Chancellor Christ: Free speech is who we are

!- Start of DoubleClick Floodlight Tag: Please do not remove Activity name of this tag: UCB001CP Retargeting URL of the webpage where the tag is expected to be placed: http://unknown This tag must be placed between the. UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ sent this message today to the campus community: Dear students, faculty and staff, This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear: Public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections. But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint - that we're required to allow it - but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university.