Just published as part of the "Non-Governmental Restrictions on Free Speech" symposium; here's the start of the Introduction and the Conclusion (the article is here):
A lot of people praise free speech, but no one really wants it. We don't want people to be able to follow us down the street at night yelling death threats. We don't want vital military secrets being revealed to our enemies. We don't want newspapers to write long articles about our private lives that are false, or even print pictures of us naked in the bathroom that are painfully accurate. We want certain kinds of speech, and not others. We want some free speech—but as soon as we say "some," that means we want speech that isn't really free, but rather that conforms to certain standards that we as a society have set. The question, then, is not whether speech should be truly free, but in what ways we think it should be controlled.
In what follows I will be addressing the morality of restricting certain forms of speech in educational institutions. There are different values at play in the university than in the state, and different goods that come from allowing or disallowing speech. But just as governments can rightly set guidelines as to what is permissible, so too can educational institutions. My argument is simple. Colleges and universities have one goal: education. That is what they are for, and that is just what it is to be a college or university—what could be termed their essence, their defining feature. So as long as we are acting qua members of an educational institution, enhancing education is the only goal that should guide us in this case.
