Against conservative pessimism about free speech on campus

The problem may seem worse than ever, but progress has been made — and there’s a real shot to make more.
At a recent conference, I talked to a young college graduate who dabbles in journalism and he said, rather offhandedly, “There’s always good attention paid to stories about free speech on campus.”

This produced a hearty laugh from me, because the overwhelming interest in campus-speech issues is a recent development.

Indeed, over my first ten years at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (2001–11), we begged people to pay attention to the fact that it was shockingly easy to get in trouble for what you said on campus. It is real progress that now when I bring up free speech on campus, very few people ever say, “I didn’t realize it was an issue.” Yet even though the issue is more prominent in public conversation than it’s ever been since the emergence of “political correctness” in the late ’80s and early ’90s, whenever I talk to conservatives, there is often a deep sense of pessimism about what can be done about campuses.