Freedom of expression has been recognzsed as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations.( 123rf, Boise State Public Radio)

Speech: it can define us as much as divide us. And Idaho, it appears, has found itself in the eye of that hurricane lately.

With the year not half over, 2024 has been particularly brittle: from the hyper-divisions at the Idaho Capitol to the rants of Boise State Professor Scott Yenor’s doubling down on his comments, calling feminists “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome.”

And Boise State is not an outlier. Just this week, college students at Yale have been charged with trespassing during protests over the Irael-Hamas war. And the University of Southern California canceled the graduation speech of a valedictorian, a Muslim, due to what the university said were “safety reasons.”

“When I look at public universities, and I’m not just talking about Boise State… once you open a public space to a speaker, the court has said, ‘you have to open that,’” said Dr. Sam Martin, scholar, professor and Frank and Bethine Church Chair Endowed Chair of Public Affairs at Boise State University. “When we affirm a person’s right to speak out and say things that we would spend our whole lives shouting against, that’s free speech.”

Martin joined Morning Edition host George Prentice to talk about how public perceptions can shift over time, and how the so-called “law of the pendulum,” which can only swing too far to the left or right.