States set rules to boost free speech
When the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents wanted to address the issue of free speech on campus last fall, it adopted a threestrikes policy that is the strictest of its kind: Any student found to have disrupted the free expression of others is expelled after a third infraction.
The goal was to foster an atmosphere of “civility, respect and safety,” and avoid the kind of violent, unruly disruptions that prevented conservatives from speaking at schools like the University of California, Berkeley, and Middlebury College. Those protests had focused national attention on the question of whether college campuses were shutting out politically unpopular points of view.
Wisconsin is not alone. Republican-led state legislatures in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina have imposed similar policies on public colleges and universities, and bills to establish campus speech guidelines are under consideration in at least seven other legislatures. These efforts, funded in part by big-money Republican donors, are part of a growing and well-organized campaign that has put academia squarely in the crosshairs of the American right.
The spate of new policies shows how conservatives are successfully advancing one of their longstanding goals: to turn the tables in the debate over the First Amendment by casting the left as an enemy of open and free political expression on campuses. It was at schools like Berkeley, after all, that the free speech movement blossomed in the 1960s.
The new efforts raise a question that has only grown more intractable since President Donald Trump took office: When one person’s beliefs sound like hate speech to another, how do you ensure a more civil political debate?
What conservatives see as a necessary corrective to decades of political imbalance in higher education, liberals and some college administrators see as an overly paternalistic approach to a problem that is being used as ammunition in the culture wars.
The campaign to address speech issues at colleges and universities is unfolding not just in state legislatures but in the courts and in Congress, where Republicans have convened hearings to explore how colleges and universities are addressing free speech concerns.
The Trump administration has also picked up the baton. In March when the White House convened a discussion called “Crisis on College Campus,” it identified two coequal culprits: opioid abuse and suppression of free speech.