Or is he?
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Trump’s and Kirk’s comments suggest that actual protection for free speech, regardless of the speaker’s identity, isn’t the core issue here. “I think he [Trump] only cares about a thin sliver of speech,” says Sanford Ungar, the director of Georgetown University’s Free Speech project." Instead, Trump’s executive order is part of a broader power play in academia — the right’s decades-long campaign to assert control over what it sees as one of the greatest threats to its political ambitions.The phantom free speech crisis
The relevant portion of Thursday’s executive order instructs 12 federal agencies to ensure that the universities receiving research grants “promote free inquiry.” What this means in practical terms was left unspecified.
The order doesn’t change existing law or regulation. It just sends a message to schools to be extra-careful that they’re following “all applicable Federal laws, regulations, and policies” if they want to keep getting federal dollars.
But when conservatives raise the alarm about a “campus free speech crisis,” they don’t speak in terms of violations of federal law. Instead, they allege that dissenting voices are being muzzled on campus in softer ways: conservative speakers disinvited from campus engagements, or professors fired for expressing controversial opinions.
Certainly there are instances of political censorship on campuses. But the evidence that they are a major problem, one requiring presidential-level attention, is quite thin.
The best work on this front, to my mind, has been done by Acadia University’s Jeffrey Sachs. In a piece published by the center-right Niskanen Center, Sachs marshaled a wealth of data to show that the number of free speech-threatening incidents on US college campuses is small and actually declining.
Sachs’s chart of data on campus speaker disinvitations shows that last year, such incidents were at their lowest number in 10 years.
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