mises.org / / July 17, 2017
The US higher-education world has been rocked the last two years by student protests, “free-speech” controversies, and allegations of faculty misconduct at schools as diverse as Missouri, Yale, Middlebury, Berkeley, and Evergreen State College. You’ve all heard about safe spaces, microaggressions, intersectionality, snowflakes, claims that certain forms of speech constitute violence, and so on. Professors have been assaulted by protesters and even fired or pressured to quit for expressing politically controversial ideas (though some are protected). Certain private groups have been banned, even from meeting off campus. Students, faculty, and staff are subjected to endless hours of sensitivity training, despite evidence that such programs increase, rather than alleviate, tensions among groups. Some schools are already experiencing blowback, while others are taking advantage of these controversies to differentiate themselves from rivals. Pundits are predicting campus craziness as the next hot-button issue in US presidential politics. What is to be done?
While I greatly admire the efforts of groups like FIRE to protect the rights of faculty and students accused of politically incorrect speech or action, I disagree with them on one fundamental point. The First Amendment protects freedom of expression for students and professors at state-owned and publicly funded colleges and universities, and it’s perfectly appropriate for the courts or regulatory agencies to discipline schools that punish speech.
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