Congress Finds Consensus on Free Speech on Campus

Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on challenges to freedom of speech on college campuses. The testimony of elected officials and witnesses ran to three hours. If you’ve got the time, interest, and patience, unabridged video is available, and gives a better idea of what Congress is really like than any evening of cable-news coverage. But life being short, my abridged highlights may better meet your needs.

If you’ve been following the debate about free speech among administrators, faculty, and students on college campuses, this congressional hearing may be most striking as a reminder that, in Washington, D.C., almost no elected official in the Republican or Democratic Party agrees with the most censorious parts of the campus Left. Republican legislators emphasized the least defensible efforts to shut down speech, while Democratic legislators cautioned against passing any laws that might chill the speech of protesters and emphasized the threat white supremacists pose to minority students. But there was no support for the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse, or for censoring Heather Mac Donald, or for the idea that the safety of students is threatened by microaggressions, or even for denying open bigots the right to speak.

Representative Val Demings, a black Democrat from Florida, set the tone in her opening remarks. She spoke of attending college at a time when there were some who did not want her there, declared a willingness to risk her life to protect the rights of a Ku Klux Klansman to speak, and insisted that a line is crossed when white supremacists invoke free speech as a cover to threaten or harass minority students.

Read more at The Atlantic.