A commenter on the thread below writes:
Thankfully, the courts seem to be getting more involved in this sort of stuff.
It is amazing that the nation survived the 200+ years or so before speech codes forced students to be nice to each other.
I’ve heard this sort of assertion before, but I don’t think it’s quite right. I’m not a historian of higher education, but my understanding is that until the 1960s, it was commonly assumed that universities had broad power to suppress student speech (whether to speech that was seen as offensive or speech that was seen as dangerous), and universities regularly used such power. To give just a few examples:
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Papish v. Board of Curators (1973), in which the Court held unconstitutional a university’s expulsion of a student who distributed a newspaper that “on the front cover … reproduced a political cartoon previously printed in another newspaper depicting policemen raping the Statue of Liberty and the Goddess of Justice [witht he caption]