In a recent opinion piece for USA Today, DeWayne Wickham, the dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication, argued that First Amendment protections do not cover insulting the prophet Mohammed.

Declaring that “Charlie Hebdo has gone too far,” Wickham goes on to claim the magazine “crossed the line that separates free speech from toxic talk” and outline what he believes is the legal limits of free speech in regard to insulting Islam: “While free speech is one of democracy's most important pillars,” he writes, “it has its limits.”

After accusing French President Francois Hollande of hypocrisy in his defense of the satirical magazine’s cartoons, Wickham credits the Obama administration and Pope Francis for showing more ambivalence toward the issue of offensive speech.  

Two years ago, then-press secretary Jay Carney questioned the judgment of Charlie Hebdo's editors when they published an offensive depiction of Mohammed. […] In reaction to all of this, Pope Francis has said of the magazine, "You cannot make fun of the faith of others."

The journalism dean then purports to explain the constitutional limits of free speech that he argues applies to insults of Mohammed:

In 1919, the Supreme Court ruled speech that presents a "clear and present danger" is not protected by the First Amendment. Crying "fire" in a quiet, uninhabited place is one thing, the court said. But "the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

Twenty-two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that forms of expression that "inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" are fighting words that are not protected by the First Amendment.

Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons “constitute fighting word, or a clear and present danger,” Wickham argues, and thus “pushes Charlie Hebdo's free speech claim beyond the limits of the endurable.”

As HotAir’s Allahpundit notes, what’s perhaps most stunning about the article is that a dean of journalism could be so wrong on his understanding of the Supreme Court’s rulings regarding the First Amendment::

Amazingly for a J-school prof, none of that is right. The Supreme Court hasn’t used the “clear and present danger” test for First Amendment cases in decades. The test now for inflammatory speech is the Brandenburg test, a strciter standard that allows the state to criminalize incitement only in narrow circumstances — when the speaker intends to incite violence and violence is likely to quickly result. Charlie Hebdo’s Mohammed cartoons may have met the “likely” prong of that test but they sure didn’t meet the “intent” part. The “fighting words” doctrine is still good law but it too has been gradually narrowed over time. Today, for the moment, it’s limited to “direct personal insults” between people who are face to face. That’s the key difference between publishing an offensive cartoon and, to borrow the Pope’s recent analogy, stepping up to a man and insulting his mother. From the Supreme Court’s perspective, those situations are apples and oranges. I appreciate Wickham’s candor in trying to expand “fighting words” to allow censorship of all kinds of offensive speech, though; I’ve worried about that myself, as longtime HA readers know. If speech can be criminalized because it angers a man to the point where he wants to attack you, why should we limit it to speech said in his presence? “Fighting words” is a potential trojan horse for smuggling all sorts of exceptions for “hate” into the First Amendment. I’m surprised more lefties aren’t as forthright as this guy is in making the case for it.