When we refuse to even have conversations on divisive issues, we help create a culture that fosters silence instead of exploration and innovation. New ideas cannot flourish and progress cannot be made in a society that fears talking it out.

Censoring offensive speech is the wrong answer, particularly on our nation's college campuses. After all, the college campus has traditionally been an arena for debate and dialogue, and has been deemed by the Supreme Court to be "peculiarly the 'marketplace of ideas.'"

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has published a second edition of its outstanding Guide to Free Speech on Campus, one of its five Guides to Student Rights on Campus. Every college student should read this book.

A federal court told the University of Cincinnati it must rewrite policies restricting protests on campus. U.S. District Judge Timothy Black ruled ...

What does Georgetown really stand for? Georgetown's continuing attempt to have it both ways when it comes to respecting freedom of expression can only earn it more bad press.

After a brief suspension over an offending shirt, the Tufts crew team's punishment was overturned on Thursday by the president of the university. "...

Parody, satire, humor, and puns are fully part of the marketplace of ideas, and it is unacceptable for a university like Tufts to violate its promises and abuse its "bias incident" policy to decide which jokes may or may not be told on campus.

I am dismayed that the risk management industry is training law enforcement and college officials to see a hoodie or "harmful debate" as a potential threat.

A college student at Oakland University in Detroit was banned from campus for a year and ordered to undergo "sensitivity" counseling because he wrote ...

At the same time the Supreme Court is poised to decide if FCC-imposed limits on "indecent" content in broadcast media are an anachronism from a bygone era, Arizona state legislators want to limit what college professors say and do to only what is fit for a Disney movie.

Colleges are all over the map when they try to come up with their own definitions of sexual harassment. Our research has found hundreds of distinct formulations and examples, a large number of which are unconstitutional.

While I am excited to see Stout offering to educate the community about the First Amendment, it is not the university community that needs educating. It is Sorensen, Police Chief Lisa A. Walter and their fellow administrators who need it.

A time comes for every campus leader when a mistake is made. If you serve long enough, errors are inevitable, but leaders shouldn't be judged for their errancy, but how they handle mistakes when they happen.

Harvard has missed something that I fear much of our society has lost sight of: Even if by some weird and lucky coincidence we happened to be right about every belief we cherish, we nevertheless tend not to understand why we hold those values until they are challenged.

Lower standards of evidence will likely produce more guilty findings -- not just of the guilty, but also the innocent. When verdicts are wrong, the cause of justice on campus is ill-served.

A lot of fraternities seem to know that their freedom of association is protected by the First Amendment. What fraternities often do not know, however, is that there are several different kinds of freedom of association.

Since the 1980s, harassment policies have been the main vehicle for campus speech codes -- that is, collegiate policies that restrict speech protected by the First Amendment.

It is crucial to give credit where credit is due for colleges that uphold freedom of speech, so here is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's list.

Bill Watts, associate professor of English at Butler University, has just published a compelling and cautionary account of what can happen when univer...

We should not be lulled into complacency about the state of academic freedom. At the academic core of teaching and research, intellectual freedom is no longer protected by the First Amendment.

Hayden Barnes, a former student at Georgia's Valdosta State University (VSU) was kicked out of his college for protesting. This case is easily among the worst I've ever seen.

Is discrimination on campus ever necessary? A prominent civil liberties group says yes, and its argument is remarkably persuasive. Student organiza...

Check out Wendy Kaminer's great column, "Debating Hate Speech," over at The Atlantic: Last week I engaged in an online Intelligence Squared debate abo...