FIRE’S 10 WORST UNIVERSITIES FOR FREE SPEECH (2016): This week FIRE revealed our annual list of the 10 worst colleges and universities for free speech in the nation. Tragically, competition was stiff this year. Check out the whole list, but I wanted to reprint one case where readers can still fight back and make a difference. The blowup over Wesleyan University’s student newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, was the first round in the often anti-free speech student activism that went on to dominate the headlines last fall. Whether you are a tweeter or a donor, let Wesleyan know that you think its so-called “commitment to the free exchange of ideas and pursuit of knowledge” is empty when it suppresses open discussion, especially from its own student press:

Wesleyan University

It’s been a rough year for the student press, and at few institutions has that been more evident than at Wesleyan University. Wesleyan was plunged into controversy last fall after its main student newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, published a student column critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. Students mobilized in opposition to the column’s publication, circulating a petition calling for Wesleyan’s student government to defund the Argus unless specific demands were met. Among the petitioners’ plans to get its demands met was a movement to support “recycling” the Argus — another way of saying they would round up and destroy copies of the newspaper if their demands went unmet. Indeed, the Argus reported that several hundred copies of the paper were stolen in the midst of the controversy.

Wesleyan’s student government then took up the issue, voting last fall to approve a dangerous resolution that could turn free speech at Wesleyan on its head. Under the new resolution, which may take effect this fall, the Argus could see $17,000 in funding — more than half its budget — revoked and reallocated to other student publications. Worse, the proposal would allocate funding in significant part based on a popular vote of the whole student body, an open invitation to viewpoint discrimination if ever there was one. If Wesleyan doesn’t wise up to the dangerous flaws in the new funding scheme, an already chilled atmosphere for free speech will turn truly frosty.