If students continue to be deprived of the growth opportunities provided by encountering and debating ideas with which they disagree, they will come to lack the qualities essential to informed, effective citizenship.

Key Points: 

  • There has recently been a plethora of news accounts exposing serious restrictions on free speech and debate on our country's campuses. 
  • University speech codes, restrictive “free-speech zones,” and commencement speaker “ dis- invitations” threaten to undermine our colleges’ and universities’ defining mission.
  • The Supreme Court has ruled that "state colleges and universities are not enclaves immune from the sweep of the First Amendment.”
  • A 2015 Pew Research Center study finds that 40 percent of millennials today approve of censorship, nearly double that of their parents’ generation.
  • The University of Chicago’s official defense of free speech on campus has been adopted by the administrations or faculty bodies of 34 universities to date.

2018 04 Testimony RestrictionsonFreedomofSpeechStudentsRights CHE Lindsay by texaspolicy on Scribd