Yes private unis regardless of federal aid can be subject to constitutional protections but freedom of speech is not automatically appliued. If UPenn tells the school newspaper not to run a story on Israel, no freedom of speech rights violated... Upenn is not the government. If Upenn tells students to free palestine that their charter is revoked as a student group...no 1st amendment violation because Upenn is not the government. You cnanot claim a 1st A violation against a private entity evne if they get federal aid. Federal aid grants do not convert them into a state actor.
Is calling for genocide protected by free speech?
- Thread starter NoahA
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Yes private unis regardless of federal aid can be subject to constitutional protections but freedom of speech is not automatically appliued. If UPenn tells the school newspaper not to run a story on Israel, no freedom of speech rights violated... Upenn is not the government. If Upenn tells students to free palestine that their charter is revoked as a student group...no 1st amendment violation because Upenn is not the government. You cnanot claim a 1st A violation against a private entity evne if they get federal aid. Federal aid grants do not convert them into a state actor.
First A is not relevant to a private university, they can set a policy to expel any student group they want for valid reasonable reasons that dont violate other laws (i.e. they cannot expel a Black student group or Jewish student group just because, but they can disband a pro-palestinian group if their message violates school policy.
Everybody needs to read the 1st A again and tell me what the first line says...
"Congress shall make no law ...."
There is no absolute 1st A right as was stated by the SC maybe 100 years ago.... and definitely a private entity has the right to determine what speech is permitted under their policies. This is not new but a lot of people forget consittutional law.
Sure, but typically such institutions must abide or risk funding no? They're welcome to keep their rules, just not welcome to fed money if they choose to enforce them over constitutional rights? It may sound like a stretch since a weapons contractor receives plenty fed dollars but employees can be fired for mis-speaking, just going by what I've noticed when it comes to private schools receiving fed. dollars.
In any case, as UsualName mentioned, it sounds like there's a conflict between section vi and the 1st. I've come to terms w/a castle doctrine carveout for speech that may constitute harassment on campus since students have to attend and they can't necessarily walk away as you would a park/public place.
Well we are talking in the air so would need an example to understand what you are talking about. If a university disbands a Pro Palestine student group the group cannot sue the school under the 1st Amendment. If a jewish group wants to hold a pro Israel rally on the quad where permission is required, the school can deny it and wont get sued under First A. The federal money part is not relevant for that.
but would the jewish group be disbanded over the same infractions the Palestinian group was and not have a 1st amendment case?
No. Can always sue the unviersity if you want but student groups exist at the behest of the university and its policies. If they disband a group without following its own policies and procedures there are courses of action within the system to address it or perhaps sue but no Constituitional right to have a student group exist at a private university if it violates any policy.
You know whoever shut down that group would be runout as antisemite just like the current McCarthyism hatchet jobs going on.
There is no such thing as antisemitism. Yes it is identified with feelings about (superior) Jewish people (like me).
But really, it's just plain old hate, ignorance, bigotry, lack of education or life-lessons.. the actions of mediocre humans who follow and never lead. Followers with little understanding of what it is or feels like to not follow; to develop an aptitude for independent thought. Millions without any true character and certainly not many with strong characters. Moreover most of the people don't even comprehend the concept of "character" unless they see it in some action hero movie. It's just a word they may have heard somewhere. So many are devoid of any of the foregoing; and pathetically, will never ever be able to develop, understand or know what it is like to be a superior, rational thinking and loving human being.
Simply put: stupid people who are too flawed to know how pathetically ignorant they are.
Here is an interesting 'article' about stupidity being an existential threat to society.
In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren. Let’s take a look at Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity:
Law 1: Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their job, education level, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity. They aren’t. Which takes us to:
Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Cipolla posits stupidity is a variable that remains constant across all populations. Every category one can imagine—gender, race, nationality, education level, income—possesses a fixed percentage of stupid people. There are stupid college professors. There are stupid people at Davos and at the UN General Assembly. There are stupid people in every nation on earth. How numerous are the stupid amongst us? It’s impossible to say. And any guess would almost certainly violate the first law, anyway.
Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of people while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. A stupid person, according to the economist, is one who causes problems for others without any clear benefit to himself. The uncle unable to stop himself from posting fake news articles to Facebook? Stupid. The customer service representative who keeps you on the phone for an hour, hangs up on you twice, and somehow still manages to screw up your account. Stupid.
This law also introduces three other phenotypes that Cipolla says co-exist alongside stupidity. First there is the intelligent person, whose actions benefit both himself and others. Then there is the bandit, who benefits himself at others’ expense. And lastly there is the helpless person, whose actions enrich others at his own expense. The non-stupid are a flawed and inconsistent bunch. Sometimes we act intelligently, sometimes we are selfish bandits, sometimes we act helplessly and are taken advantage of by others, and sometimes we’re a bit of both. The stupid, in comparison, are paragons of consistency, acting at all times with unyielding idiocy. However, consistent stupidity is the only consistent thing about the stupid. This is what makes stupid people so dangerous.
Cipolla explains:
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational, you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvers and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy. All of which leads us to:
Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril. This brings us to the fifth and final law:
Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. And its corollary: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
We can do nothing about the stupid. The difference between societies that collapse under the weight of their stupid citizens and those who transcend them are the makeup of the non-stupid. Those progressing in spite of their stupid possess a high proportion of people acting intelligently, those who counterbalance the stupid’s losses by bringing about gains for themselves and their fellows. Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as successful ones. But they also have high percentages of helpless people and, Cipolla writes, “an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity.” “Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid] fraction and makes decline a certainty,” Cipolla concludes. “And the country goes to Hell.”
But really, it's just plain old hate, ignorance, bigotry, lack of education or life-lessons.. the actions of mediocre humans who follow and never lead. Followers with little understanding of what it is or feels like to not follow; to develop an aptitude for independent thought. Millions without any true character and certainly not many with strong characters. Moreover most of the people don't even comprehend the concept of "character" unless they see it in some action hero movie. It's just a word they may have heard somewhere. So many are devoid of any of the foregoing; and pathetically, will never ever be able to develop, understand or know what it is like to be a superior, rational thinking and loving human being.
Simply put: stupid people who are too flawed to know how pathetically ignorant they are.
Here is an interesting 'article' about stupidity being an existential threat to society.
In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren. Let’s take a look at Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity:
Law 1: Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their job, education level, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity. They aren’t. Which takes us to:
Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Cipolla posits stupidity is a variable that remains constant across all populations. Every category one can imagine—gender, race, nationality, education level, income—possesses a fixed percentage of stupid people. There are stupid college professors. There are stupid people at Davos and at the UN General Assembly. There are stupid people in every nation on earth. How numerous are the stupid amongst us? It’s impossible to say. And any guess would almost certainly violate the first law, anyway.
Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of people while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. A stupid person, according to the economist, is one who causes problems for others without any clear benefit to himself. The uncle unable to stop himself from posting fake news articles to Facebook? Stupid. The customer service representative who keeps you on the phone for an hour, hangs up on you twice, and somehow still manages to screw up your account. Stupid.
This law also introduces three other phenotypes that Cipolla says co-exist alongside stupidity. First there is the intelligent person, whose actions benefit both himself and others. Then there is the bandit, who benefits himself at others’ expense. And lastly there is the helpless person, whose actions enrich others at his own expense. The non-stupid are a flawed and inconsistent bunch. Sometimes we act intelligently, sometimes we are selfish bandits, sometimes we act helplessly and are taken advantage of by others, and sometimes we’re a bit of both. The stupid, in comparison, are paragons of consistency, acting at all times with unyielding idiocy. However, consistent stupidity is the only consistent thing about the stupid. This is what makes stupid people so dangerous.
Cipolla explains:
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational, you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvers and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy. All of which leads us to:
Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril. This brings us to the fifth and final law:
Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. And its corollary: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
We can do nothing about the stupid. The difference between societies that collapse under the weight of their stupid citizens and those who transcend them are the makeup of the non-stupid. Those progressing in spite of their stupid possess a high proportion of people acting intelligently, those who counterbalance the stupid’s losses by bringing about gains for themselves and their fellows. Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as successful ones. But they also have high percentages of helpless people and, Cipolla writes, “an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity.” “Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid] fraction and makes decline a certainty,” Cipolla concludes. “And the country goes to Hell.”