Campus mobs muzzle free speech: Our view – USA TODAY

A protest at Berkeley on February 1, 2017.(Photo: Elijah Nouvelage, Getty Images)

Respect for free speech is withering on campus.

At Claremont McKenna College in California, protesters blocked the doors to a lecture hall preventingconservative authorHeather Mac Donaldfrom speaking. At Middlebury College in Vermont, a professor accompanying libertarian author Charles Murraywas injured by an angry mob. At the University of California-Berkeleyand its surrounding community, protests against scheduled speakers have turned ugly.

In just the place where the clash of ideas is most valuable, students are shutting themselves off to points of view they dont agree with. At the moment when young minds are supposed toassess the strengths and weaknesses of arguments, they are answering challenges to their beliefs with anger and violence instead of facts and reason.

As much as university administratorslament student-led intolerance and narrow ideas about free speech, they played a rolein their creation.For decades, colleges and universities, public and private, have been fighting in court to maintainridiculous restrictions on expression. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education catalogs them exhaustively. Last month, Fairmont State University in WestVirginia finally accepted that students have a right to gather signatures on a petition without a school permit. In March at Regis University in Colorado, the school shut down a student sale that charged different prices for baked goods based on the buyers' race,gender, religion or sexualityto protest affirmative action. That's the same monththe University of South Alabama tried to force a student to take down a Trump/Pence sign from his dorm room.

And just like university bureaucratswho try to shut down speech they don't like, student governments get in the act, too. Last month, Wichita State student governmentbacked down from its decisionto deny recognition to a student group, not because the group engaged in "hate speech,"but because the student group argued that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment.

Free speech issue is a diversion: Opposing view

More often than not, cases where universities or student governments restrict student speech like thoseinKansas, Alabama, Colorado and West Virginia are overshadowed by the celebrity speech fights that get national headlines.Ann Coulter,the author and pundit, has been relishing the attention she has gotten from her on-again, off-againappearance at Berkeley. Not only did the pointless battle help her sell books and get booked onto television shows, it also made her seem more like a First Amendment heroine and less like a partisan bloviater.

Campus administrators and student groups, who defendthe growing intolerance for unpopularideas on campus, see themselves as protecting whatNew York University Vice ProvostUlrich Baer calls"the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse" in a unique moment when Donald Trump, nationalism and the "alt-right" are on the rise. But those who'drestrict freedom of speech and association always have an important excuse for their actions. The grave threat of global communism abroad was no excuse for McCarthyism in Hollywood. European carnage in World War I was no excuse to shutter the German-language press at home.

Campus protesters are right that President Trump'sAmerica-first nationalism is a grave threat to many Americans.But unfettered First Amendment rights are the answer to the threat, not its cause.

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