Students' Right to Protest Comes From the Civilization They Reject

Campus protesters often treat Western civilization as an oppressor while relying on the very freedoms it helped secure.

The argument: Students rarely realize that their rights to free speech, protest, and petition are part of the Western inheritance they are taught to reject.

WHY IT MATTERS

A generation taught to view Western civilization primarily as oppressive will struggle to understand the source of its own liberties. A free society cannot endure if its citizens are trained to despise the tradition that made freedom possible. And when students exercise rights they do not understand, they become less prepared to defend them, preserve them, or pass them on.

These anti-Western attitudes first found voice at Stanford University in the 1980s when Jesse Jackson led 500 protesters in the now-infamous chant, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” They complained that the program lacked diversity and demanded that Stanford end its introductory humanities program in “Western Culture,” then a graduation requirement. Since then, students have decried Western civilization as both a course of study and a cultural norm. Such courses rarely exist on today’s college campuses, leaving students woefully ignorant of the principles and traditions that comprise our intellectual inheritance. In fact, only 7% of Americans can name all five First Amendment rights.

If students still took Western Civ, they would learn that our rights to free speech, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances—all enshrined in the First Amendment—have roots in ancient Greece, the English legal system, and early colonial America. These rights did not emerge suddenly or accidentally; they developed over centuries through philosophical inquiry, legal precedent, and political struggle. A recent report from the Cato Institute documents that the first government to allow citizens to openly criticize the state was that of 5th-century Athens, which helped foster a culture of broad debate.

Photo by: Heather Mount (Unsplash)

English legal tradition also informs our system of expressive rights. Our rights to petition and assembly can be traced to Chapter 61 of the Magna Carta, which established a mechanism for subjects to hold the king accountable. By the 15th century, English subjects routinely gathered to present collective petitions to the king or Parliament. These practices normalized the idea that people could assemble peacefully to express political grievances. The rights to petition and assembly were codified in the English Bill of Rights in 1689, which also included the right to free speech within Parliament. This was admittedly a limited application, but it paved the way for broader rights in the future. Unfortunately, most Americans do not know this history.

That’s because this history of expressive rights is rarely taught in high school or college classrooms. As a result, many student protesters exercise these rights without appreciating how precious, hard-won, and historically rare they are. They may take for granted freedoms that emerged only through centuries of intellectual and legal refinement. We should instead teach students that it’s no accident of history that Americans enjoy the expressive rights codified in our First Amendment. We have the legal traditions of Western civilization to thank for such rights, and they deserve both understanding and stewardship.

THE BOTTOM LINE

A society cannot preserve liberties it no longer understands. Restoring serious instruction in the Western tradition, through general education requirements and civics curricula, would ensure that students are equipped to understand, defend, and responsibly exercise their own rights, rather than trampling on the tradition that afforded them.