For Tiffany Villager, protecting Americans’ First Amendment freedoms is not an abstract concept but a battle to be fought daily.
Armed with education and communication, she and others like her wage war on ignorance and defend the Constitution. The surprising part: they work not from the White House, not from a court house, not from a capitol building, but from a red brick building only minutes from Vanderbilt.
Past the dorms on Peabody, down potholed and patched Edgehill Road, around the corner of 18th Avenue, and sandwiched between the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy and a parking lot, sits the John Seigenthaler Center amid the Nashville cityscape. The impressive building, with its white trim and giant double doors, houses the offices of the Freedom Forum and its offshoots, the First Amendment Center and the Diversity Institute. Inside, Villager, legal research director for the First Amendment Center, and her fellow researchers, lawyers, and journalists do their part to educate the public and the media about their constitutional rights.
The Freedom Forum, based in Arlington, Va., is a non-profit, nonpartisan, private foundation started by USA Today founder Allen H. Neuharth in 1991 to promote “free press, free speech, and free spirit.” The foundation supports three initiatives: the Newseum, an interactive museum dedicated to journalism currently under construction in Washington, D.C., the Diversity Institute, which promotes racial diversity in newsrooms, and the First Amendment Center, which encourages public debate on First Amendment issues.
The idea for the First Amendment Center was born when John Seigenthaler, an acclaimed journalist for The Tennessean and USA Today, approached Neuharth about starting a center to help citizens and the media better understand First Amendment issues. The pair contacted former Vanderbilt Chancellor Joe Wyatt and former Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies Cliff Russell, who welcomed the center to campus as an affiliate of the institute.
The center has since endeavored to increase awareness of the First Amendment at a time when even the public’s basic understanding of First Amendment freedoms is in frighteningly short supply. According to the center’s “State of the First Amendment 2003” survey, more than a third of 1,000 respondents were unable to name any of the specific rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Freedom of speech was the only right named by more than one-third of the people surveyed, and only two percent remembered the right to petition the government. The same survey found that 34 percent of Americans believe the First Amendment goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees.
In hopes of changing this attitude, the center’s education and outreach efforts take a variety of forms, from establishing “First Amendment Model Schools” for teaching students K-12 about democracy and citizenship to holding a First Amendment law moot court competition for law students. The center’s Executive Director Ken Paulson and scholar Charles Haynes write a weekly newspaper column, “Inside the First Amendment,” and the center also reaches out to the public through a weekly public television program, “Speaking Freely,” which highlights free expression in the arts. First Amendment Center scholars publish white papers, briefing reports on current hot button issues available on the center’s website at www.firstamendmentcenter.org.
Recent topics of debate include library Internet filtering, public employee speech, the 10 Commandments, and campaign finance. On college campuses specifically, the First Amendment Center has examined free speech zones, controversial campus speakers, and newspaper theft.
“You come in one day with what you think you’ll be doing, and it all changes when the Supreme Court makes a decision,” said Villager. “Then you’re writing analyses, distilling the case, researching related issues, answering calls from reporters, and briefing them on the case.”
While attorneys at the center don’t take cases, they help refer citizens with First Amendment issues to attorneys in their jurisdictions. Additionally, they research for journalists and provide them with background information so they can understand the issues they report on.
Villager describes her job as “ever-changing.” But even though the specific battles she and her colleagues fight shift from day to day, their mission remains consistent.
“It [the First Amendment] is the first 45 words of the Bill of Rights, and it’s really our blueprint for personal liberty,” said David Hudson, First Amendment Center research attorney. “If you don’t have the right to speak out and voice your opinion and even criticize your government, then you’re really not a self-governing people.”
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