What Does It Take to Really Protect Campus Free Speech? Policy adoptions are useless without enforcement mechanisms.

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | March 29, 2023 | John Hasnas

[karpov]

I read with interest and trepidation the Martin Center’s March 16 article “Davidson College Affirms Free Speech,” which noted that Davidson had adopted a version of the Chicago Principles as its new speech policy.

My interest came from the recognition that the college had made an abstract commitment to preserving freedom of speech on campus. My trepidation came from the tone of celebration the article embodied—the implication that adopting the new policy would actually protect unpopular speech.

There is an old saying that it is good to learn from experience but better to learn from someone else’s experience. In the hope that people at Davidson will adhere to that aphorism, I offer my experience at Georgetown University.

In 2015, the Steering Committee of Georgetown’s Faculty Senate commissioned a committee to revise the university’s speech and expression policy. That committee worked for two years to produce a policy that was acceptable to all parties.

Like Davidson’s, the revised policy was a version of the University of Chicago’s Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression (Chicago Principles), adapted to Georgetown University’s history and tradition. In the spring of 2017, at a meeting attended by representatives of the Office of Student Affairs, the university counsel, the Faculty Senate, and the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity & Affirmative Action, the revised policy was approved and sent on to Georgetown’s Board of Trustees, which ratified it.

Georgetown appeared to have made a serious commitment to freedom of speech on campus, and yet …

In 2022, the Foundation for Individual Right and Expression (FIRE) ranked 203 universities on the basis of how hospitable they were to free speech on campus. Georgetown was ranked #200. In 2023, Georgetown received FIRE’s lifetime censorship award. How could this be?

[GOPJ]

Either Universities protect freedom of speech or they’ll become remedial institutions filled with angry women, minorities and sexual weirdos... Majors requiring intellect will be reduced to ‘grievance studies’ with attitude...

[wrcase]

Cutting off all Federal funding. No Federal student loans, no research grants, denying unruly students Federal positions upon graduation, etc.

[wrcase]

Also eliminating the Federal tax deduction for donations to schools.