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Arizona Considering Bill to Promote Free Speech on Campus Through Ideological Diversity

Arizona Considering Bill to Promote Free Speech on Campus Through Ideological Diversity

“passed the House in late February and is currently being debated in the Arizona state senate”

This is a very interesting idea. The bill would call for the promotion of debate and speakers from different backgrounds.

Campus Reform reports:

Arizona campus free speech bill unlike anything we’ve seen before

A bill currently making its way through the Arizona legislature aims to promote free speech on campus.

Republican state Rep. Anthony Kern sponsored the bill, which would direct the Arizona Board of Regents to create an Office of Public Policy Events at each one of Arizona’s public universities to “organize, publicize, and stage debates, group forums, and individual lectures that address, from multiple divergent and opposing perspectives, an extensive range of public policy issues that are widely discussed and debated in society at large.”

The legislation stipulates that universities “invite speakers who hold widely diverse perspectives from within and outside the university,” and “if necessary, provide honoraria and travel and lodging expenses to persons from outside the university.”

HB 2238 passed the House in late February and is currently being debated in the Arizona state senate.

In addition to offering a wide range of perspectives, the bill would also require that universities maintain publicly accessible and searchable lists of each event hosted by the Office of Public Policy Events. Starting in September 2021, the calendar would go to the governor and lawmakers. The legislation would also require universities to record each event and post videos of every debate online.

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Comments

“Free speech” means that government can’t inhibit the speech it doesn’t like.

It also means that government can’t promote the speech it does like. It works both ways.

No level of government should have anything at all to do with regulating speech, one way or the other.

Just as a historical note, I’d like to point out that the fatal flaw of the Weimar government was its obsession with representing—no, surrendering to—diversity. The structure of the Reichtag was deliberately designed to make it inevitable for fringe groups (like, say, the NSDAP) to participate in the legislature . . . and, as it turned out, to dominate and pervert it.

    George_Kaplan in reply to tom_swift. | April 8, 2020 at 9:23 pm

    The problem is as it stands governments fund universities which ban speech they don’t like – anything not Far Left approved. Government, by permitting such censorship and regulation to stand, is flagrantly violating the 1st Amendment.

    Since speech is already unlawfully regulated what is the alternative to promoting conservative speech? And don’t bother saying government simply needs to make universities support free speech. Academics are almost universally Left-Far Left and united against permitting freedom of speech and freedom of thought on campus. As Oberlin etc show, they’d much rather their institutions become smoking holes in the ground than acknowledge that maybe they’re mistaken.

Just don’t dare discuss much less promote BDS.

The viewpoint diversity spectrum isn’t merely two-dimensional. There are so many other dimensions to it that it could take years of investigating and hearing from all the other diverse viewpoints out there before getting around to hearing from a conservative speaker. And even with that, there are a number of paths within the conservative spectrum, many of which don’t even recognize each other as being conservative.

And who gets to define the spectrum of speech that must be allowed? The University.

This is a waste of time, feel-good sensationalist virtue-signalling. Any groups who want to host speakers should do so off-campus, and out of their own pocket. Get the University out of it entirely.