Colleges Have Never Cared About Free Speech

They thought they had made this clear when the National Guard killed four students for protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State in 1970. Or when police officers killed two students for protesting racial inequality at Jackson State in Mississippi in the same year. Or even 40 years later when campus police at the University of California - Davis were pepper-spraying students in the face for protesting economic inequality.

Universities suppressing their students' speech has such a long history in America that examples of it exist from before the states were even united: Ten years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, students at Harvard University protested the quality of the food they were being served on campus, and subsequently half of their student body was suspended as a result.

And these are just the high-profile episodes that managed to make their way into the news. But colleges are silencing their students way more often than you hear about, and for any reason they see fit to.

I know this because it happened to meeeeeeeeeeeee.

MUSIC CUE: "Semi-Charmed Life" by Third Eye Blind, doo doo doo, doo doo-doo doo

The year was [redacted]. It was the Spring semester of my single year at Webster University. I was super thin and handsome and cool (not important to the story, I just want it in the public record). The school was gearing up for its annual student film and video awards called the Webbies, and I had signed up to help make the showcase feature film that accompanied the ceremony every year.

The film was always a crude, over-the-top comedy, such as the kind you would expect a bunch of college kids to make, with the plot generally revolving around a group of students saving the Webbies from a series of unrealistic movie-themed disasters, often parodying features like Back to the Future or Warriors.

The year I got involved the movie was Lethal Webbies, a parody of 1980s cop films like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard. The story was about two idiot campus safety patrol officers who didn’t see eye to eye, but eventually set aside their differences to stop an evil Austrian exchange student’s plot to blow up the Webbies, a plot he had devised after his art film Untitled Soul received zero nominations.

Somehow, during our months-long production, rumors started spreading that the movie we were making was highly problematic. One especially rampant rumor was that the film was unkind to Austrians. These rumors took on a life of their own and were pervasive enough that they made their way to the school’s top administrators who decided they needed to step in. The students involved in the project set up a private viewing of the film to try to put the school at ease.

We never had a chance.

The administrators remained dead silent for the entirety of the screening, crossing their arms in disapproval and clucking their tongues at jokes they didn’t like (which was all of them). When the credits graciously rolled an hour plus later, they proceeded to tell us that they thought the movie sucked and wasn’t very funny. They also decided to ban the film, for reasons unrelated to their unsolicited critiques.

They had decided that Lethal Webbies was culturally insensitive to Austrians, specifically the evil exchange student, a character who was basically just Hans Gruber from Die Hard. They told us the Webbies ceremony was to be live-streamed at their Vienna campus that year (which never happened), and this movie would not be a good look for their global exchange program. They didn’t care about the other parts of the movie that actually were incredibly offensive (at one point my diabetic character threatens to end his own life by eating a candy bar) or overtly crude (at another point my character punches a corpse); they only cared about the thing that was closest to the inaccurate rumors they had originally heard about, so they fully doused their students’ hard work and artistic expression as a mere precaution.

Of course this only ended up being really good for Lethal Webbies. Word quickly spread that our movie was too controversial to be screened at the ceremony it had been created for, and this resulted in even more people seeing it at two jam-packed screenings in the Winifred Moore auditorium to a raucous and lively crowd, who loved it. In trying to censor the movie, the school had only raised its profile and ensured more people saw the finished product.

Now, am I really comparing a small potatoes student film to the ongoing protests at Washington University over a military effort that so far has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people? Unfortunately I am.

Colleges sell students on the idea that their institutions exist solely to provide them with the tools to think critically and freely express themselves, but in reality schools are just businesses whose primary goal is to make as much money as they can get away with (and they get away with a lot), and if a student's free expression sparks the loss of even a single solitary cent from donors or enrollment or divestments or whatever, the college is going to shut their ass down. They might even call the cops on them.

And as anyone with a worthless mass communications degree can tell you, if the fuzz shows up, that only helps amplify the message the school is trying to censor.

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