In a new post at Minding The Campus, Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley outline a six point strategy for saving free speech and overcoming censorship on campus.

6 Ways to Defeat the Campus Censors

It’s no longer a matter of much debate that America’s college campuses are not the beacons of free and open discussion  they were intended to be. In its 14 years of existence, our organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has documented hundreds of cases of gross abuses of students’ and faculty members’ fundamental rights. More than sixty percent of America’s largest and most prestigious colleges have speech codes that are either unconstitutional (at public universities) or directly contradict promises of free speech (at private universities).

The two authors of this piece come from different political and personal perspectives. One is a liberal and an atheist (Lukianoff), the other a conservative evangelical Christian (Shibley). Our combined decades of work as president and senior vice president  of FIRE have convinced us that the groupthink and the pressure to conform, be silent, or talk solely to those with whom you already agree  that is fostered by the culture and rules of the modern campus is destructive to students, our educational system, and our society as a whole.

So what can people who recognize the importance of free speech on campus do about it? There are a number of possible measures that might be taken. FIRE is already doing some of them; others would require new large-scale and ambitious initiatives. Some are cultural. Some are political or legal. None are the silver bullet that a lot of us might like, and some have tradeoffs that might make them less desirable. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

1. Tie Speech Protections to Federal Funding.

Margaret Hagen, a professor at Boston University, recently proposed that Congress  use the power of the purse to force campuses to respect free speech. This would be a statutory effort that would tie the receipt of government funding to enacting policies and practices that respect free speech, much as colleges that receive government funding must provide access to military recruiters. Given our college funding system, this would apply to nearly every college in America, public or private, since “federal funding” includes not just direct subsidies (received mostly by state schools) but also research grants as well as student funds like Pell grants and Stafford loans. Virtually every college in the U.S. gets federal funding from at least one of these sources–indeed, FIRE only knows of three that don’t, out of the thousands of American colleges: Hillsdale College, Grove City College, and the College of the Ozarks. (There are probably more, but not many.)

Read the other 5 points at the link below.