On June 27, University of California at Los Angeles Professor Keith Fink was told that his 10-year teaching career in the Department of Communication Studies was over. No substantive reason was given; Interim Dean of Social Sciences Laura Gómez simply stated “your teaching does not meet the standard of excellence.” The decision attracted national attention in large part because Fink teaches courses on the First Amendment, including a course on Free Speech on Campus — a hot-button topic that has become politically-charged in recent years (inversely and ironically so, because the Free Speech Movement was born within the liberal mecca of UC Berkeley in the 1960s).

Today, for reasons worthy of a Ph.D. thesis, Free Speech purism has shifted from a “liberal” cause to a “conservative” cause. The First Amendment (especially with respect to its first clause: speech) should be apolitical. Accordingly, I (and Fink, too) view it simply as a non-partisan constitutional law issue — one where the past 10 years of campus speech codes, mandatory “diversity training,” “hate speech,” so-called “safe spaces,” and “trigger warnings” all fly in the face of dozens of Supreme Court opinions, none of which lend any credence to the legality of the aforementioned “ideals.”