If they would even nod towards condemning their business allies silencing workers in workplaces across the country, I might take them a little bit seriously

I take it you're not a big believer in the "freedom to contract" or the "right to work" ;)

I agree with your point, Nathan, but I also agree in large part with Bernstein. There's no question that speech suppression/condemnation from "the left" has gotten out of hand. This is especially true on college campuses, which should be the most supportive of speech, whether it is favored or disfavored speech. A special exemption when the speech is "from the oppressor" is nonsense.

Yuval: "freedom to contract" comes with a presumption of a reasonably level playing field. Without this, it's called slavery.

"right to work" - Finish the phrase, please. Right to work for minimum wage.

Your argument is old and quite scripted. It's also called greed.

Benedict (yes, not John Q, corrected) - Yuval was being a bit ironic, note the winking smiley face.

John Q (yes, not Benedict, corrected) - I dislike most "speech codes" but there have always been speech codes mandating civility or other regulations. Professors get to control debate in classrooms and can silence students at will (at least officially), which could be seen as a horrible restriction on free speech, but many see as a useful regulation to assure learning.

And where vigorous debate leaves off and harassment starts has always been debated. I mostly think conservatives are wimps. Lefties go into hostile territory all the time-- from doing civil rights work in racist areas to campaigning for unionism-- but whenever conservatives venture into even slightly hostile environments, they immediately start whining.

A professor was dismissed in Florida because he was pro-Hamas. Where are the rightwing defenders of campus free speech on his behalf? Nowhere. Because that kind of speech is "unacceptable" for them. So it's always about whose ox is being gored.

What's laughable is that anybody would take seriously the complaints that a "human rights" organization would criticize American business for exercising their rights to control their place of business.

John Q- Yuval was being a bit ironic, note the winking smiley face.

Nathan, I think you have me confused with "Benedict." :-)

That said, I certainly agree that the Right gets awfully whiny when "their" speech is suppressed, and due to their generally better access to media outlets, their whining gets awfully loud. But that doesn't change anything: if conservative or libertarian speech is being suppressed on colege campuses, it should stop.

My experience with academia is that there is absolutely no test for the political views of professors who are not teaching politics in some way. There are raving right-wingers teaching physics, and lunatic socialists teaching art history, and so on. I have heard that there are, at many schools, some sort of peer-pressure enforcement of the party line of the department on issues that relate to the subject matter. That is, a particular economics department may be keen on the flat tax, or a particular poli-sci department may be keen on race-based analysis. That's not altogether surprising, as a particular English department may be keen on formalism, or a particular math department keen on discrete.

On the whole, though, I suspect that the view also has to do with where you are on the spectrum. For instance, I don't think that there are many faculty members at my institution who are within a mile of my lefty views; I think that there are many who are viewed by the Right as militarist left-wing nutbars. There are several who I think are conservative idealogues, who Dennis Preger would consider moderates. It's hard to tell whether the universe you perceive is the same one other people do.

On the other hand, as you point out, the actions of universities are easier to describe that their attitudes, and their actions place them right plumb spang in the corporate-capitalist mainstream. Bernstein doesn't much need to worry about that.

Howard- please elaborate on your eliptical comment?

Suppose that I fired an employee because I found him handing out KKK propaganda on company time. Would that violate his freedom of speech?

If congress refuses to confirm Janice Rogers Brown because of some of the legal opinions she has written, will that violate her freedom of speech?

More generally: does the first amendment say that anybody can say anything she or he wants to and nobody can hold it against her or him when it comes time to hire or fire?

Since when?

Free speech in the workplace is pretty much non-existent. If your employer knows you are a member of the Natural Law party, they can fire you based on that fact.

And just as Brown was picked for her legal opinions, she can be rejected for those legal opinions by the Senate.

However, there are certain economic rights that employees have under the International Labor Organization -- to which the US is a signed party -- which require that employees have the right to organize unions. And part of those rights-- both under international law and under federal statutes -- is the right to ON THEIR OWN TIME at work (such as breaks), advocate for unionism without retaliation.

To amend my earlier comment, in California they have a statute prohibiting retaliation against employeees for their political activities outside the workplace. And there are other statutes that increasingly protect selected rights to speak in the workplace on other issues, or protect the right to speak in Spanish, for example.

But those are all statutory protections. There is essentially no federal constitutional protections for speech in private workplaces in the US.

If universities want to regulate speech on campus, they should do what the Bush Administration does: confine them to "free-speech zones," miles away from the people they want to speak to.

Conservatives sure seem worried about the wrong kind of speech suppression!

Not to embarass your ranting with facts, but:
A professor was dismissed in Florida because he was pro-Hamas. Where are the rightwing defenders of campus free speech on his behalf? Nowhere. Because that kind of speech is "unacceptable" for them. So it's always about whose ox is being gored.

Well, five minutes of looking through Volokh's site gives me:
This entry of Volokh's expressing concern.
This TheFIRE condemnation of the action
Or, indeed, Prof. Volokh's post directly on point as to your charge of hypocrisy.

And that's one Google search. "Nowhere" must be a very expansive place for you indeed.

(And this is a professor who you tellingly neglect to mention is currently under indictment under RICO statutes for working with Islamic Jihad.)

Regarding the lack of tolerance for unpopular speech on campus, I have a hard time seeing it as exclusively (or even primarily) the domain of the Left.

On the one college campus where I worked the longest (the University of Washington, as a staff member, not as faculty), the campus student newspaper was usually moderate-to-conservative (sometimes shockingly conservative). Eventually, a group of leftist students tired of this and decided to start their own newspaper. Unlike all the "alternative" right-wing campus rags that get shovels of corporate cash from the likes of the Olin Foundation, this was a grassroots effort on a shoestring budget.

The response from some right-wing students was to steal the paper from its distribution points. Eventually, its publishers had to change its official price from "free" to something like "first copy free, all subsequent copies $1" (I forget the exact price for extra copies) so that future thefts could be prosecuted.

If it had been left-wing students that stole copies of the campus right-wing rag, you can bet the media would have raised a stink about it nationwide, complete with all sorts of blather about leftists all being freedom-hating Stalinists at heart.

Instead, the silence was deafening. It barely got a few inches coverage deep in the inside of the local Seattle papers. Not slightest peep of coverage made it out of the area.

Based on my own experiences, I strongly suspect that the apparent pattern of leftists suppressing free speech on campuses is more an artifact of right-wing bias in the mainstream media than anything else.