The brouhaha unleashed in academic and media circles over a free speech editorial published last week by the Wellesley College student newspaper is both justified and overstated. It’s justified in that college campuses matter for setting the intellectual conditions for free inquiry and debate. It’s perfectly appropriate to criticize the editorial for its poor history, hostility to open campus discussion and misstatement of free-speech doctrine in current law.
The objections are overstated, however, because of a crucial aspect of the editorial that seems to have been missed by critics, and maybe by the authors themselves: the distinction between the First Amendment right of a private college to regulate student speech and the First Amendment right of the individual to be free from government speech regulation.
