Last week we learned that exercising your free speech rights to tell the truth can get you called irresponsible while using those same rights to justify distorting the truth and telling lies gets you labeled “brave.”
In tweets to all of six potential students, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Sara Goldrick-Rab expressed frustration over the attacks on the university and suggested that the prospective students consider that when deciding which school to attend. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel got ahold of this and reported it as an actual news story — which raises its own questions of responsibility and judgment when it comes to the First Amendment. In any event, in response to the story, a faculty committee chastised Goldrick-Rab for apparently discouraging students from attending the UW.
It seems that Goldrick-Rab is being criticized for expressing — maybe with a little too much edge and sarcasm (certainly wouldn’t find that here) — what are very legitimate concerns. Cutting the UW System by $250 million will damage the institution. Removing tenure and shared governance from the statutes does send a powerfully negative message. And, whether one professor communicates to six students about it or not, these things will affect how the brightest kids evaluate their choices.
She did compare Scott Walker to Adolf Hitler, and nobody should go that far. Destroying unions is an awful thing but it’s a far cry from genocide. Yet how many people, in a fit of righteous indignation, haven’t compared somebody to a monster? Hitler is shorthand for the worst person you can think of. It’s inadvisable to invoke his name, but it happens all the time, and it doesn’t warrant coverage in a newspaper.
Compare this use of free speech to the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision using the First Amendment to justify millions in special-interest money flowing — without any transparency — to support Walker’s campaigns and now, by extension, any politician’s campaign.
For the last several years big-money special interests and conservative strategists have latched on to a dangerous yet effective legal strategy: cloak the flat-out buying of politicians and public policy in the revered garb of First Amendment free speech rights. Justice Michael Gableman even wrote that those who brought this case in the name of equating lots of money with lots of free speech were “brave” for doing so.
So, let me get this straight. Goldrick-Rab has been chastised for the use of sarcasm and a little bit of overstatement-for-effect in the service of what is essentially telling the truth to just six potential students. (And, of course, now a whole lot more students know about it only because some in the media thought the tweets of one professor were worth reporting.) But in the very same week the First Amendment is twisted by our state Supreme Court to justify unlimited, unaccountable millions flowing to campaigns — most of which is likely to be used only to distort and tell outright lies about politicians and policies that well-heeled special interests don’t like.
So, who exactly is brave and who is cowardly here?
