As graduation ceremonies end and summer break begins, college and university presidents have an opportunity to reconsider their campus policies on speech and action. What begins in higher-education institutions rarely ends there. We all have a stake in what they decide.
Americans may believe the First Amendment applies across the board to these institutions. It doesn’t. Public schools are fully subject to this constitutional cornerstone, but private ones enjoy substantial freedom—limited by federal civil-rights laws and legislation in a handful of states—to craft codes of conduct that are inconsistent with it.
Whatever their motives, the members of Congress who grilled the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania (all private institutions) were right to focus on the universities’ codes rather than the Constitution. The presidents’ legalistic responses weren’t merely tin-eared; they revealed a failure to connect speech and action to the broader purposes of the academic enterprise.
Treating speech and conduct as political problems to be managed in the interest of keeping the peace on campus is a recipe for failure. Leaders who adopt this course ensure inconsistencies that damage their institutions and open them to charges of hypocrisy that are difficult to rebut. Look no further than the Jewish students who have been exposed to abuse and harassment that wouldn’t have been permitted against other minority groups.