How does freedom of speech or just speech undermines education and defeats the purpose of public colleges and universities?

America’s colleges and universities have historically been treated as havens for free speech, laboratories of thought where diverse viewpoints and ideas can be discussed and debated in an endless search for truth and knowledge.  The Supreme Court has long recognized that our institutions of higher education serve an important societal purpose beyond classroom instruction, that the modern university campus “is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.'”[1]   Therefore, the Court has traditionally held that college students are entitled to robust speech rights so that they may speak freely and contribute to the exchange of ideas.[2]

However, a major threat to this model of the American university has presented itself:  Colleges and universities across the country have enacted “speech codes” broadly regulating how students are allowed to speak on campus.  Speech codes are “university regulations prohibiting expression that would be constitutionally protected in society at large,”[3] or “any campus regulation that punishes, forbids, heavily regulates, or restricts a substantial amount of protected speech.”[4]  Speech codes violate students’ free speech rights,[5] often by taking aim at any expression deemed by university administrators to be uncivil, offensive, or disagreeable.  They have proliferated on college campuses despite the fact that the courts have indicated that “[s]peech codes are disfavored under the First Amendment because of their tendency to silence or interfere with protected speech.”[6]