The Marketplace of AN Idea

Two recent occurrences at my school have opened my eyes to an interesting phenomenon taking place in the halls of academia. The phenomenon regards the stranglehold administrators have on the speech, or lack thereof, taking place on campuses throughout the country. The incidences at my school, which have received national attention, can be read about here and here.

Basically, lefitst professors and administrators, who seriously outnumber conservatives on virtually any given campus, have severely repressed speech at universities around the Nation. They do this by adopting speech codes restricting what they call “hate speech”, and then enforcing the codes by expelling any students who violate them.

I find this interesting and quite hypocritical for one main reason: The liberal battle cry is “protect our civil liberties”, yet they are the first to limit speech in their little enclave called the university.

And, apparently they really don’t buy into the seemingly liberal legal doctrine surrounding free speech. Supreme Court jurists for the past several decades have staunchly espoused a doctrine called “the market-place of ideas” (See, Justice Holmes’ dissent here). The standard is simple: They claim (and I actually agree with it for the most part) that speech should almost never be regulated by government because the cure for disagreeable speech (or what we would call any expression of a message) is more speech. Basically, a market-place of all ideas should exist in which people are able to hear all sides of every argument in order to choose what to believe - the result is that only the best ideas survive.

But, to limit the market-place prevents a legitimate opportunity to choose the best ideas. However, this is precisely what leftist administrators and professors at my school, and others, have done! Thus, when it comes down to it, they really don’t believe in the market-place of ideas after all - rather the market-place of AN idea.

Why do you think this is?