The Patriot Update: Whatever Happened to Free Speech on College Campuses?

[Patricia M. McBride]

This is going to be of grave concern for some times to come and we need to certainly be aware of what is going on at colleges around the country. Free speech is the cornerstone of our country and a first amendment right, but many college campuses and the mass of liberal professors and administrators are trying to squash the words of anyone who may not agree with them and put forth their ideology in the classroom. There are a couple of organizations that fight such tyranny on college campuses and one such organization is FIRE (http://thefire.org/). You may wish to take a look at their web site to get an idea the magnitude of this problem at our colleges (it is huge and this is but one example of free speech rights gone amuck).

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In our book, Liberal Tyranny in Higher Education, my colleague, Archie Jones, and I deal with the dismantling of the First Amendment on college campuses.  More particularly we describe how freedom of speech has become a one-way street controlled by liberals who do their best to suppress conservative and Christian opinions, thoughts, and ideas.  Left-leaning professors and administrators are using so-called “free-speech” zones and “speech codes” as their preferred methods for suppressing free speech.

A free speech zone is a designated area in which students who wish to speak out on an issue are allowed to have their say.  But there are some obvious problems with this concept.  Here are just a couple of them.  First, the entire college campus should be a free speech zone.  When the liberal professors who came up with this concept were campus radicals in the 1960s they certainly did not allow themselves to be hemmed into free speech zones.  In fact, they took over and occupied entire buildings.  The concept of academic freedom that is the cornerstone of the academy was established to promote, encourage, and protect freedom of speech, not to suppress it.

A second problem with free speech zones is that many colleges require students who wish to make use of the designated areas to apply in advance and describe what they plan to say.  I know what you are thinking.  What about the Constitutional prohibition against prior restraint?  Good question because if they do not like what the students plan to say, some colleges have begun to deny them access or, at the very least, limit their access. There are even cases in which the designated free speech zone was moved to an isolated location when conservative or Christians applied to use it.

Read more here:  http://patriotupdate.com/articles/whatever-happened-to-free-speech-...