Sen. Cotton: Restricting Speech Should Cost Colleges Funding

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., is introducing a bill that he says will withhold federal funds from public universities that restrict free speech.

The Campus Free Speech Restoration Act would prohibit a public institute of higher education “from restricting noncommercial expressive activities in a generally accessible outdoor area on campus.”

It also “prohibits retaliation against an individual because the individual reported or complained about restrictions on expressive activities or participated in an investigation or hearing.”

According to the bill, any private college or university that receives federal funding must provide students with that institute’s policies on expressive rights.

“Colleges and universities ought to be centers of free thought and spirited debate — places where young Americans are exposed to all sides of an issue and sometimes hear things that they disagree with or maybe even makes them uncomfortable,” Cotton told the New York Post in an interview on Friday.

Cotton later criticized students at Stanford Law School who protested a federal judge who was on campus to deliver a talk.

“If you’ve gone to law school and you can’t tolerate hearing the other side of an argument and you can’t meet it with counterarguments but rather meet it with shouts and heckling, then you’ve probably gone into the wrong line of work,” the senator said.

“Unfortunately, thanks to the politicization of faculty and college administrators and left-wing thought police, increasingly many of our universities are some of the most monolithic institutions in the country,” he claimed.

Cotton’s bill lists nine Republicans as co-sponsors, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., but no Democrats.

“I wish we had more Democratic support, but I’ve got to say it doesn’t surprise me that we don’t,” Cotton said. “Unfortunately, the Democratic Party, and more broadly the progressive movement in America, is hostile to free speech.”

“The whole point of college is to expose students to ideas that they haven’t previously heard,” he continued. “But if we’re protecting them and creating nothing but safe spaces and relegating free speech to the edge of the campus, we’re failing the students that we’re trying to educate.”