New York Colleges Under Fire After Targeting Conservative Students and Groups JONATHAN TURLEY
We have been discussing how universities are remaining silent as student governments limit rights of free speech and association, including the impeachment of conservative students. Now, students at Skidmore College have reportedly barred fellow students from starting a campus chapter of the conservative group Young Americans for Liberty (YAL). In Rochester Institute of Technology, the student government has impeached student Senator Jacob Custer for defending campus police officers wearing Thin Blue Line masks. In both controversies, there are appeals or reviews being pursued but students were subjected to weeks of abusive campaigns for the exercise of their free speech and associational rights.
Skidmore has been previously in the news as a campus with a growing anti-free speech movement, including an unsuccessful effort to fire professors for attending a police police rally. There is a growing threat to free speech posed by student governments curtailing free speech under the guise of self-governance. For some universities, student governments can accomplish indirectly what they cannot legally or politically accomplish directly.
We’ve come a long way since the free speech movement at UC Berkeley. Now US campuses are the center of the woke anti-free speech movement, in many cases abetted by campus administrators. Will they have a similarly large impact on society at large? It seems impossible, but I think it could happen.