Free speech and open inquiry are alive and well on campus. But today’s conservative “free speech” campaign doesn’t want you to know that. If anything, the real threat to free inquiry isn’t students, but that same market imperative that First Amendment defenders claim to hold dear. Its enemies are the campus Jacobins, who, it claims, are destroying the “marketplace of ideas” that alumni remember so fondly. Yet now their selectively legalistic “free speech” strategy helps turn collegial contentions into rhetorical battlefields by hyping and even provoking progressive offenders.

Source: New York Times September 03, 2016 18:30 UTC