Hayley Waring, a student at Southern Methodist University,  recently thanked former New york City mayor Michael Bloomberg for his defense of campus free speech.

This gratitude was especially heartfelt, as she had personal experience with campus political harassment.

I’ve always had a feeling that the original grade might have been directly related to the fact that the majority of my research came from the Heritage Foundation.

Andrew R. Kloster, a legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, focuses on civil rights, the role of the federal courts and other constitutional issues. He had this analysis of Waring’s situation.

Colleges are supposed to be places of free inquiry and debate. In public schools, particularly public colleges, students are protected by the First Amendment. But even at private colleges such as Harvard and SMU, students expect and deserve to be allowed to think for themselves.

Yet, too often, the free speech student radicals of the 1960s—today’s graying college professors—seek to suppress conservative speech rather than engage with it intellectually. Bloomberg likened this situation to “McCarthyism.” Yet shutting down the free speech of today’s students is worse than McCarthyism. Sen. Joseph McCarthy was fighting against those who sought to violently overthrow the American government, and declassified intelligence reports now show that many of his accusations in the 1950s were not unfounded. By contrast, today’s students are not trying to violently overthrow anything—they are seeking to learn and express themselves peacefully. Using Heritage research, passing out Heritage pocket Constitutions, even being a part of the Heritage Young Leaders Program—these are not the sort of thing that should draw reduced grades from professors.

Cases like these make it all the more important that students educate themselves about the Constitution and about the First Principles that make America great. Take a few minutes to do so. The next time you find yourself staring down a college professor, you’ll be glad you did.