Why Colleges Don’t Care About Free Speech: It’s incentives more than ideology, and there’s a simple fix.
Georgetown University’s law school violated its own speech policy last week when it placed Ilya Shapiro, a newly hired administrator, on leave over a tweet that offended some students. Why do universities make grandiloquent commitments to freedom of speech, then fail to honor them? It isn’t so much an issue of ideology as a problem of incentives.
Georgetown’s policy states that speech “may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived.”
