[bruce511]

Free speech at a university is important. Sure it opens the door to regressive ideas, but it also opens the door to progressive ideas, which may be equally counter-establishment. A university is a place where these all ideas can, and should, be discussed and debated.

Free speech in a bar, or any other business environment, though is out of place. Because the primary goal of a business is to make money, and creating disharmony and antagonism seldome leads to better business.

In other words free speech is useful, but there's a time and a place.

Bars for example like to attack a hermogenous crowd. Happy people drink more, break less. If 10% of the patrons start spouting off racism, or mysogeny, or whatever, then the rest won't fight it, they'll just leave. If it happens a couple more times they'll stop coming back.

So bars are typically quick to remove people, or ban people, with a history of strife. You don't have to go as far as Nazis, all you need is a few guys being obnoxious about, say, eating meat.

Free speech is not "saying whatever I want, wherever I want, to whomever I want." there's a time and a place. A university campus is a great place, and also (for typical college age people) a good time.

[doctorwho42]

Devil's advocate; MIT and many other universities are technically businesses. And they have become more and more like businesses with each passing year.

So in this case, would complete free speech be out of place by your metrics?

In the case of MIT, which is a 501(c)(3), but also sits on a multi-billion 'endowment'.

[bruce511]

Clearly universities have "personality" (as do all business's) and that factors a lot in which university I choose to attend. I expect a different world-view in say Alabama compared to say California.

I might steer clear of Berkley as being too hippy, and choose Alabama or Mississippi instead.

But I also expect that a business in the business of sharing ideas is open to new ideas. If I want to discuss a gun-free society at Alabama State, then i might be in the minority. As a professor my students won't appreciate it in my physics lecture, but I might form a student group against guns etc.

So yes a university is a business, but the business of ideas, and censoring some ideas seems like that makes it a bad business.

[fallingknife]

Fine, but only if they stop accepting federal funding.

[Kamq]

There are very few universities that hit this mark. That being said, MIT might actually be one of them.

My understanding of the situation is that most universities accept federal funds, which have a bunch of strings attached. One of these strings is allowing freedom of speech. This is why communists couldn't be banned from campuses back in the 50s and 60s, or the speech codes of the 80s and 90s failed.

This doesn't apply to universities like Harvard or Brigham Young that take zero federal funds, but the vast majority of them aren't going to pass up the money.