OPINION:
In his 1987 best-seller “The Closing of the American Mind,” the late Allan Bloom lamented “how higher education had failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students.” It’s worse now, thanks in no small part to militant left-wing students who, not content to close their own minds, insist on the right to close the minds of others.
For years, conservatives have complained about how right-leaning speakers have been excluded, disinvited, shouted down or otherwise silenced by leftist students, often aided and abetted by like-minded faculty and administrators.
There are at last indications that the anti-free speech left is getting overdue pushback, after shutting down speeches on campuses across the country by Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray and Heather MacDonald and drawing censure across the country.
Legislatures in two states are trying to do something about it, laying down the law to state-funded schools that they can’t let the bigoted, the abusive and the intolerant get away with silencing speech they don’t agree with. The Republican-majority North Carolina General Assembly enacted the Restore and Preserve Campus Free Speech Act, and over Democratic opposition. The legislation authorizes disciplinary sanctions against anyone who “substantially interferes with the protected free-expression rights of others, including protests and demonstrations that infringe upon the rights of others to engage in and listen to expressive activity.”
Copying the language of campus liberals who demand mandatory sensitivity training for anyone who transgresses political correctness, the legislation further mandates that incoming freshmen attend orientation classes about free-speech rights.
Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, still hasn’t said whether he will sign it, and must decide by July 30. The law was enacted by veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature, but the American Association of University Professors and the National Coalition Against Censorship urge Gov. Cooper to veto it nevertheless.
The irony is lost to the members of the coalition. In their two-page letter to the governor, the letter-writers make no mention of the canceled speeches that prompted the legislation. They call the legislation “a solution in search of a problem.”
In Wisconsin, Democrats stood logic on its head in arguing against the proposed Campus Free Speech Act. They contend that not only would it not protect free speech, but would chill free speech by exposing students who shut down speech to punishment, including expulsion from the university.
The bill passed the lower house of the Wisconsin legislature 61 votes to 36 on a straight party-line vote in late June.
Claremont McKenna College isn’t waiting for the California legislature to act. Last week, it disciplined seven students who took part in disrupting an April speech by Heather MacDonald, a critic of Black Lives Matter. Three were suspended for a year, two others for a semester, and two more were placed on conduct probation.
Speech of others isn’t “hate speech” just because liberal and leftist students say so. Nor should campuses be expected to be “safe spaces.” Colleges and universities must be the marketplace for a robust exchange of ideas, and more states should follow the lead of North Carolina and Wisconsin to make sure that happens.
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