming into an echo chamber of political correctness and homogenous thought, a shelter for fragile egos.

In 2017, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education surveyed 450 colleges and universities across the country and found that 40 percent maintain speech codes that substantially infringe on constitutionally protected speech.  Of the public colleges surveyed, which are bound by the First Amendment, fully one-third had written policies banning disfavored speech.  

But who decides what is offensive and what is acceptable?  The university is about the search for truth, not the imposition of truth by a government censor.  

College administrators also have silenced speech by permitting "the heckler's veto" to control who gets to speak and what messages are conveyed.  In these instances, administrators discourage or prohibit speech if there is even a threat that it will be met with protest.  In other words, the school favors the heckler's disruptive tactics over the speaker's First Amendment rights.  These administrators seem to forget that, as the Supreme Court put it in Watson v. City of Memphis more than 50 years ago, "constitutional rights may not be denied simply because of hostility to their assertion or exercise." 

This permissive attitude toward the hecklers' veto has spawned a cottage industry of protestors who have quickly learned that school administrators will capitulate to their demands.  

Protestors are now routinely shutting down speeches and debates across the country in an effort to silence voices that insufficiently conform with their views. (Photo: Protesters of Jeff Sessions' speech at Georgetown University/Reuters/via USA-Online News)

This is not right.  This is not in the great tradition of America.  And, yet, school administrators bend to this behavior. In effect, they coddle it and encourage it.  

But even setting aside the law, the more fundamental issue is that the university is supposed to be the place where we train virtuous citizens.  It is where the next generation of Americans are equipped to contribute to and live in a diverse and free society filled with many, often contrary, voices.

Our legal heritage, upon which the Founders crafted the Bill of Rights, taught that reason and knowledge produced the closest approximation to truth—and from truth may arise justice.  But reason requires discourse and, frequently, argument.  And that is why the free speech guarantee is found not just in the First Amendment, but also permeates our institutions, our traditions, and our Constitution.  

Soon you will be the professor, the university president, the Attorney General, and even the President of the United States. And you will have your own pressing issues to grapple with. But I promise you that no issue is better decided with less debate, indifference, and with voices unheard.

There are those who will say that certain speech isn't deserving of protection. They will say that some speech is hurtful—even hateful.  They will point to the very speech and beliefs that we abhor as Americans. But the right of free speech does not exist only to protect the ideas upon which most agree at a given moment in time.
 
As Justice Brandeis eloquently stated in his 1927 concurrence in Whitney v. California: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

University officials and faculty must defend free expression boldly and unequivocally.  That means presidents, regents, trustees and alumni as well.  A national recommitment to free speech on campus is long overdue.  And action to ensure First Amendment rights is overdue.  

Starting today, the Department of Justice will do its part in this struggle.  We will enforce federal law, defend free speech, and protect students' free expression from whatever end of the political spectrum it may come. To that end, we are filing a Statement of Interest in a campus free speech case this week and we will be filing more in the weeks and months to come.

This month, we marked the 230th anniversary of our Constitution. This month, we also marked the 54th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. Four little girls died that day as they changed into their choir robes because the Klan wanted to silence the voices fighting for civil rights. But their voices were not silenced.  

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would call them "the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity," and I urge you to go back and read that eulogy and consider what it had to say to each of us. This is the true legacy of free speech that has been handed down to you.  It was bought with a price.  This is the heritage that you have been given and which you must protect.

 So, I am here today to ask you to be involved to make your voices heard—and to defend the rights of others to do the same.  

 For the last 241 years, we have staked a country on the principle that robust and even contentious debate is how we discover truth and resolve the most intractable problems before us. 

Your generation will decide if this experiment in freedom will continue. Nothing less than the future of our Republic depends on it.

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