Commentary: The Myth of a Free-Speech Campus

Bruce Gilley August 08, 2023 1 min read

Bruce Gilley
Law & Liberty

Excerpt: It sounds like a miracle. A small community college with a politically divided student body achieves the impossible: an agreement on the need for civil discourse among different political viewpoints. Free speech becomes a campus-wide value, and a growing number of students participate in contentious debates with no hurt feelings or ex-post investigations.

But for all the fuss about Linn-Benton, the true story of this campus along the Calapooia River in central Oregon is a stark reminder of deep-seated censorship in American higher education. It also shows the inadequacy of superficial fixes often put forward by Heterodox Academy or the new faculty-led Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.

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