Thanks for that. It seems like this isn't a new thing and that there's no real recourse for the people expelled.

Yet just because federal courts, both high and low, have severely restricted speech codes, it does not follow that the universities have altogether complied.

As John B. Gould reports in his ground-breaking study, “The Precedent That Wasn’t: College Hate Speech Codes and the Two Faces of Legal Compliance,” college hate-speech codes are far from dead. His careful analysis of codes enacted between 1992 and 1997 demonstrates that hate-speech policies not only persist, but have also actually increased in number despite court decisions striking them down. By 1997 the percentage of schools with speech policies had actually jumped 11% from 1992, Gould found, and, while policies against verbal harassment of minorities had dropped 3%, those covering other kinds of offensive speech had tripled. As Gould notes, this apparent contradiction — between judicial precedent on one hand and collegiate action on the other — is hardly surprising to students of judicial impact, but it does highlight the tenacious efforts by advocates of speech codes to continue to use institutional authority to limit speech.

The matter of the legal standing of such codes, however, can obscure the larger issue of whether they should exist at all. Of course, expression on a campus is not a free-for-all; there are limits. There are clearly forms of expression associated with conduct that can be banned, including fighting words, libel, falsification of research findings, plagiarism and cheating. In these instances, as O’Neil notes, the limitation placed on expression is not a matter of the speaker’s viewpoint or message. Universities, he warns, need to be wary of picking and choosing which speech they will and will not support — and in so doing protecting some groups by curbing the speech of others. Moreover, most university speech codes have been condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union, although the ACLU has also insisted that universities can draft disciplinary codes that are narrowly tailored to prevent and punish such behavior as intimidating phone calls, threats of attack, and extortion. However, speech that merely creates an unpleasant learning environment is not, according to the ACLU, susceptible to being regulated. That position has been generally adopted by the federal courts.