The growing cost of un-free speech in America

For a vivid picture of what’s happening to free speech on America’s college campuses, look no further than the University of Buffalo, where the ideal of higher education as a “marketplace of ideas” is near to extinction.

At UB, all students have to do to see their club formally recognized is a) march to the administrators’ political agenda and b) sign away all their legal rights. Of course, that automatically disqualifies any club whose members think for themselves.

UB is taking particular exception to a chapter of Young Americans for Freedom — a national organization that encourages students to study and discuss history, the U.S. Constitution, individual freedom, national defense, free enterprise, and other things generally dismissed as “conservative” by our nation’s “progressive” university professors.

YAF has existed as a registered student organization on the UB campus since 2017, with more than 20 members meeting weekly on campus. That seems to be about 20 more than UB administrators, faculty, and their acolytes want to see, since they first derecognized the group and later denied it the benefits extended to other student organizations — including access to the club’s more-than-$6,000 in student-fee funds.

Two years ago, right after YAF hosted conservative commentator Michael Knowles’ lecture on gender ideology, officials derecognized the group because it associated with a national conservative organization. Under legal pressure from my organization, Alliance Defending Freedom, officials rescinded the policy that allowed for that discrimination — only to replace it with another one, equally unconstitutional. It’s this new policy that demands club leaders surrender their own (and their organization’s) right to sue the university — or even to exist and operate as a legal entity under state law.

In effect, UB is demanding that all organizations on campus exist as an arm of the university or the student government — or both. No group can hold an event or host a speaker that doesn’t get an official administrative stamp of approval. No alternate viewpoints, no challenging new ideas, no personal beliefs. There is no more effective way to extinguish free speech without resorting to violence, which is why ADF is currently challenging UB’s policy at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

UB, of course, is only one of the hundreds of colleges and universities that have embraced a threefold mindset that somehow regards free speech as the single greatest threat to democracy today. This mindset insists that only one political, cultural, and social viewpoint is acceptable. All others pose a dangerous threat to society, because speech that contradicts that official viewpoint is essentially violence, and so university officials can and should allow leftist students, faculty, and administrators to quash that metaphoric “violence” with the real thing, disrupting conservative speakers and events, and physically attacking those who initiate, participate in, or attend those forums.