Colleges and Universities

My Creators Syndicate column this week is on our colleges and universities. The lead paragraph gives you an idea of where I'm coming from.

I am old enough to remember when America's colleges and universities seemed to be our society's most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America's colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society.

It continues to astonish me that so many colleges and universities have speech codes. In my days at school—Harvard College 1962-66 and Yale Law School 1966-69—speech codes would have been considered an astonishing imposition. Now they're taken for granted as part of higher education. Not a step forward, I think.

I've received several thoughtful E-mails from academics in response. Most agreed with my take; one, from a professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., said I was exaggerating the problem.