Common Sense about the Chilling Campus Speech
Much blame, much truth, and much exaggeration can be attributed to almost all sides of this difficult controversy. As is so often the case, simplistic answers are misplaced.
Greg Lukianoff, a leader of the fight to raise awareness of challenges to free speech on college campuses and to challenge restrictions on campus speech, offers valuable perspective on the deep roots of what often appears as an unprecedented attack on campus speech. He is right that despite the fact that every college speech code challenged in court has fallen, court rulings about particular hate speech codes are not self-executing: each school’s code, and each revised code following a court ruling, may need to be challenged in court. For this reason, hate speech codes imposed by university administrations appear to be far more prevalent that they were decades ago.