This weekend is the Legislative Conference of the United States Student Association, the nation’s oldest and largest annual student organizing and lobbying event. It kicked off Friday night with a summit of state student association leaders, continued yesterday with a USSA board meeting and dinner speeches from activist and former White House official Van Jones and Stephanie Bloomingdale of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, and continues through Tuesday’s National Student Lobby Day.

USSA is one of the nation’s indispensable student organizations, and Leg Con is — along with the group’s annual student Congress — one of the true high points of the USSA calendar. You can follow all the news and gossip this year by checking out the #LegCon11 hashtag on Twitter.

In a few minutes I’ll be heading out to the Defining the Future of Public Higher Education conference at SUNY Stony Brook. I may or may not be blogging from the scene (tweeting is almost inevitable, of course).

If you happen to stop by the conference, be sure to say hi.

Roger Shibley of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), who I criticized yesterday for his remarks on the Alexandra Wallace video, has written a new piece at the FIRE website responding to my criticism and explaining that organization’s approach to the various speech acts it defends on First Amendment grounds:

“An integral part of being able to do the work we do is not letting our feelings about the viewpoint of the expression itself affect how we analyze the expression or how vigorously we defend the rights of the speaker. … Instead, we consistently present on our website all the evidence that we have about the expression in question in order to help people make up their minds for themselves, and we expect people to draw their own conclusions.”

That’s certainly a reasonable position, and indeed I have commended FIRE for taking exactly this tack in its letter to UCLA. But I criticized Shibley’s original blogpost precisely because it failed to follow this approach.

FIRE’s policy, Shibley says now, is to summarize each speech act fully and dispassionately without editorializing, and to let their readers draw their own conclusions about its merits. But Shibley did editorialize about Wallace’s video. He called it “pretty tame,” and “not particularly severe.” In it, he said, Wallace “couches her language in a number of ways and even apologizes at the beginning for not being ‘politically correct.'”

This is editorializing. Worse, it’s misrepresentation of the video itself, as Wallace at no point in it apologizes for her lack of “political correctness.” Instead, she deploys that term as a pre-emptive defense against the criticism she expects to receive: “we know that I’m not the most politically correct person so don’t take this offensively.” Instructing people not to be offended by your views is not an apology for those views.

And Shibley’s misrepresentation of the video doesn’t end there. As I pointed out in my original blogpost, Wallace’s “ching chong ling long ting tong” mockery of Asians’ speech and her snide reference to the Japanese tsunami went unnoted in Shibley’s summary, despite their centrality to campus criticism of Wallace and prominence in media coverage of the controversy.

I’ve done this dance with FIRE before. Twice in the past I’ve pointed out situations in which they’ve misrepresented or mischaracterized racist or sexist speech in ways that minimized the ugliness of those speech acts. This isn’t a one-time slipup. It’s a pattern.

Again, I respect FIRE’s principles as articulated. I can accept their belief that the work they do requires them to do no more than “present … all the evidence that we have about the expression in question in order to help people make up their minds for themselves.” But that’s not how Shibley approached the Wallace case, and it’s not how FIRE addressed the two previous cases I’ve highlighted. In each of these three cases, representatives of FIRE offered partial and incomplete descriptions of presumptively racist and/or sexist speech, with their omissions serving to create the impression that the speech was less obnoxious than it actually was. And in each of these three cases those same representatives offered editorial defenses of that speech on content-based rather than civil libertarian grounds.

FIRE is an organization encompassing members and leaders of wildly divergent political perspectives. It speaks out on behalf of controversial speech of all kinds. The work that it does on behalf of the rights of people with unpopular views is often valuable. But despite all this, its reputation in many quarters is one of political and cultural conservatism. There are many reasons that it has this reputation, but the phenomenon I’ve described here is, to my mind, one of the most significant.

If the folks at FIRE want to be accepted as a force for free expression across the political spectrum — if they want to be seen as, in Robert Shipley’s words, “an honest and trustworthy broker to whom people of all different values and beliefs can come for help” — they’re really going to have to do a better job with this kind of stuff.

Afternoon Update | Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE, has offered a couple of thoughts on this post, and I’ve responded in turn. Click through (or scroll down) to comments to see the exchange.

Update | FIRE’s Robert Shibley has put up a response to this post. My reply to his response can be found here.

There’s something I find very weird about the campus-free-speech crowd centered around FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education).

Every time a new example of incendiary, bigoted campus speech hits the news, the FIRE folks rise up to defend the speaker’s right to express his or her views — as, in my opinion, they should. Like them, I’m generally opposed to campus speech codes and in favor of the principle that more speech is the best remedy for bad speech.

But see what I did there? I called bad speech “bad speech.” Because whether I think speech needs defending has nothing to do with whether I consider that speech obnoxious. I’m happy to describe bad speech as bad speech in the course of saying it’s entitled to First Amendment protection.

Contrast that with Robert Shibley of FIRE’s comments on Alexandra Wallace’s racist YouTube rant:

“It is easy to see why Asian students in particular, and others as well, might find it offensive—although in my opinion it is really pretty tame, as far as Internet rants go.”

It’s easy to see why some other people might find this speech offensive, he says, though he himself considers it “pretty tame.” And how does Shibley summarize the video itself? In it, he says, Wallace

“claims that the ‘hordes’ of Asian students at UCLA (UCLA’s undergraduate population is about 37 percent Asian and Pacific Islander) cause various annoyances like loudly talking on their cell phones in the library and having their extended families come over and do their chores for them.”

Kudos to Shibley for quoting the word “hordes,” I suppose, but I find it curious that he leaves out the other two most inflammatory elements of the video — Wallace’s racist “ching chong” caricature of “Asian” languages, and her mockery of students who might have been attempting to reach family members in the path of the Japanese tsunami.

Blogger Matthew Hurtt — who approvingly quotes Shibley — takes a slightly different tack, arguing in essence that if you take out the bigotry from Wallace’s rant, it’s really not all that bigoted, but the minimizing effect of his rhetoric is similar. Tellingly, for the epigram of his blogpost, Hurtt invokes Voltaire:

“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend – to the death – your right to say it.”

I say “tellingly” because Hurtt gets the quote wrong.

The “defend to the death” line originates with Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who summarized Voltaire’s position as “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire himself phrased it even more strongly, in a 1770 letter: “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.” [Update: That quote is fake too. See final update below for details.]

See the difference?

Alexandra Wallace’s speech was detestable. If you’re going to defend it on principle, there’s no reason not to admit that.

Update | Seems like I gave Hurtt too much credit. Responding to this post on Twitter, he says he doesn’t consider Wallace’s rant bigoted at all. Glad to have that cleared up, I suppose.

Second Update | FIRE’s letter to UCLA on the Wallace dustup does a much better job of threading the needle on these issues than Shibley’s blogpost. In it, they provide a dispassionate account of the video’s content (including the “ching chong” business, though omitting the “tsunami” joke), then explaining why they consider it deserving of First Amendment protection even if it is judged to be “hateful” or “offensive.” Law professor Eugene Volokh goes even further, defending Wallace’s free speech rights even as he characterizes the video as “bigoted” “moronic” “nonsense.”

2015 Update | My corrected version of the Voltaire quote is itself a fake. Oops. Read the whole story here.