"'No one is disputing how the courts have ruled on this,' john a. powell, a Berkeley law professor with joint appointments in the departments of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies, told me."

"'What I’m saying is that courts are often wrong.' Powell is tall, with a relaxed sartorial style, and his manner of speaking is soft and serenely confident. Before he became an academic, he was the national legal director of the A.C.L.U. 'I represented the Ku Klux Klan when I was in that job,' he said. 'My family was not pleased with me, but I said, Look, they have First Amendment rights, too. So it’s not that I don’t understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?'... In the nineteen-seventies, when women entered the workplace in large numbers, some male bosses made salacious comments, or hung pornographic images on the walls. 'These days, we’d say, That’s a hostile workplace, that’s sexual harassment,' powell said. 'But those weren’t recognized legal concepts yet. So the courts’ response was Sorry, nothing we can do. Pornographic posters are speech. If women don’t like it, they can put up their own posters.' He drew an analogy to today’s trolls and white supremacists. 'The knee-jerk response is Nothing we can do, it’s speech. ‘Well, hold on, what about the harm they’re causing?’ What harm? It’s just words. That might sound intuitive to us now. But, if you know the history, you can imagine how our intuitions might look foolish, even immoral, a generation later.'"

From "How Social-Media Trolls Turned U.C. Berkeley Into a Free-Speech Circus/Public universities have no choice but to welcome far-right speakers seeking self-promotion. Should the First Amendment be reinterpreted for the digital age?" by Andrew Marantz (in The New Yorker).

Is "self-promotion" a special right-wing motivation? Is there some idea that a left-wing speaker promotes his ideas, but a right-wing speaker promotes only himself — that left-wingers are earnest and sincere and bring substance to the campus milieu but right-wingers are demagogues who belong in the hinterlands, braying to some mob?

There's a lot about Milo Yiannopoulos in that article, by the way.

As for john a. powell, he's saying things that are scarcely new. They were standard fare in the legal academy a quarter century ago. That is, it's already "a generation later." His sarcasm at "It’s just words" sounds straight out of "Only Words," the book Catharine MacKinnon published in 1994, and "Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And The First Amendment (New Perspectives on Law, Culture, and Society)" a collection of essays some Critical Race theory lawprofs put out in 1995.

These ideas have been pushed for a very long time, and there's still an intense effort to clear the campus of competing ideas about freedom of speech. I was utterly surrounded by those left-wing views back in the early 90s, and I find it wonderful that they're still so outré that a lawprof today presents them as intriguingly new. What a miracle that Americans still believe in freedom of speech!

ADDED: The NYT has a very similar article today, "The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience" by a philosophy professor, Bryan W. Van Norden. He wants elite institutions to embrace forthright viewpoint discrimination — justified by portraying the ideas he finds offensive as "ignorant":

Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has complained that men can’t “control crazy women” because men “have absolutely no respect” for someone they cannot physically fight. Does this adolescent opinion deserve as much of an audience as the nuanced thoughts of Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, about the role of “himpathy” in supporting misogyny?...

There is a clear line between censoring someone and refusing to provide them with institutional resources for disseminating their ideas... What just access means in terms of positive policy is that institutions that are the gatekeepers to the public have a fiduciary responsibility to award access based on the merit of ideas and thinkers. To award space in a campus lecture hall to someone like Peterson who says that feminists “have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination”...  is not to display admirable intellectual open-mindedness. It is to take a positive stand that these views are within the realm of defensible rational discourse, and that these people are worth taking seriously as thinkers.

Neither is true: These views are specious, and those who espouse them are, at best, ignorant, at worst, sophists. The invincibly ignorant and the intellectual huckster have every right to express their opinions, but their right to free speech is not the right to an audience.