Harvey Silverglate

Where would you rather be?

Well, it's important everywhere in the society, but it's most important on college campuses.

Why?

Because that's where we educate our young citizens.

And if you are educated under a notion that some dean can call you on the carpet because you say something which is considered racist or you can say something which is considered dangerous to social cohesion, then it's not a liberal arts college.

Now, the theory that

I used in the Shadow University.

A book you've written, The Shadow University.

1998.

You were ahead of a lot of these things, by the way.

I'm afraid that as a pessimist, I always saw the bad side of things.

Yes, with one of my Princeton classmates, Alan Charles Kors, who's now an emeritus professor of Enlightenment history at the University of Pennsylvania.

I only taught for one semester and I can go into that later, the reason that I did not continue to teach in colleges.

It was Harvard Law School, I taught a course in the mid-1980s.

But in any event, the college campuses are one of the most important for free speech.

This is where people get education.

And if you don't really get a good education, if certain points of view are not allowed to be expressed, because education comes from the clash of ideas, and you then have to decide this is how you become a thinking adult.

You have to decide which ideas make more sense to you, which ones you're going to follow.

The college experience is transformative.

And if there is censorship on campuses, it's highly destructive of the educational enterprise and ultimately to the entire society.