Censorship, The First Amendment, and Free Speech Essay - 1

Censorship, The First Amendment, and Free Speech - Essay Example Victims of hate speech suffered from emotional, as well as psychological pains, and as a result, various institutions took up action by way of creating hate speech campus codes. These codes were meant to limit speech that was both hateful as well as harmful to people (Garrett 1). However, the courts systematically began striking down the policies in speech, stating how they were unconstitutional. From a student’s perspective, hate speech is unfair harassment or treatment either verbally or non-verbally directed towards an individual, or group of persons based on their color, race, nationality, religious beliefs, age, and sex, with the sole purpose of creating offensiveness and intimidation for the persons involved. Although there has been a significant increment in the number of hate speech codes within colleges, as well as universities, the increase in hate speech occurrences across the U.S is unbearable. Although hate speech codes endeavor to create a safer environment that is politically correct within college campuses by instituting principles as well as guidelines for students to adhere to, they are somewhat ineffective because they are merely trying to cover up hate speech (Gould 73). Various campuses enforce repressive as well as biased speech codec, and under these codes, all groups of persons of integrity risk persecution from school staff. These speech codes make it punishable for students to talk about or even distribute resources concerning issues that are contrary to dominant beliefs within the campus, of which could be mostly secular as well as politically correct in nature. Nevertheless, there has never been any known case whereby a college’s speech has remained unchanged after a courtroom challenge. The present generation of speech codes tends to come by way of students conduct and email policies that ban invasive communication, statements of diversity that have provisions for