Mary, RE: college campus speech codes
There are several. Off the top of my head, there's Brown University, whose code came under attack by the ACLU for its restrictions on speech. Carnegie Mellon also has a speech code that restricted freedom of speech; when that code was enacted, I remember hearing the phrase "Orwellian" tossed around by teachers there. In these cases as well as most others, the codes had a noble intent, to prevent harassment, but in the end, they reached too far. Most of them were enacted in the mid 90's.
Some are in the process of being amended to undo the excessive restrictions. Michigan comes to mind immediately, just because I get all the alumni stuff from them. (Here's a link from the Michigan Daily: michigandaily.com
Here's a link from the University of Wisconsin's speech code: news.wisc.edu
As you can tell, amendment of this code was necessary, again because it restricted speech, which was not the intended result. If you read the reports, you'll note that once again, the intent was to prevent harassment. Like most speech codes of the mid 90's, though, in the process they went too far, and ended up with a code that in theory would prevent any introspective discussion of controversial issues. Like Michigan, Wisconsin had to undo parts of the code that went too far.
I'm sure that there are probably better examples, but those are what I came up with in a quick search. |
