https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/us/politics/campus-speech-protests.html
Finally, we can have free speech on college campuses by expelling student protestors and by compelling campuses to be open forums for Nazis and whomever else some campus organization troll wants to invite.
Incredible, no one could have foreseen this "free speech defense" rhetoric being cynically manipulated.
“You did it for underrepresented students, do it for underrepresented points of view,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. In his comments, which he made at a New York Times conference on higher education last month, Mr. Alexander said that if colleges did not prioritize political diversity, they risked graduating a generation of overly squeamish adults.
“We don’t want a whole generation of students who have to go to a safe room when they read an offensive tweet,” he said. “They need to learn how to deal with that in our society.”
Were UW-M to expel a student pursuant to a three-strikes policy, I think they'd have a pretty textbook 1st Amendment claim. Sounds like that hasn't happened, though.
And it has long been the law that speech in a public forum cannot be prevented based solely on the political affiliation of the speaker. So, yes, a Nazi is included in that definition. So-called "hate speech" is also protected speech, subject to a few exceptions that rarely apply. None of this is new or novel...
There are campus speech policies across the country--and across the political spectrum--that would likely be invalidated if suit were brought by a proper plaintiff. The problem is you need in injury in order to establish standing. So if these institutions never take punitive action pursuant to such policies, such policies are not subject to judicial review.
On balance, I think the political left is still more hypocritical when it comes to First Amendment issues at public universities. But time will tell.
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