INTRODUCTION

A Florida University’s Policy Against The Passion.

In the fall of 2004 the Christian Student Fellowship at a Florida public college had pushed the administration too far: the CSF wanted to show Mel Gibson’sThe Passion of the Christ at their next meeting. The movie, which portrays the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, was hardly an unknown quantity—it remains the highest grossing foreign language film in US box office history and the highest grossing religious film of all time worldwide. But it was not so popular with the administration of Indian River Community College (IRCC), which claimed that the students could not show it because it was “controversial” and “R-rated.”

When the administration threatened further draconian measures against the Christian group, they contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help. We at FIRE receive hundreds of requests for help each year, and, sadly, few abuses of college students’ rights surprise us anymore, but this ban seemed so petty and mean-spirited that we were confident it would be quickly resolved. Instead, the college stubbornly stood by its alleged blanket code against R-rated movies. This argument was outrageous on its own; college students range from teenagers to retirees, and the lofty mission of higher education-the search for truth—would be, to say the least, hampered by a content ceiling of PG-13. But what made this case so classic, was the administration’s stunning double standard. Not only did our research show that the college had sponsored the showing of R-rated movies in the previous year, at virtually the same time the school was banning The Passion it was hosting a production that included a skit called “Fucking for Jesus”—a piece about masturbating to an oil painting of the Christian messiah.

While FIRE was exceedingly clear that the both the skit and The Passion were fully protected expression and could not be banned on a public college campus, the school’s double standard was jaw-dropping. After months of public pressure from FIRE the college relented, ceased its punitive actions against the CSF and allowed them to show The Passion. This case is far too typical in FIRE’s experience and reveals how speech policies are used to silence certain disfavored views on campus, while seriously misinforming students about their basic speech rights. It also highlights the fact that, despite some reports that speech codes died off in the 1990s, these codes remain the rule rather than exception on America’s campuses.

FIRE and Campus Speech Codes.

One can be forgiven for thinking that campus speech codes are a thing of the past. After all, there were no fewer than five legal decisions from 1989 to 1995 overturning such codes as unlawful or unconstitutional. Sadly, however, speech codes did not disappear in the 1990s; in fact, they increased in number even as it became painfully clear that they were both unlawful and unwise.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) was founded to address the abuses of fundamental liberties on campus, including the shocking tenacity and pervasiveness of campus speech codes. FIRE was founded by Alan Charles Kors, a conservative-leaning libertarian, and Harvey Silverglate, a liberal-leaning libertarian. The organization has proudly maintained its non-partisan nature, defending the free speech rights of everyone from conservative student newspapers to liberal ones, from evangelical Christians to those who mock Christianity, from devout Muslim students to those who are highly critical of Islam, and from Ward Churchill to those who protest Ward Churchill.

While FIRE has never made a secret of that fact that some views—social conservatism, religious orthodoxy, and politically incorrect satire—are more likely to be punished on the modern campus rather than others, speech codes pose a special threat to the campus “marketplace of ideas” itself.

FIRE is sometimes wrongly characterized as a “free speech absolutist” organization, implying that we see no such thing as a “reasonable” restriction on free speech. While we take this label with a certain amount of pride, it is not quite correct. FIRE tends to agree with the limitations that the Supreme Court has recognized concerning First Amendment rights. This is sometimes called the “categorical” approach, which means that, generally speaking, outside of a limited number of categories, speech is presumed to be free. These categorical exceptions include libel, placing someone in fear of bodily harm or death (true threats), hardcore pornography (obscenity), inciting people to imminent lawless action, child pornography. The speech codes that have arisen over the last three decades, however, bear little or no resemblance to these narrow limitations and, by their terms, can sweep in even the most run of the mill expression. Such broad policies, of course, cannot be enforced across the board, lest virtually any speaker be reduced to silence—instead they are often used to discourage people with the “wrong” views. Fighting campus speech codes is, therefore, not to agitate for anarchy; rather, it is to fight against a uniquely un-American form of totalitarianism, in precisely the setting where we need discussion to flow the most freely.

