President Trump says he will sign an executive order that will pull funding from colleges if they don't respect free speech.

President Donald Trump. 

President Trump announced today at CPAC that he would sign an executive order that would threaten research grants at colleges that did not do enough to protect free speech. The Hill. President Trump said “We reject oppressive speech codes, censorship, political correctness and every other attempt by the hard left to stop people from challenging ridiculous and dangerous ideas." Trump had brought Hayden Williams, a young conservative activist who was punched in the face at Berkeley, onto stage before the announcement. The president has long threatened reprisals to colleges that shut down free speech, most notably after riots at UC Berkeley broke out during the speech of right wing pundit Milo Yiannopoulos. 

If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

My Comment:
A very welcome announcement and one that is overdue. The truth of the matter is that many of these publicly funded colleges have long since given up their ideals of freedom of speech and the right to disagree. These days if you are openly conservative at a public college there's a decent chance you will face discrimination or even violence, like in the case of Hayden Williams and many others.

It wasn't quite like that back when I went to school in 2003-2007. There were only a few times where I faced any consequences for speaking my mind. The only case I can think of was in one of my criminal justice classes where I was highly critical of an assigned book and ended up getting the equivalent of a B- for what I thought was at least B+ work. And even then, I couldn't prove that it was bias and not just the professor thinking it wasn't as good as I did.

Generally speaking, it was pretty free on campus. People could say what they wanted when they wanted and nobody rioted when a speaker showed up, even if people disagreed with them. For the most part activism was pretty low on the totem poll with studying and partying being the main activities.

Not so much today. In addition to violence against conservatives, there has also been a lot of stifling of their events. The Milo Yiannopoulos disaster in 2017 was the most famous as it descended into a large riot, it was far from the only one. People as milquetoast as Ben Shapiro have been dis-invited and harassed at colleges. Even Charles Murray, a fairly centrist political scientist, was attacked and slandered as a racist by college activists.

In short, it's not safe to be a conservative on campuses these days. That is not the way college is supposed to be. You are supposed to go to college and be exposed to new ideas and think about things in new ways. Instead, very little deviation from the norm is allowed these days to the point where campus liberals are starting to turn on each other was well. This is not an environment that is conducive to learning.

Part of this is the student body being different then it was back when I went to school, but it's not completely fair to put all of the blame on the students. Many of the professors and staff at these schools either quietly support these actions against conservatives or actually participate in them as well. In those cases I would not have any problem with those colleges having their funding pulled.

I do think that Trump's executive order here will help things. Without knowing the details, it's hard to comment on exactly what would happen but the general idea is that places like UC Berkeley will have their funding cut if they don't support free speech. Threatening money is always a good way to exert pressure so I think it has a chance to work.

Of course, I don't know if the colleges will take this lying down. They may sue to regain their funding. If so that would be fairly disgusting and would prove that the bias really is out of control. It would send a clear message to any potential conservative students though. "We don't support your right to free speech or even the right to be safe on campus and we are willing to risk millions of dollars in federal funding and pay for an expensive court case just to make sure your time on campus is as bad as it can be." Why would any student go to a college that has that attitude?