Something is wrong with American higher education. Colleges and universities offer encomiums to free speech and inquiry, which the First Amendment protects, at least in theory, at public institutions. But the unmistakable trend in higher education is to police speech and thought.

Colleges and universities promulgate speech codes. Administrators, professors and students encourage “trigger warnings” and demand punishment for “microaggressions”—a pretentious word for inadvertent slights—and insist on “safe spaces” from which troubling opinions and ideas are banished. Campus authorities disinvite controversial speakers and look the other way when students shout down dissenters who somehow slipped through. The transparent goal is to prevent any deviation from the reigning orthodoxy.

A subscription is required to read the full article "How State Lawmakers Can Restore Freedom On Campus."

overlay image