The College Fix

He’s been targeted for “disinvitation” from campus gigs, with some universities less cowardly than others.

But Yale University’s William F. Buckley Jr. program gave political pundit George Will his due last week, precisely because he’s been deemed too offensive to be heard by so many delicate flowers in the quad.

Speaking to the program’s first annual “disinvitation dinner,” Will warned that students are increasingly demanding “the right to an emotionally, intellectually comfortable living,” as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes.

Will gave props to FIRE’s president, Greg Lukianoff, as “a genuine hero of our times” for fighting threats to speech on campus and credited his book Unlearning Liberty “as the source of many of the examples of censorship cited throughout his speech.”

The speech recounted incidents as varied as a student employee found guilty of racial harassment for “reading a book about the Ku Klux Klan” and a professor (caught on video) physically attacking a pro-life activist after stealing her protest sign, FIRE says.

The next line of attack on campus speech is more subtle, Will pointed out: The Supreme Court is considering a case over “specialty license plates” that could give schools more authority over “student and faculty expression that involves university procedures.”

Read FIRE’s post on the “Disinvitation Dinner.”

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IMAGE: Pennsylvania State University/Flickr