Pop quiz: My UCSC students understand free speech — do you?

Quick Take

UC Santa Cruz lecturer Ryan Coonerty has spent the year teaching on newsy topics, including antisemitism and free speech. Coonerty, a former Santa Cruz mayor and member of the county board of supervisors, says he’s buoyed by his students’ attitudes and aptitude. He also offers his final exam. Could you pass it?

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

Last fall, I taught a class at UC Santa Cruz on antisemitism. This spring, I just finished teaching another 50 Banana Slugs a legal studies course about free speech. I am ready for my courses to be less relevant.

When I tell colleagues the subjects I teach, I am often asked questions more suitable for a member of a bomb squad than an educator. Am I scared of my students? How do I know what to say? What happens if everything explodes? My answer often surprises them. Engaging with more than 100 undergraduate students on these difficult topics for several hours a week over the past year gives me joy and hope. My students are great.

The students deserve most of the credit for demonstrating those qualities, especially when their elders have not been great role models. Students today are just as good as those I taught more than a decade ago. They are educating me, and I’ve tried to provide them with a good learning environment. Here are some things that worked this contentious year:

Start with an acknowledgement of how difficult, emotional and complex the issues are and that we won’t solve them in an hour or 10 weeks. This sounds obvious, but it allows the majority of students who are overwhelmed or confused to be comfortable in that uncertainty. It also encourages those who have strong opinions to acknowledge that global peace doesn’t depend on winning an argument in the next hour.

I also tell my students they are the global educated elite and with that comes responsibilities. Of all the conversations, this is the one the students struggle with the most. They don’t see themselves as elites and don’t want to be seen by others that way. Often students who have opposing political beliefs find common ground rejecting my assertion. Yet, facts are facts. By being at a University of California school, they are elite.

As such, they have a responsibility to engage deeply and meaningfully in these issues.

By virtue of their elite status, they will also likely find themselves selected to be leaders. They will be the people future students criticize. Because of this, we use real-world scenarios. In assignments, they must be chancellors, lawyers, police chiefs and politicians. They can’t just criticize, they have to say what they would do in those positions and what the consequences of those decisions would likely be.

As the educated elite, they also have to know that genocide, antisemitism, terrorism and hate speech are specific legal terms with contested definitions. If students invoke these words, they must be prepared to articulate what definition they are using and why. I also require them to make a strong counterargument to their claim. In my classes, students are expected to represent the views of Leo Frank’s antisemitic lynch mob, Nazis trying to march in Skokie and a kid who burned a cross on a Black family’s lawn.

This is not both-sidesism. This is living in a diverse, uncomfortable democracy.

Similarly, when we talk about free speech, it has a specific legal meaning. As students at a public university, they have constitutional rights (their peers at private universities traded some of their free speech rights for a private school experience). My students should demand free speech rights for themselves, those they agree with and those they vehemently dislike. They can both passionately advocate for the rights of a speaker they disagree with while passionately criticizing that person’s ideas.

We also must be clear when we are talking about the distinction between civil disobedience and protected free speech. I have respect for those who violate laws for a cause they believe is a moral imperative. But, they can claim the moral high ground only if they embrace the punishment. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from Birmingham Jail, “One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

I’ve had students ask to be excused from a class to attend a protest. I tell them it will be an honor to dock their grade so they can take a stand for an issue they care deeply about. And I mean it.

Ryan Coonerty is a former Santa Cruz mayor and county supervisor. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz

This week, my students will submit a final paper. It is a legal analysis of a hypothetical situation. They are assigned the role of a public university’s general counsel (see below). There are protests and counterprotests on their campus and the situation is getting messy and maybe dangerous. They must, in nine well-researched pages, tell me what they recommend the chancellor do and why – based on legal precedent and likely real-world impacts.

Some of my students might have written parts of their paper in a picket line or at an unpermitted protest encampment (the UCSC encampment was less than 200 yards from our classroom for most of the quarter). I expect my students to struggle and end up with different and far-from-perfect recommendations. I can’t wait to read their answers.

Ryan Coonerty, a former mayor and county supervisor in Santa Cruz, teaches legal and Jewish studies at UC Santa Cruz. He was a fellow at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement in 2020-21.

FINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT

You are the general counsel for UC Santa Cruz. The chancellor has asked you to analyze free speech issues as well as provide legal and policy recommendations in order to resolve a series of controversial events on campus. The paper should be nine well-written pages citing relevant First Amendment case law.

Here are the relevant facts:

A group of students is engaging in protests and established an unpermitted encampment in the Quarry Amphitheater to protest UC policies in regard to tragic events in Gaza. They will not move until their demands are met.

In response, a student group has approached the university for a permit to stage a counterprotest event in the Quarry Amphitheater. They want to have pro-Israel speakers, music and fundraising for a week. It will be amplified, except from midnight to 8 a.m. Students will be invited to camp overnight. They have offered, as a compromise, to hold their event in Bay Tree Plaza and parking lot. They will not accept any other location.

As tensions have risen, both sides have started anonymously posting the names and email addresses of student leaders and faculty participating in the protest/counterprotest on social media. In these posts, these students and faculty are labeled as terrorists or supporters of genocide. The posts urge that these students/faculty lose jobs, grants and honors. As a result, some of the students and faculty are receiving death threats. They have asked the administration to expel any students who are found to be posting their information. Campus information technology services has not been able to establish the source of the death threats, but has identified some of the students who likely posted the names.

Finally, in response to these disputes, a group called “Make Love/Not War” has announced that the only way to reduce tensions is to stage a love-in. They believe public nudity and erotic acts will encourage peace. They also don’t believe that “love needs a permit.” The group plans to stage their events during graduation ceremonies on adjacent hillsides.

Suggested outline for legal memo