A bedrock understanding of freedom of speech in the press is that diverse opinions will more likely lead to the truth... You just can't turn to any page, you can't avoid the understanding of freedom of speech in the press in this country without encountering that basic principle. It is in John Stewart Mill, John Milton; it picked up when the free speech tradition really begins in this country in 1919 .. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis. .. That continues on up through New York Times vs. Sullivan in 1964, and on to today."

[What's the proof for that idea?]

"The fact is, none of us could bring forth .. any scientific data that would conclusively prove that a commitment to unregulated diverse expression is more likely to bring us truth. We are simply committed to that idea because of what I would call experiential sort of knowledge."

"Our history is filled with actions for which we feel shame and the need to redress. For two or more centuries, there was enslavement of a population in our midst, and there was also deep discrimination against various groups and exclusion of groups."

"The Constitution of the United States has not only a first amendment principle, but also a principle of equality -- the 14th amendment. "No citizen shall be denied equal protection of the laws", the so-called equal protection clause. That principle of equality has, of course, also been the subject of powerful interpretation by the U.S. Supreme Court and the courts and by the society. Brown vs. Board of Education, the great lode star opinion for this century held separate but equal in education is not constitutional. And Brown vs. Board of Education has launched, for this century, our great project of equality -- trying to redress that history of segregation and that history of enslavement, that history of discrimination of other groups as well.

"Now we think in the United States in this century then of two grand principles, one of freedom of speech and press and the other of equality. We could not pick, could not select any principles that would be higher in our sense of ourselves than those two, I think. They are deeply, deeply interconnected."

"Now today we are under real serious reconsideration and challenge to these basic principles of freedom of speech and of equality. This University is now being sued by a group, funded and sponsored by a group in Washington, D.C. known as the Center for Individual Rights, trying to prohibit under the Constitution the University from taking race into account as it tries to build a diverse student body."

Why do we do it? We do it because of an educational philosophy that is like the first principle, that is the first principle -- diverse opinions make for a better education. They also make for a better society under the first amendment."

"But here we are at the end of the century, and the group I mentioned in Washington, D.C. was successful in suing the University of Texas Law School. .. And in California, the Regents of the University of Michigan voted to end any form of taking race into account to build a diverse student body; and the citizens voted in a referendum to follow the same course with respect to all public institutions.

What has been the upshot of these suits in Texas and California? The upshot is that at the University of Texas Law School this year for the first time, operating under this new constitutional principle, that the number of African Americans in the entering class of the law school at the University of Texas have fallen from about 50 to about four. And the number of African Americans who have entered into Bolt Law School at the University of California at Berkeley, has fallen from about 30-40, to one.

".. It's my hope that we will see in this a retrenchment, a reversal of a century in which we have tried to, under our two great principles of free speech and equality, move to a new level of integration in our minds. But it's also possible that we will, at the end of this century, find ourselves just about where we were at the beginning -- that is with a resegregated system of higher education -- not intentionally segregate, but that's simply a fact."

"What I do know is that since we are so dependent upon our public understanding of these issues of free speech, equality, higher education and how they weave together .. upon .. the media that what I see as crucial to a good education has to be, in my mind, crucial to a good newsroom."

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