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Lawmakers’ attempts to protect free speech and academic freedom could backfire

Beware ‘giving everyone the right to file a complaint on a whim’

Imagine this (it won’t be hard):

[A] culture where harassing innocents with the filing of frivolous complaints is a common feature, forcing victims into time-consuming administrative investigations, often with opaque rules and rampant due process violations

[A]dministrative bloat that flows from hiring staff to investigate complaints, carry out hearings, adhere to bureaucratic rules, and demonstrate compliance

Sounds like a sexual misconduct proceeding spurred by a vindictive ex, made possible by a rogue federal agency that changed the meaning of Title IX without authority, right?

In Wisconsin, it might also be the result of Republican legislation to protect free speech on campus.

Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf is the latest advocate for free speech and due process to sound the alarm about the Campus Free Speech Act, which has undergone some revisions to focus narrowly on “unprotected conduct” that disrupts an event or speaker.

MORE: Wisconsin lawmakers offer Campus Free Speech Act

Friedersdorf cheers modifications to the Wisconsin bill that would exempt “mere disruptions” (such as a solitary “boo”) and give accused students greater protections, but he’s alarmed that both the mandatory minimum penalties remain and the bill lets anyone file a complaint:

If I know academia, the potential for abuse, absurd outcomes, and chilled expression is greatly exacerbated by giving everyone the right to file a complaint on a whim. …

The administrative bloat would likely remain in Wisconsin for years after the trend of speech disruptions by student activists fades away and other campus problems loom larger. This is how bureaucracies become cumbersome and sclerotic over time.

MORE: Michigan bill would protect campus free speech

Republicans may be correct in concluding that speech is being shut down often enough on college campuses to warrant a legislative response, especially if public university administrators are repeatedly failing to punish students who shut down events. But if legislators intervene, they should do so with more precision and restraint than is demonstrated by the counterproductive activists that spurred them to action.

Frank Pray at the Martin Center for Academic Renewal sounds a similar alarm over a purportedly retaliatory budget cut by the Republican-controlled North Carolina Legislature against the University of North Carolina School of Law.

MORE: Wisconsin lawmakers propose UW free speech center

The law school pays an anti-capitalist professor $200,000 to teach a single class and its Center for Civil Rights is deeply politicized, but “this attempt to force the school to adhere to the legislature’s vision of what a law school should be is shortsighted,” Pray says:

Instead of incentivizing greater intellectual diversity, in the long run it could endanger the school’s academic standing and embolden campus radicals. Case studies in other states show why legislators should think twice about this kind of meddling.

MORE: UNC pays anti-Republican poverty crusader $200,000 to teach one class

Pray cites failed budget-driven attempts by South Carolina Republican lawmakers to force colleges to drop LGBT-themed “summer reading” books (one college next assigned a book that blames conservatives for “racial violence”), and the Missouri Legislature’s budget cut to the protest-plagued University of Missouri, which is “just as radical now” as it was in November 2015:

Beyond the possibility of contributing to such unintended consequences, or simply failing to curb the activities of progressive campus ideologues, politicized budget cuts provide the perfect justification for radical professors to portray Republican legislators, and conservatives in general, as anti-education and opposed to academic freedom.

It’s better for lawmakers to support efforts to add intellectual diversity, says Pray, citing UC-San Diego’s Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism, Georgetown University’s originalism “bootcamp” and CU-Boulder’s visiting scholar of conservative thought and policy.

Read The Atlantic and Martin Center articles.

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About the Author
Associate Editor
Greg Piper served as associate editor of The College Fix from 2014 to 2021.