Posted by Orin Kerr:
What's Up at the Universities?
Don Herzog has a very good post about academic freedom and viewpoint
diversity in the classroom over at [1]Left2Right. A taste:
Are students entitled to classrooms or campuses where they won't be
offended? No way. That's a recipe for turning vibrant free speech
into mindless pablum, given how many people have exquisite
sensibilities on tons of issues. Not that you need exquisite
sensibilities to take exception to some things that get said. There
have been some grievous episodes of hate speech on campuses. But
every speech code I've ever seen, including the one from Michigan
struck down in '89, is impossibly hamhanded. Probably the best bet
is to give up on such formal codes and sanctions, not on the
Looney-Tunes view that free speech means anyone can say anything
however and whenever he likes, but because we can't trust the
authorities to make sensible decisions. There are horror stories
too about what jittery and spineless university administrators will
do to protect students' sensibilities: it was ludicrous to shut
this down.
References
1. http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/01/whats_up_at_the.html#more
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[email protected]
http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
