FIRE’s Model Code of Student Conduct

BY JOHN K. WILSON The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has released a Model Code of Student Conduct for colleges to adopt, and it’s a tremendous advance for student liberties on campus. All colleges should adopt this Model Code (with slight improvements, I believe). Too many colleges have vague and repressive provisions in…

Does the University of Chicago Really Protect Free Expression?

BY JOHN K. WILSON It’s praiseworthy that the University of Chicago has announced to its students a “commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression.” But there is a problem: in this announcement, the University actually calls for limiting freedom of expression, and University of Chicago policies also severely limit free inquiry and student rights. According…

Review of Unlearning Liberty

By Steve Macek, Speech Communication, North Central College Review of Greg Lukianoff, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate (Encounter Books, 2012) A student expelled for a Facebook post criticizing the construction of a new parking ramp at his college, a faculty member reported to a “threat assessment team” for posting a…

Free Speech on Campus

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) just released their “annual list of America’s Best Colleges for Free Speech.” FIRE does great work in promoting free speech on college campuses, but I’ve often been critical of their ratings system for missing some campus policies that restrict free speech. In my book, Patriotic Correctness: Academic…

The Liberty Way of Censorship

It used to be that a Republican presidential candidate speaking at Liberty University was controversial because of the institution’s repressive, far-right-wing politics. Now, the controversy goes the other way. Mitt Romney is being attacked by students at Liberty University because he has been invited to be this year’s commencement speaker. That’s controversial because Romney is…

FIRE’s Misleading Attack on CSU-Chico

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), “While all of 2011’s Speech Codes of the Month flagrantly violated students’ and faculty members’ right to free expression, two of them were so egregious that they deserve special mention as 2011’s Speech Codes of the Year.” But FIRE got a lot of things wrong…