Why Have Universities Stopped Protecting Free Speech?

I was a graduate student in Chicago in 1967 and spent a lot more time agitating about the Viet Nam War than I spent in seminars. If you were on a college campus that year or the next several years and weren’t demonstrating against the war, you were either unconscious or afraid that an arrest would make it more difficult to pursue a professional career.

And anyone who says they were a college student in those years and supported the war is either delusional, or lying, or both.

Anyway, at some point a bunch of us decided that we wanted to hold a big teach-in about the war and the University administration were terrified that such an event would result in God knows what kind of bad publicity for the school, or maybe a building would be burned down, or something else would happen that would give the school a big, black eye.

So, of course we formed a committee with some faculty to discuss the issue, and it was decided that in the interest of ‘academic freedom,’ we could hold our teach-in if someone appeared who represented the ‘other side.’ We immediately agreed.

A few days later we were told that someone from Congress would appear to speak on behalf of the government, but the name of the speaker was being withheld for reasons of ‘personal security.’