The Lantern | The Journal of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

When I say that censorship on campus has become more pervasive and intrusive and focused on increasingly trivial offenses, I don’t mean to suggest that campus speech was unrestricted in the past. Censorship is a perennial problem; the urge to restrict speech you fear or dislike seems almost primal – especially to people in power, on all points in the political spectrum. In recent years, the drive to repress individual rights on campus has generally emanated from the left, but sometimes it simply represents an apolitical, bureaucratic mind-set; and, historically, for every example of left wing repression, you can find a counter-example of right wing repression. Consider mid 20th century red scares, when colleges and universities grievously betrayed their stated commitments to academic freedom by imposing loyalty oaths on faculty and collaborating in purging suspected communists or communist sympathizers from their ranks. (For a history of that period, I recommend No Ivory Tower, by Ellen Schrecker.) We’ve also passed through periods when free speech and some would say anarchy practically flourished on campus.