In a bit of First Amendment irony, the Free Expression Tunnel at North Carolina State University was censored by students after “offensive images and slurs” were painted on its walls.
According to the college’s paper the Technician, a group of students blocked entrance to the tunnel overnight while they used black paint to cover up “sexually explicit picture of black man labeled as President Obama with racial slurs spray-painted on his face.” The News & Observer also reports that college’s chancellor issued a statement saying the message contained “racially charged obscenities and derogatory comments directed to the GLBT community.”
The protesters repainted their own message of “tolerance” incuding the word “diversity” twice and postulates, “Freedom of Speech…at what cost?”
“Pansies,” said former IR editor Corey Friedman. “Not because they’re gay, but because they can’t handle free speech.” Friedman, a strong advocate of the First Amendment, once began a post repeating the phrase, “There is no right to freedom from offense.”
“College kids have no spine these days,” Friedman said. And I agree.
As demonstrated in the Evan Coyne Maloney documentary “Indoctrinate U,” students have been severely punished, or at least threatened, for simply offending someone or some group.
This isn’t the first case of censorship of the celebrated tunnel, which is advertised as giving “students a venue for expressing their thoughts and feelings about anything.” As Adam Kissel from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education pointed out three years ago, “Well, not anything.”
In 2007, Kissel wrote an article (in his first year at FIRE) about college officials monitoring the tunnel for “hate speech” or anything that could be offensive. The chief of campus police told the Technician, ” There is a blanket rule for facilities to remove any speech that is deemed as inciting harmful actions against a particular individual or demographic…” Facitlties workers would take a picture of a possible offensive expression and hand it over to police. If it was considered a “hate crime” it would be painted over.
A year later, there was another lack of freedom at the Free Expression Tunnel. Following the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, racially charged messages were left inside the tunnel, offending minority students. The messages called for killing the president-elect, but were determined by the secret service to not be viable threats. Kissel pointed out a poem scribed on the wall in 1979 which read in part:
“I WILL STILL ENJOY THE SHOW / AS WE NUKE YOU TILL YOU GLOW … / … / IRAN YOU JUST LISTEN HERE / YOUR HOLY MAN’S TIME IS DRAWING NEAR / IT[‘]S HIS OWN MURDERING PIGS HE HAS TO FEAR / … / OUR OWN ARMY DANCES WITH DELIGHT / AT THE CHANCE TO KICK YOUR ASS LEFT AND RIGHT / YOU SWINE DOGS HAD US BY A SHORT HAIR / …”
The poem was directed toward Iran and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
“While it may be less controversial, speech is not less ‘hateful’ simply because it is directed at foreigners rather than at Americans,” Kissel wrote. “For NC State to advertise its Free Expression Tunnel to potential students as a place for unmonitored expression—but in reality to have a policy in which speech there is censored—is fraud and a mockery.”
Most free speech advocates will argue that the best way to combat negative speech is with postive speech. Rather than completely censoring a dissenting opinion completely, individuals or groups should issue their rebuttal, and the state should not be involved.
Stay tuned to IndieRegister.com and thefire.org for updates on this case.
indieregister.wordpress.com 
Well, free speech goes both ways – if they want to black out someone else’s expression, as a way of making their own statement, then let them. It’s not like the school’s officials did it. I’m all for free speech but hate speech I’m not really that cool with, myself.
How does anyone define “Hate Speech”? It is like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder.