George Will knows a thing or two about free speech on college campuses.

Susan Kruth of the FIRE blog reports.

George Will Surveys Campus Free Speech, Hails FIRE’s Lukianoff at Yale’s Disinvitation Dinner

Increasingly on college and university campuses nationwide, students are objecting to invitations to visiting speakers with whom they disagree and demanding that the speakers be disinvited. This especially occurs in the spring, with colleges’ commencement speakers often coming under heavy criticism, leading FIRE to dub the phenomenon “disinvitation season.”

On April 15, the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale University hosted its First Annual Disinvitation Dinner in order to recognize those who have been the target of disinvitation attempts. Columnist George Will—who has been the subject of both successful and unsuccessful demands for disinvitations—gave the keynote speech at the event, rejecting the idea that people are too fragile to handle freedom of expression and citing the preposterous results of overly broad restrictions on speech.

Will’s speech is worth watching or reading in full, but of course, there’s only so many egregious First Amendment violations one can fit into a single speech. Fortunately, FIRE has more on some of the cases Will cited for those who want to know all the troubling details.

Will starts with a FIRE classic: the case of Keith John Sampson, a student-employee at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who was found guilty of racial harassment in 2008 just for reading a book about the Ku Klux Klan. The case isn’t unique—Will also cites Brandeis University’s determination that a professor was guilty of racial harassment for saying “wetbacks” in the context of criticizing use of the word in his Latin American Politics course. Then there’s Texas Tech University’s establishment of a 20-foot-wide free speech gazebo, which was ultimately struck down in a 2004 court case coordinated by FIRE.

Sadly, as recent cases demonstrate and as FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff notes in his book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, attempts to silence students don’t come just from college administrators—they come from other students and professors, too. Will cited several examples of this disappointing phenomenon in his speech.