FIRE defines a speech code as any campus regulation that punishes, forbids, heavily regulates, or restricts a substantial amount of protected speech, or what would be protected speech in society at large. This basic definition is necessary because colleges rarely label such restrictions as “speech codes” in their handbooks. Instead, they are referred to by many other names:

“Speech zone” policies like the one at Texas Tech University which limited the free speech activities of 28,000 students to only one twenty foot wide gazebo; “student rights and obligations” policies like Texas A&M University’s code, which prohibits students from violating others’ “rights” to “respect for personal feelings” and “freedom from indignity of any type”; computer use policies like the one at Northeastern University in Boston, which prohibits students from using campus e-mail accounts or servers to send any message that “in the sole judgment of the University” is “annoying” or “offensive”; “diversity” policies like the one at Ohio State University, which warns, “Words, actions, and behaviors that inflict or threaten infliction of bodily or emotional harm, whether done intentionally or with reckless disregard, are not permitted” (emphasis added).

But the most common type of speech code comes in the form of absurdly overbroad “harassment policies.” For example, Western Michigan University’s harassment policy actually bans “sexism,” which it defines as “the perception and treatment of any person, not as an individual, but as a member of a category based on sex.” The University of Iowa, meanwhile, defines sexual harassment as something that “occurs when somebody says or does something sexually related that you don’t want them to say or do, regardless of who it is.” Davidson College’s Sexual Harassment Policy prohibits the use of “patronizing remarks,” and, heartbreakingly, goes on to explicitly prohibit “comments or inquiries about dating.”_²

In 2007 FIRE published its second official report on the state of speech codes on the nation’s college campuses. As will be detailed later in this article, we found that 75 percent of schools surveyed had some form of highly restrictive speech code and that only a handful had policies which were free of any potentially threatening speech restrictions.

Our colleges and universities are institutions that rely on an open exchange of ideas in order to function correctly. When that candor is limited by such absurdly broad policies, the marketplace of ideas becomes distorted. Courts understand this, the Supreme Court has understood this for over a half a century, and even campus administrators, university presidents, and professors often claim to understand this. The question then becomes, if campus speech codes are so clearly harmful and universally reviled, why are they still so pervasive? Where did they come from in the first place?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPEECH CODES

The Rise of Speech Codes.

The rise of modern speech codes took place in the 1980s and coincided with a decidedly positive development nationwide: increased representation in higher education for women, minorities, and openly gay individuals. This development brought new tensions along with it, and an increase in racially charged incidents and confrontations—ranging from the criminal to the relatively minor—was reported at campuses across the country._³ Some commentators have characterized the rise of campus speech codes as the direct, natural, and understandable—if misguided—response of colleges to such incidents._⁴ Meanwhile, other commentators have asserted that the rise of speech codes in the 1980s was more closely related to the growing dominance of the left in higher education, and to their belief that it was their function to reengineer society, starting with students’ interior beliefs and moving outward._⁵Another possibility posited by some is that speech codes were largely a tool for quelling campus unrest and guaranteeing to college presidents and administrators “peace on their watch.”_⁶

Given the remarkable overbreadth of the earliest codes, it is difficult to imagine that the intent of speech codes was limited to punishing only the most threatening racist speech, such as the hurling of racial epithets. For example, the speech code at the University of Michigan—one of the earliest codes—defined harassment as including:

• “You comment in a derogatory way about a particular person or group’s physical appearance or sexual orientation, or their cultural origins, or religious beliefs.”
• “You exclude someone from a study group because that person is of a different race, sex, or ethnic origin than you are.”
• “You display a confederate flag on the door of your room in your residence hall.”_⁷

Meanwhile, the University of Connecticut banned the “use of derogatory names, inappropriately directed laughter, inconsiderate jokes, anonymous notes or phone calls, and conspicuous exclusions from conversations and /or classroom discussions…”_⁸ These represent just two of the dozens of speech codes that cropped up around this time period, many of which reflected intentions clearly beyond addressing mere ‘civility,’ and delved into more sweeping, mandated social engineering._⁹

The country was paying attention to the rise of speech codes and in May of 1991, President George H. W. Bush warned of “free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses…And in their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behavior crush diversity in the name of diversity.”_¹⁰ Shortly before President Bush’s speech, Henry Hyde introduced a congressional bill called the “Collegiate Speech Protection Act of 1991″ as an amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act._¹¹The act did not pass, however, perhaps because it was not seen as necessary; after all, by that time speech codes were already being struck down by the courts.

