As President Donald Trump doubled down against the NFL National Anthem protests, his attorney general will wade into a different culture war with a planned address to law students about “free speech on college campuses.”
In the speech, to be delivered at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington on Tuesday, Sessions will lament American universities “transforming into an echo chamber of political correctness and homogenous thought, a shelter for fragile egos,” according to a person familiar with the event.
The debate that Sessions will enter has in recent months become a violent one.
In February, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, black-clad agitators smashed windows and hurled Molotov cocktails ahead of a planned appearance by far-right controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos. At Middlebury College in Vermont in March, protests outside the speech of a conservative political scientist devolved into a shoving match that left one professor hospitalized.
Flashpoints around hot-button speakers, alongside a trend of trigger warnings and safe spaces, have fueled reputations that places of higher education are hostile to the First Amendment. More US adults surveyed by Gallup last year thought that Americans’ ability to exercise their free speech rights is weaker today than 20 years ago (40%), than those who thought it was stronger (31%).
Sessions has a strong interest in First Amendment protection and has discussed publicly remarking on university turbulence for months, according to the source familiar with the speech.
Students and faculty members of Georgetown’s law school say they plan on protesting the attorney general’s speech.
“I find it hypocritical for a member of the Trump administration to act as a champion for free speech while the President has consistently mocked and insulted those trying to exercise the very same rights,” said Richard Hand, a third-year law student at the university.
“I think we understand those things without him having to tell us that, ” added third-year student Spencer McManus. “I don’t deny that he has the right to say what he wants and what he thinks — I certainly believe that very strongly. It’s the irony of him coming here.”
The law students, who helped organize a rally expected to draw hundreds, point towards Trump’s recent fight with NFL players who have protested civil rights abuses during National Anthem performances and the Justice Department’s decision to prosecute a woman who laughed at Sessions during his confirmation hearing as examples of the hypocrisy. The woman, Desiree Fairooz, faces a November trial over charges of unlawful conduct after she rejected a plea deal offered by prosecutors earlier this year.
Sessions has regularly faced small groups of protestors outside his speeches around the country, many denouncing his views on criminal justice and policing issues.
A Georgetown Law spokeswoman said Monday night that the campus has “designated protest areas for high-profile speaker events” and that entry into the law school buildings are restricted to members of the school community and their invited guests.
“We are committed to upholding the values of academic freedom and serving as a forum for the free exchange of ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable to some,” spokeswoman Tanya Weinberg said.
Some on Monday also criticized the university’s ticketing of the address, which is only open to a small group of students that have in the past signed up to attend at least one event held by its host organization, The group, the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, says it hosts programs to examine “how best to remain faithful to the Constitution’s text.”
Professor Randy Barnett, the right-leaning law professor who leads the group and is slated to speak Tuesday after Sessions, also invited students from his classes, Weinberg said. Both policies, she said, are in line with university policy “given limited capacity.”
Sessions will be met before his Georgetown appearance also with a statement signed by 44 members of the university law school faculty rebuking his remarks and saying that “a man who fails to recognize paradigmatic violations of the First Amendment is a poor choice to speak about free speech on campuses.”
Prof. Alicia Plerhoples, one of the law professor organizers of the statement, said many of her colleagues planned to protest Sessions and the administration’s views on free speech by “taking a knee” outside the auditorium where the attorney general is scheduled to speak — a reference to the growing NFL National Anthem protests.
