Op-Ed: Taxpayers Shouldn’t Fund Colleges that Don’t Protect Free Speech

Op-Ed: Taxpayers Shouldn’t Fund Colleges that Don’t Protect Free Speech

This is a point I have been making for years and feeling like I was yelling into a well. It’s great to see people with much more influence now saying this.

Karol Marcowicz writes at the New York Post:

Taxpayers shouldn’t fund colleges that don’t protect free speech

Why should we continue to help fund schools that don’t allow a free exchange of ideas?

During a recent speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, President Trump floated the idea of an executive order withholding federal research dollars from schools that don’t protect speech and free inquiry. Conservatives rightly cheered, but there’s more to be done to preserve and advance right-of-center views on the quad.

Left-wing academe and its media cheerleaders, of course, don’t even acknowledge there’s a problem. A piece in the Washington Post following Trump’s speech was headlined: “Questions abound after Trump threatens to strip funding from colleges that don’t support free speech.”

The article quoted many people ostensibly supportive of free speech who were nevertheless concerned about Trump’s plan.

They don’t get it.

Jonathan Friedman, campus free-speech project director for PEN America, was quoted as saying that “colleges are not the enemy of free speech that this administration has sometimes made them out to be.”

But they are exactly that. Colleges are educating a generation of young adults who can’t hear ­opposing viewpoints. That this is dangerous to freedom of speech should be obvious.

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