In 1989, in Doe v. Michigan, a federal district court overturned Michigan’s speech code; then in 1991, a federal court overturned Connecticut’s afore mentioned policy in an unreported opinion.¹² In another 1991 case, a court overturned the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s speech code, which forbade students from making comments that would “demean” others on the basis of a number of different categories, including race, gender, and religion.¹³ Then in 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that, while not directly concerning speech codes, demonstrated that such codes could not survive constitutional scrutiny.¹⁴

1993 should have put the final nail in the campus speech code coffin. For the first time, a campus speech code was overturned in a published federal appellate court decision.¹⁵ That same year, the University of Pennsylvania became the target of national and even international ridicule for attempting to discipline a student for calling other students “water buffaloes.”¹⁶

In 1995, the fight against speech codes escalated to a new level when a California court struck down Stanford University’s speech code.¹⁷ This case is exceptional because Stanford is a private university and thus not directly bound by the First Amendment. The court was acting under the power of the state’s new “Leonard Law,” which extended the free speech protections of the First Amendment to private college campuses in California.

Add to this unanimous tide of victories¹⁸ clear Supreme Court precedent like Texas v. Johnson,¹⁹ and the already well developed case law regarding the rights of college students,²⁰ and it is perhaps no surprise that some commentators like Robert O’Neil reported:

[The R.A.V. decision] seemed to sound the death knell for most campus speech codes…[college administrators] read a clear message, that few codes drawn along such lines could survive the Supreme Court’s broader First Amendment ruling. Many colleges and universities either repealed speech codes or allowed them to languish…most of the codes were either given a decent burial by formal action or were allowed to expire quietly and unnoticed.²¹

The Rumors of Campus Speech Codes’ Death Are Greatly Exaggerated.

But speech codes didn’t die; rather they thrived.²¹ FIRE was founded in 1999 and soon began the preliminary stages of developing what would become FIRE’s Spotlight speech code database. In 2003, FIRE initiated our Speech Codes Litigation Project. While FIRE is not a litigation group, we began the process of partnering with lawyers, as well as identifying suspect codes and potential plaintiffs.

The first lawsuit, filed in April 2003, targeted Shippensburg University’s code, which was then overturned by a federal court in Bair v. Shippensburg.²³ The second lawsuit was filed by ACLU attorney Carol Sobel against California’s Citrus College’s speech code and speech zone policies; the case settled in just over two weeks. The next lawsuit was filed against Texas Tech University in cooperation with the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian litigation group. Under pressure from FIRE, Texas Tech had already greatly expanded its “speech zone” from the 280 square feet of the “free speech gazebo” to nine acres. The university, however, still maintained unacceptable restrictions and in Roberts v. Haragan, a federal court held that it could not maintain a speech code that banned, among other things, “insults,” “ridicule,” and “personal attacks.”²⁴

At virtually the same time as the Shippensburg decision, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education issued a letter of clarification to all of the colleges and universities under its jurisdiction (virtually every university in the country). The letter addressed the tendency on the part of universities to blame OCR regulations for the fact that so many of them maintained absurdly overbroad harassment codes. Gerald A. Reynolds, Assistant Secretary for OCR, wrote:

I want to assure you in the clearest possible terms that OCR’s regulations are not intended to restrict the exercise of any expressive activities protected under the U.S. Constitution… Thus, for example, in addressing harassment allegations, OCR has recognized that the offensiveness of a particular expression, standing alone, is not a legally sufficient basis to establish a hostile environment under the statutes enforced by OCR.²⁵

With regard to private colleges, Reynolds wrote:

Because the First Amendment normally does not bind private institutions, some have erroneously assumed that OCR’s regulations apply to private federal-funds recipients without the constitutional limitations imposed on public institutions. OCR’s regulations should not be interpreted in ways that would lead to the suppression of protected speech on public or private campuses. Any private post-secondary institution that chooses to limit free speech in ways that are more restrictive than at public educational institutions does so on its own accord and not based on requirements imposed by OCR.²⁶

OCR thus made it clear that no federal regulation could require banning constitutionally protected speech. Momentum seemed to be gaining. In February 2004, the Association for Student Judicial Affairs, an umbrella group of college administrators, issued a statement²⁷ that “urge[d] public institutions of higher education in the U.S. to ensure that their policies, rules, and procedures protect students’ freedom of speech and expression as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution,” and promised the aid of ASJA members in helping to bring campus codes into compliance.

