Thread by @donmoyn

If you are looking for a campus speech crisis - a real one - look at the wave of laws and administrative directives that make it harder for people to protest at their university. Sadly @MarquetteU is the latest. See this letter from faculty. chronicle.com/blogs/letters/…

@MarquetteU @JeffreyASachs @PhilipRocco Two aspect of Marquette's new protest policy worth noting:
1) All protests must be approved by the administration and in the designated protest era. This recalls the "free speech zones" of the Trump era. Essentially: denude protest of power by hiding it.

@MarquetteU @JeffreyASachs @PhilipRocco 2) Second, @MarquetteU is telling people that they are not responsible for their own behavior, but also for those around them. Someone in your group, or a guest, misbehaves, you are all guilty. Hard to think of a more chilling threat to collective action.

@MarquetteU @JeffreyASachs @PhilipRocco Its also helpful to understand the political background: An outspoken conservative Marquette professor won a state Supreme Court case to protect his speech rights to, uh, dox grad students. Protestors are unlikely to receive the same judicial sympathy.

@MarquetteU @JeffreyASachs @PhilipRocco Meanwhile, Marquette's public peers @UWSystem adopted new rules that compels expulsion for disruptive protestors. The state GOP wants to turn those rules into legislation, despite the fact that have not been violated since they were put in place. wisconsinexaminer.com/2019/08/27/eru…

@MarquetteU @JeffreyASachs @PhilipRocco @UWSystem And so in the space of a few years, politicians (incl judges) & political appointees (regents) dramatically reshaped campus speech policy in Wisconsin to protect perceived threats to conservatives, while weakening the protest rights of faculty and students they regard as hostile.

@MarquetteU @JeffreyASachs @PhilipRocco @UWSystem Since it is twitter policy that I have to mention Brett Stephens somehow, let me note that this attack on free speech was done under the guise of protecting it. People like Stephens lent intellectual respectability to this sleight of hand by framing students as the problem.