Yes. Hey, folks, Ellie Honig here on this week's episode of Cafe Insider. I'm joined by Lee Bollinger, former president of Columbia University and University of Michigan and legal scholar in free speech and First Amendment law. We'll take a closer look at President. elect Donald Trump's free speech proposals and their potential impact on social media platforms, on universities and on the federal government. Do these policies truly promote freedom of expression or do they risk stifling it?
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I do want to turn quickly to the topic of college campus free speech, which is obviously a loaded and fraught topic. And I just want to speak generally. So first of all, does the First Amendment apply? on a college campus the same as it would apply anywhere else? Does it apply in some different way in a college campus setting? It doesn't matter if it's a public school or a private school.
The First Amendment does apply to public universities. The University of Michigan, where I was for many years, is subject to the First Amendment. Same with Berkeley, same with the University of North Carolina, and so on. Private universities are not covered by the First Amendment. They can do what they want.
The fact is, every private university, every major one, has said we will voluntarily comply with the First Amendment. So across the country, in public and private, there is compliance with the First Amendment. You have to distinguish then, Ellie, between the public forum that universities have, students debating issues appearing on the steps of their...
library and central administration in arguing for certain things, and then what happens in the classroom. I mean, there's not Reese Meach in the classroom. In the same way, there is free speech out in the public settings, debating public issues. But in that setting of debating public issues on university campuses, both public and private.
are trying to live by the First Amendment. I think what we've seen over the past year is just a lot of confusion about what that means and people not understanding what the First Amendment requires. And then people not understanding that in private universities, you can debate that. You could change it if you wanted to. And so I think there's been just a real serious lack of clarity.
on all those fronts. And that's been problematic for lots of reasons. It seems to me as an outsider that the hardest challenge faced by colleges, college administrators now is where do we draw the line? we collectively draw the line between hate speech and harassment on one hand and controversial or explosive, but protected free speech on the other hand. And I know colleges have been...
grappling with this for the last year or so. Has any sort of consensus emerged as where that line is? I wouldn't put it that way. Okay. Because let's step back. Let's say that you, as a college. either are required to follow the First Amendment or you're private and you say you will. If you then look to the First Amendment as your template, your framework for this, over the past 100 years, it has been...
clear under the First Amendment that hate speech is protected. A famous case, Skokie, you know, a suburb of Chicago that had 4,000 survivors of concentration camps. World War II and a group of neo-Nazis wanted to march through, protected by the First Amendment. A major case in the 1960s, Brandenburg v. Ohio. A group of Klan hold a meeting in which they advocate.
revenge against African Americans and Jews, protected by the First Amendment. So hate speech, advocacy of violence is protected until just before it turns into violence. horrible ideas, denial of the Holocaust, etc. These are protected under established cases of the Supreme Court. Now, you can say in private universities, that's great, we don't want to follow that.
And we're going to make an exception for hate speech. And that's a perfectly reasonable debate. You would have to then confront the problem. What are you going to call hate speech? How are you going to determine that? And many people have backed away from that because of that problem. Important to know, finally, I would say that Europe follows a completely different path.
Hate speech, neo-Nazi speech, et cetera, in Germany in particular, is not protected by their ideas of free speech. So America stands pretty much alone in this area, but it's a very… strong consensus between liberal justices and conservative justices that that should be our position. Interesting. And I don't know that we'll see any of these cases really resolved through litigation at the appellate level. I think it's more going to be... campus by campus and case by case. I think that's right.
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