The Campus-Speech Debate Spends Summer Break in Statehouses
While student activists are away, legislators have transformed the fight over how free expression is regulated on public university campuses.
Until this summer, the debate about free speech on college campuses was shaped by small groups of student activists, forcefully protesting an ever-expanding list of controversial speakers, and their critics and defenders, who were mostly reactive.
The clearest conflict, amid many shades of gray, concerned the subset of those activists who went beyond mere protest and tried to shut down events. They usually purported to do so on behalf of a historically marginalized group, contested the notion that liberal tolerance