With all of these developments, could the death of speech codes be on the horizon at long last? Sadly, our research indicates that, in spite of everything, speech codes are as strong and pervasive as ever.

THE STUDY

For our 2007 report, FIRE surveyed publicly available policies at the 100 “Best National Universities” and at the 50 “Best Liberal Arts Colleges,” as rated in the August 28, 2006 “America’s Best Colleges” issue ofU.S. News & World Report. FIRE surveyed an additional 196 major public universities. (because public universities are legally bound by the First Amendment, FIRE is continually adding data on public universities to our database, at a rate consistent with our available resources). Several FIRE staff members spent a substantial portion of their year researching literally thousands of policies and rules in student handbooks, other official campus materials, and on schools’ websites. The policies were then evaluated by FIRE’s specialized lawyers and assigned a red (worst), yellow or green light (best) rating to the university based on the extent to which their written policies restricted constitutionally protected speech. We publicly post all of the relevant materials, our ratings, and excerpts containing the language most dangerous to basic liberties on our Spotlight website (www.thefire.org/spotlight). It is, to our knowledge, the most extensive evaluation of campus codes ever attempted.

A school is given a “red light” if it has at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech. A “clear” restriction involves a threat to free speech which is obvious on the face of the policy, whereas a “substantial” restriction is one that is broadly applicable to important categories of campus expression.

A “yellow light” institution is one that has policies which could be interpreted to suppress protected speech, or policies that, while restrictive of freedom of speech, restrict only narrow categories of speech. For example, a policy banning “verbal abuse” would have broad applicability and would pose a substantial threat to free speech, but it would not be a clear violation because “abuse” might refer to unprotected speech, such as threats of violence or genuine harassment. “Yellow light” policies may still be unconstitutional,²⁸ but they do not clearly and substantially restrict speech in the same manner as “red light” policies.

If FIRE finds no policies that seriously imperil protected speech, a college or university receives a “green light.” This does not necessarily mean that a school actively supports free expression. It simply means that the school does not have any publicly available written policies which violate students’ free speech rights.

Of the 346 schools reviewed by FIRE, 259 received a red-light rating (75%), 73 received a yellow-light rating (21%), and only 8 received a green-light rating (2%). Six schools did not receive any rating from FIRE. Surprisingly, public schools, which are unambiguously legally bound by the First Amendment, actually had a somewhat higher percentage of “red light” ratings; a full 79% of public schools were “red light,” 19% “yellow light”, and 2% green.

What Makes Speech Codes So Hardy?

So how do speech codes continue to survive? I have come to the conclusion that there are at least four major factors at work:

1. Ideology: Political correctness is still alive and powerful on our college campuses. The belief that some students (and, indeed, some administrators) have a right not to be offended plays a part in dozens upon dozens of incidents every year in which FIRE must come to the defense of a student or faculty member who said “the wrong thing.” “The wrong thing” can range from publishing an “insensitive cartoon,”³⁰ to sending out an overly ironic Halloween invitation,³¹ to an attempt to satirize or protest any number of issues, from affirmative action³² to terrorism and religious extremism.³³
2. Bureaucracy: What I find perhaps most galling about universities’ unwillingness to defend free speech and provide basic due process rights for students is that students are being asked to pay increasing portions of their lifetime earnings for the privilege of attending these institutions. Furthermore, their tuition money is far too infrequently spent on improving faculty-to-student ratios or otherwise guaranteeing the quality of education. Rather, it goes toward an ever expanding army of student judicial officers, residential life officials, and other administrators whose primary existence seems to revolve around keeping an eye on students and being involved in their lives. The results have not been surprising, as administrators justify their positions and salaries by diagnosing more and more problems in the behavior, speech, and even attitudes and beliefs of students.
3. Liability: This is the factor that I believe gets the least attention from the critics of campus political correctness. An ever-growing industry of university lawyers and “risk management” experts has left universities in a panic about avoiding lawsuits. Unfortunately, some poorly decided harassment cases, as well as case law indicating an increased legal duty on the part of campus administrators to police the behavior of students,³⁴ seems to have encouraged many plaintiffs. At the same time, the risk management industry has a vested interest in exaggerating how serious and complex the state of the law actually is, and in this process free speech and due process often lose.
4. Genuine ignorance of the law, the principles of modal liberty, and the reality of speech codes: Starting in 2000, FIRE has made a point of sending a representative to the annual Association of Student Judicial Affairs conference, and we have led seminars there concerning abuses of student speech rights on campus. While there are notable exceptions, I have been routinely surprised by how much misinformation and lack of understanding there is among both college administrators and university counsels regarding basic principles of free speech and academic freedom.

