George Leef’s latest Forbes column asks whether taxpayer-subsidized colleges and universities should take steps to protect students’ and faculty members’ First Amendment rights.
Around America, free speech on college campuses is under attack. We find invited speakers being disinvited or shouted down, “bias incident” reporting systems that encourage students to complain when they hear anything they don’t like, and professors who demean students who dare to question their assertions.
In the fairly recent past, most higher education leaders would have admitted that the assault on free speech was bad, but tried to say that it isn’t really much of a problem. But now we find that some actually praise it, such as New York University professor Ulrich Baer, who recently argued in the New York Times, “The idea of freedom of speech does not mean blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of the community.”
I’m not going to explain what’s wrong with that “speech must be regulated” view here. … The question at hand is what, if anything, the federal government should do to protect free speech against its many enemies in higher education.