Subject: Long Overdue Lawsuit Against Iowa State Claims University Policies Chill Free Speech Tue Jan 07, 2020 10:27 pm
Given the widespread attacks on conservative and libertarian/individualist speech at universities over the past few years, one might think that a new report about a college speech lawsuit was just that: a legal action likely taken because a “place of higher learning” was punishing or banning freedom of expression on campus. But the situation at Iowa State is a bit trickier than might at first appear, and it reveals that people often miss the point in debates over the insulting term “appropriate limits” to public university speech. According to Celine Ryan, of CampusReform, Speech First, a non-profit advocacy group in favor of free speech, filed suit against Iowa State University on January 2 in an attempt to “help restore free speech and expression to America’s universities.”
And who wouldn’t applaud that? After all, many liberty-minded students have suffered at the hands of leftist professors who mark them down merely because their opinions don’t fit the leftist doctrines. I experienced precisely that at Boston University. Many conservative and libertarian guest speakers have been harassed and physically threatened on college grounds. Dave Rubin’s May 1, 2018 appearance at the University of New Hampshire was temporarily halted by a crowd that included an actual professor at the university – a prof named Dr. J Ruby Ryan (no relation to the reporter covering the story), who’d soon be teaching a course called “Trans-forming Gender” and who Tweeted: