The left-wing threat to campus free speech is abating. The right-wing threat is not.

Why campus free speech is under siege — from the right

A protester.
(Image credit: Illustrated | jacoblund/iStock, bsd555/iStock, -slav-/iStock)

When it comes to free speech on American campuses, there seems to be a law of conservation at work: Just when the internal threat of censorship from left-wing campus activists is abating, the external threat from right-wing lawmakers is rising. But given that the new threat relies not on the decibel level of immature 18-somethings but the state power of motivated adults, it may be much harder to fight.

Concerns about political correctness on campus date back at least 25 years when Philip Roth wrote The Human Stain, his brilliant novel depicting the travails of a half-black classics professor pretending to be Jewish who gets summarily fired after black students take offense over his use of the word "spooks." But after a brief hiatus, these concerns came back with a vengeance in the last decade, at least partly because a well-oiled right-wing machine emerged to pounce on every student transgression — big and small, real and imagined, in order to paint a picture of a "free speech crisis" in academia.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.