REASON ENOUGH TO DEFUND ACADEMIA:

More than half of America's colleges and universities now have restrictive speech codes. And, according to a censorship watchdog group, 217 American colleges and universities--including some of the most prestigious--have speech codes that "unambiguously impinge upon free speech."

Judges have interpreted the First Amendment broadly, giving Americans some of the most expansive rights of speech in the world. But over the past two decades, and especially the past few years, American college administrators and many students have sought to confine speech to special zones and agitated for restrictions on language in classrooms as well. To protect undergrads from the discomfort of having to hear disagreeable ideas and opinions, administrators and students--and the U.S. Department of Education--have been reframing speech as "verbal conduct" that potentially violates the civil rights of minorities and women.

American college campuses are starting to resemble George Orwell's Oceania with its Thought Police, or East Germany under the Stasi. College newspapers have been muzzled and trashed, and students are disciplined or suspended for "hate speech," while exponentially more are being shamed and silenced on social media by their peers. Professors quake at the possibility of accidentally offending any student and are rethinking syllabi and restricting class discussions to only the most anodyne topics. A Brandeis professor endured a secret administrative investigation for racial harassment after using the word wetback in class while explaining its use as a pejorative.

As college campuses have become bastions of rigorously enforced political correctness, the limits on speech have come crashing down in the real world, with the presumptive Republican nominee for president dishing out macroaggressions on a daily basis. 

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