Ten years ago in 2003 in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Greg Lukianoff & Harvey Silverglate examined the state of free speech on campus in an article entitled, “Speech Codes: Alive and Well at Colleges.” Last week, Greg published an update to that article in the Huffington Post.
The article debunked the myth that university restrictions on freedom of speech (“speech codes”) had gone the way of the dodo after being roundly mocked in the court of public opinion and consistently defeated in federal courts in the 1980s and 90s. The article revealed that the overwhelming majority of campuses still maintained the very kind of speech codes that lost in court. A decade later, I ask: What has changed since our 2003 article, and what does that change–or lack thereof–mean for our nation’s campuses?
In the article, “Speech Codes: Alive and Well, 10 Years Later,” Greg details what hasn’t changed, what has gotten better, and what has gotten worse in the last ten years. Unfortunately, the answers to those questions (and the implications for students and free speech) are not very encouraging.
You can read to whole article here.