Once upon a time, American colleges and universities prided themselves on being a zone of free expression, open to ideas, in a society that often censored speech and pressured citizens into conformism. How things have changed! Now college and university campuses are among the least free parts of our society, with speech codes and censorship enforced by armies of administrators.

Fortunately there is an organization fighting this state of affairs: FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE has represented students against administrators bent on censorship and has catalogued the restrictions on speech currently in force in 58 percent of American colleges and universities. Many of the students it has represented are conservatives, like the Modesto Junior College student barred from handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day, but others are leftists: FIRE backs free speech from any quarter — just like colleges and universities used to pride themselves on doing.