I have an article titled "Viewpoint Diversity" Requirements as a New Fairness Doctrine forthcoming in several months in the George Mason Law Review, and I wanted to serialize a draft of it here. There is still time to edit it, so I'd love to hear people's feedback. The material below omits the footnotes (except a few that I've moved into text, marked with {}s, as I normally do when I move text within quotes); if you want to see the footnotes—or read the whole draft at once—you can read this PDF. You can see my argument about why viewpoint diversity requirements are likely to chill controversial faculty speech here; here is a brief follow-up section as to the problems with imposing such requirements as to students:
[E.] Viewpoint Diversity Rules as to Students
The Administration's letter to Harvard also calls on "audit[ing] the student body" and not just the faculty. But the problem of people being encouraged to misreport their political beliefs is likely to be even more severe with regard to the auditing of students. For college students, any such audit is likely to be based entirely on self-reporting, since most students will have little history of party registration, even less history of political donation, no formal publication record of the sort that academics have, and (again, for most students) little politically minded social media commentary.
