Scholars, lawyers, and writers who cherish free speech are fighting back in earnest against the dangerous smothering of unfettered expression on college campuses nationwide. Good for them. This fight that must be waged, and won.
More than 300 thought leaders this week released a statement called “Free to Speak: Reforming the Higher Education Act.” It is a stirring call for legislative action aimed at “holding colleges accountable when they do not respect intellectual freedom.” Noting that the federal Higher Education Act is due for reauthorization this year, the statement demands that Congress provide enforcement mechanisms for the law’s existing but unenforced clauses meant to protect students’ rights to speech, assembly, and religion.
“Public institutions with restrictive speech zones and speech codes, discriminatory treatment of religious student groups, and other policies and practices that violate the First Amendment must be stripped of eligibility for federal student loans and grants,” says the manifesto. “And private colleges should make all speech and association policies transparent and open to the public, as a condition of eligibility for Title IV loans and grants. Students should be fully informed about private institutions’ speech climates before they choose to enroll.”
This is important. The signers note: “In the last two years, there have been nearly 50 attempts to disinvite speakers from college campuses. More than 120 colleges and universities have speech codes that clearly and substantially restrict freedom of speech — frequently in violation of the First Amendment. Many colleges discriminate against religious and other student groups, preventing them from organizing on campus, withholding funds from mandatory student activity fees, and denying the use of campus facilities.”
In an essay in City Journal this week, scholar Heather MacDonald provided numerous examples of these assaults against free speech. Fires and riots at Berkeley, a professor assaulted (and concussed) at Middlebury, classes stormed and canceled at Evergreen State University in Washington state, among many others, went not only unpunished but actually praised by cowering administrators or radical faculty. In some places, the threat to free speech isn’t merely, well, “academic,” but physically perilous.
The 300-plus signers of the “Free to Speak” statement aren’t the only ones mobilizing for counteraction. The Claremont Institute this week launched a multi-pronged campaign, intended to last through the 2020 elections, against the “identity politics” that so often drives campus and cultural unrest.
In the launch essay entitled “Defend America — Defeat Multiculturalism,” writer Ryan Williams makes clear he is actually celebrating the presence in the United States of “many cultures, races, or ethnic traditions.” Instead, he says the fight is against the ideological use and abuse of those many cultures to Balkanize the country into multitudinous, grievance-obsessed enclaves, rather than to “assimilate to a certain view of justice embodied in the Declaration of Independence and safeguarded by our state and national political institutions, first and foremost the U.S. Constitution.
Much of the assault against freedom at colleges is specifically aimed against the ideal of assimilation, and instead in favor of grievance-mongering and claims of victimhood. But that way lies fear and societal weakness.
“Intellectual freedom is the anvil on which great debates are hammered out,” write the “Free to Speak” signatories. “It is the forge of civilization. It is the fire in which we burn away the fallacies in the raw ore of ideas. Higher education is the special place in society set aside for the freedom to seek the truth.”
Well, higher education no longer is that special place in actual practice. The new efforts to restore that original mission of free inquiry are noble attempts to save enlightened civilization itself. They merit universal support.
[Read more: Trump signs college transparency and free speech order]
