IN A JULY LETTER to colleges and universities across the country, Gerald Reynolds, head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, addressed “a subject,” as he put it, “of central importance to our government, our heritage of freedom and our way of life: the First Amendment.” Reynolds’ office doesn’t have the authority to bring lawsuits to enforce the First Amendment. What, you might wonder, possessed him to write a letter about it? The answer begins with the fact that hundreds of colleges and universities have policies restricting speech that the First Amendment protects. Called “speech codes” when initiated in the 1980s–ironically by a generation of professors who in their youth supported the free speech movement of the 1960s–the policies have taken on new guises. Often, they are expressed in vague rules against harassment and target speech deemed to offend a person or group.