Campus threats to free speech

The Bowling Green Daily News has asked me to start regularly contributing a op-ed on various public policy issues of state and local interest. My first offering was this recent piece about the visit of Kyle Rittenhouse to Western Kentucky University's campus, which I considered a triumph for free speech.

But the event also demonstrated why lawmakers need to go further to ensure that college campuses remain places where a diversity of viewpoints are free to be expressed.

In 2020, Rittenhouse, age 17, took a rifle into the middle of a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, attacked and later acquitted for shooting and killing two of his three assailants in self-defense. He now advocates for the right to bear arms on campus and was invited by a student group to speak at WKU.

Two weeks prior to Rittenhouse’s visit, WKU officials took the unusual step of sending a campus-wide message clarifying that the speaker was not invited by the university itself.

Controversial speakers often come to campus, many officially sponsored by some unit within the university, and almost all espousing far-left views that conservative students and faculty find disagreeable or upsetting.

In none of these cases does WKU issue such a disclaimer. But also in none of those cases do conservative students and faculty try to silence free speech. Sadly, that was exactly what was happening.

Read the whole thing here.