Ethics

Free Speech on College Campuses. Again.

By Ed Brayton

After all of the debate in the comments on my post about FIRE's annual report on speech codes on college campuses, I'd like to tell the story of one of the most important disputes over free speech at universities in our history.

In the early 1970s, a Nobel Prize laureate named William Schockley -- inventor of the junction transistor -- spent most of his time touring around the country giving speeches on college campuses about the genetic inferiority of blacks. Needless to say, this caused a great deal of controversy. In 1973, he came to speak at Staten Island Community College and was greeted, as always, with counterprotests and demands that he not be allowed to speak.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 18, 2009 (boomark / email).