COLLEGES VALUE CIVILITY OVER FREE SPEECH
By Scot Lehigh, Boston Globe Columnist | February 8, 2005

Write about free speech on American college campuses occasionally, and you quickly come to realize that a good many people honor the concept mostly in the breach. Every column defending free expression generates a number of emails with this basic message: Of course I support free speech, I just don't think someone should be allowed to say that.
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David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit devoted to defending free speech on campus, says the foundation frequently encounters that sentiment among college administrators and faculty.

''One of the most common experiences we have at FIRE is for an administrator or a faculty member to pledge undying loyalty to the First Amendment even while they are censoring a student,'' said French. ''They claim to support free speech, and if you put them on truth serum I think they would still claim to, but they think if a person's feelings are hurt, speech has just gone too far.''

Harvard University President Larry Summers encountered that same sort of mentality in the recent brouhaha he sparked by mentioning - not embracing, mind you, but merely mentioning - theories than men and women have different innate abilities when it comes to science and math.
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