Much as administrators and faculty may dislike it, the fact is that public colleges are subject to both the First Amendment and the state legislatures that fund them. Legislators shouldn’t micromanage the campuses, but they must set some basic rules.
One of those rules should be that free speech and open inquiry will be protected.
You might find it surprising that academics need to be told to protect free speech and inquiry, but American campuses have become increasingly intolerant of speech that conflicts with “progressive” orthodoxy. I have often written about the rules imposed by campus officials that run afoul of the First Amendment, such as the speech infringement at Iowa State and the miniscule “free speech zone” at Grand Valley State.
Conservative and libertarian speakers have frequently been shouted down or disinvited from giving a scheduled address; students who say something that hurts someone’s feelings are likely to face charges brought by a “bias incident” team. In one of the most shameful events of all, a speaker at the University of Wisconsin, Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, was prevented from completing his off-campus talk when a mob of students that had been organized by a school administrator broke into the room where he was discussing the evidence of racial preferences in UW admissions.
Hitting the nail squarely on the head, in his January 31 Wall Street Journal column, Professor Peter Berkowitz wrote, “The yawning gap between universities’ role as citadels of free inquiry and the ugly reality of campus censorship is often the fault of administrators who share the progressive belief that universities must restrict speech to protect the sensitivities of minorities and women. They often capitulate to the loudest and angriest demonstrators just to get controversies off the front page.”
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
