NEW YORK ¨C The parents and newly admitted students visiting colleges this month are asking questions about social life, study habits and ¡ª everyone¡¯s favorite topic these days ¡ª job prospects after graduation. These are all important subjects, but if you care about your child¡¯s intellectual development, or just want to keep the kid out of trouble, you should also ask about the university¡¯s attitudes toward free speech.
For more than a decade I¡¯ve been on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil-liberties watchdog group that defends the rights of college students and faculty. As you probably assumed, many cases that FIRE gets involved in stem from ¡°politically correct¡± censorship; but the range of university abuses is much wider than that. The motives often have less to do with ideology than with administrative bullying, paranoia or stupidity.
To take a particularly absurd example, in January a Bergen Community College professor was placed on leave after he posted on Google+ a photograph of his young daughter wearing a ¡°Game of Thrones¡± T-shirt with the quote, ¡°I will take what is mine with fire & blood.¡± An administrator deemed the photo a disturbing threat of violence.
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