FIRE has a number of strategies for addressing the problems presented by these four factors, which I will address in greater detail below.

The argument of “But we don’t enforce our speech codes.”

 A favorite argument of those on campus who defend speech codes is to essentially say, “Yes, we do have speech codes on the books but we don’t enforce them.” This explanation has been oddly effective at quelling some campus concerns about codes. It is, of course, a peculiar argument-why are the codes there if the administration does not intend to use them? But it may nonetheless help to convince some administrators that the codes do little harm, while allowing universities to express their opposition to offensive speech.

Defeating speech codes depends, at least in part, on dismantling this faulty argument. The first response is that this claim is just flatly and demonstrably wrong: FIRE can point to dozens of well-documented examples of campus policies being used against clearly protected speech-cases that readers can see for themselves at http://www.thefire.org/index.php/case/. To cite just one recent glaring example in which a code was used to justify viewpoint based censorship, in the spring of 2006 Pennsylvania State University’s School of Visual Arts cancelled the opening of a student’s art exhibit on the basis that the student’s art violated the university’s Statement on Nondiscrimination and Harassment. The student’s exhibit on images of terrorism, which showed the destruction of Jewish shrines, anti-Semitic cartoons and propaganda in Palestinian newspapers, and the indoctrination of Palestinian youth, did “not promote cultural diversity” or “opportunities for democratic dialogue,” according to the School of Visual Arts.³⁵

Second, while universities may claim that they do not actually enforce their speech codes, they have the convenient protection of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which requires a university, whether public or private, to keep disciplinary proceedings against students confidential,³⁶ to hide behind.

Third, even if the university has not enforced the code, it is still part of its regulations and may, at any time, be pulled out when a student or faculty member might wish to silence, intimidate, or punish a member of the community whose opinions he or she disagrees with. It would most likely be at the very instances when free speech protections are most badly needed that the dormant code would be dusted off and put to work.³⁷

Finally, and most importantly, the speech code itself, whether enforced or not, is the harm. First Amendment jurisprudence recognizes this concept in the doctrine of “facial” unconstitutionality. A speech regulation may be declared “facially” unconstitutional if it, by its very terms, sweeps in a large amount of clearly protected speech or if it is so vague that people of reasonable intelligence would have to guess at its meaning. Either way, speech is “chilled” because the overwhelming majority of people typically would rather keep their mouths shut than risk the consequences of violating such a policy. Furthermore, if the speech code is promulgated through the student handbook at a public university and the administration tells students that the university reserves the right to punish any speech that it deems “offensive,” it has both chilled speech and gravely misinformed students about their rights as students and citizens, whether the administration intends to enforce the speech code or not.

DEFEATING SPEECH CODES

Speech codes have proven to be surprisingly resilient, so what strategies can be used to eradicate them once and for all?

For starters, the Speech Codes Litigation Project is essential to this end and has, so far, proven to be uniformly successful.³⁸ Likewise, David French, director of the Alliance Defense Fund’s Center for Academic Freedom, has committed his organization to litigating against speech codes, and so far his attempts have been equally successful.³⁹ At every school where a “red light” speech code has faced a sustained challenge,⁴⁰ that code has fallen—whether by the university’s unilateral decision, negotiation with the school, or legal decision. However, more litigation is sorely needed. In FIRE’s experience—given that overbroad speech codes are plentiful and many lawyers are interested in doing pro bono work on important matters of constitutional law—finding students who are willing to sue their own schools is the great limiting factor for the Speech Codes Litigation Project. FIRE hopes that more brave students are willing to come forward to challenge their schools’ repressive codes, and we will be working to identify these students both through our Campus Freedom Network and through cooperation with other non-profits.

Continued litigation is, however, not enough by itself. Colleges around the country have chosen to ignore one legal decision after another, and because it is not possible to litigate against every single school in the country, other approaches must be taken as well.

Since its founding, FIRE’s primary weapon has been public exposure. FIRE’s ever expanding Spotlight speech code database and our regular speech code reports are crucial aspects of this effort. Prior to the creation of the Spotlight database, partisan commentators could pretend that speech codes no longer existed; now they can look for themselves to the original documentation taken from university websites to see that speech codes are indeed alive and well.

