Private colleges and employers can, and do, ignore the right to speak freely.
By Bill Lueders, The Progressive
A common misapprehension about the First Amendment is that it protects the right to free speech for U.S. citizens. It doesn’t.
What the First Amendment actually does is bar the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” But, as scarcely needs to be said, the government is not in charge of everything, and the rules by which it must abide have no power to constrain the censorial impulses of others. Private entities, including private universities, can still deny others the ability to say what is deemed in the passions of the moment to be the wrong thing.
Just ask Rabea Eghbariah.
The Palestinian human rights attorney at the Haifa-based Adalah legal center and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School had an article he wrote for the prestigious Harvard Law Review spiked in November after it had gone through several edits, been fact-checked, copy edited, and approved for publication.
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