"Six years ago, my good friend Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, coined the perfect phrase to describe the state of free speech in American education: 'unlearning liberty.' Our educational system is at cross-purposes with the Bill of Rights, teaching students to believe that unalienable rights such as free speech and due process are a problem, especially when they conflict with the demands of social justice or political expediency.

"It's not that students are taught to despise free speech -- after all, students love their own right to speak. It's that students believe free speech should be subordinate to other, higher values. With depressing regularity now, surveys of college students reveal a pattern: There's immense support for free speech in the abstract, but that support erodes significantly when the questions get specific. ...

"The true tension in the First Amendment isn't between freedom and diversity or freedom and inclusion. History teaches us that the tension is between freedom and power. Free speech, by its very nature, leads to questioning, debate, and -- eventually -- accountability.

"In reality, speech is the engine that powers American diversity. Individual liberty is indispensable to true inclusivity. Thus, it's incompatible with the false diversity of the college campus, which celebrates differences in sexuality and ethnicity but increasingly expects its faculty and students to think alike. And it's incompatible with the false inclusivity of the modern university, which all too often excludes even the most credible and serious voices if those voices challenge the orthodoxies of identity politics.

"Our students 'unlearn liberty' in part because they've been presented with a false choice. The true conflict isn't between speech and diversity, it's between speech and the unaccountable power that political and cultural leaders so consistently crave."

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