To go along with Spotlight, FIRE has been drawing attention to particularly egregious speech codes through our Speech Code of the Month program. In a relatively short amount of time, the program has already led to the revision of speech codes at seven schools.^₄₁ We have also discovered that collaborating with students on campus can be a particularly effective means to defeating speech codes. In this respect, we are hopeful that our new Campus Freedom Network will help attract more ground forces in the battle against speech codes.

It is, also, crucial that this effort not be understood in an overly partisan rubric. My experience indicates that average Americans, whether they are Democrats or Republicans, think that having speech codes on college campuses is unjustifiable. Some of FIRE’s most effective campaigns against speech zones, for example, have been in collaboration with local ACLU chapters_⁴² and left or liberal student groups.⁴³Opposing speech codes likewise may present an opportunity for real and meaningful cross spectrum cooperation.

As for the problem of a genuine lack of understanding of the law and the basic philosophy of liberty on the part of college administrators, FIRE already leads seminars educating campus administrators about fundamental principles of free speech and individual liberty. In the future we hope to participate in more conferences and even to establish a continuing legal education program for university lawyers.⁴⁴

As for the confusion caused by genuine ambiguities in the law, FIRE hopes that this can be addressed through further litigation and legal scholarship. To this end, we’ve established our Justice Robert H. Jackson Fellowship, which is directed at producing legal scholarship on precisely the types of legal ambiguities that exacerbate the erosion of liberty on campus.

As for changing the prevailing culture, a lack of ideological commitment to the principles of a free society is a tremendous hurdle to overcome. FIRE, however, may be more optimistic than most people about the potential for change due to the fact that our remarkable record of successes relies almost entirely on American society’s belief in fundamental liberties. Free speech, meaningful dissent, regard for toughness in debate, and a willingness to question existing orthodoxies have, to forgive the expression, become fashionable again. And while we have a long way to go, I have seen real change in the attitudes of administrators and students. An encouraging sign of the progress that FIRE has witnessed during its eight years of existence is the fact that case submissions have begun to decline, even as FIRE’s prominence and name recognition has grown. From a qualitative standpoint, it appears as though schools are increasingly handling instances of “offensive” speech in ways that show regard for free speech. Whether this is due to a genuine shift in appreciation for free speech among college administrations, or merely out of fear of public embarrassment is, of course, impossible to tell.

Is Legislation the Answer?

FIRE has traditionally held a healthy skepticism of the effectiveness of legislation. Legislation tends to be a clumsy instrument, and oftentimes even well thought out and well constructed legislation becomes highly distorted through the political process. We have, therefore, avoided supporting legislation in the past.⁴⁵

Looking forward, however, legislation might be appropriate in certain areas. Legislators could very well require universities to follow controlling case law, to define harassment in a way that follows the appropriately narrow formulation of the only student-on-student harassment case to reach the Supreme Court, Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education,⁴⁶ and to provide further redress for students and faculty members whose free speech rights have been violated. Congress could also give teeth to contractual requirements so that private universities face more serious consequences should they fail to live up to their promises regarding free speech. Thus, well constructed legislation could help end the scandal of campus speech codes forever. FIRE will be exploring how to best achieve these results in the coming years.

CONCLUSION

The war against speech codes has spanned two decades and, despite constant losses in the courts and in the court of public opinion, too many of these codes remain. Ending this scourge once and for all will require the coordinated effort of groups like FIRE, litigators, faculty, students, alumni, and possibly even federal and state governments. The first step, furthered by our database, our speech code report and articles such as this one, is to make sure that the public knows that these codes still exist, that they are pervasive, and that they are harmful. And the harm is indeed grave: entire generations of educated Americans are being taught that they have fewer rights than they actually do, while at the same time being inculcated with a fatal hostility to the very principles of free speech and academic freedom that make our democracy and our system of education possible. Because our campuses seem oblivious to the dangers inherent in raising a generation that sees little wrong in regulating away “disagreeable” expression, it is up to those of us who care about preserving the basic principles of liberty to band together in this fight. It is a fight we can win, and indeed it is a fight we must win. Campus speech codes have survived for too long; it is time that they are finally relegated to the dustbin of history.