Among the more surprising of the findings, FIRE also reports that public universities are more restrictive of speech than private colleges. Considering that public universities, being part of the state, are explicitly bound by the Constitution, one would expect the results to be opposite*.

FIRE also finds that the biggest trend in repressing free speech is the growth of “bias incidents” and broad-sweeping harassment codes. Public universities are increasingly placing the right to not be offended above the right to speak one’s mind.

*I’m reminded of this NYT article on Muslim students in France who are abandoning the strictly secular public schools to attend private Catholic schools, where they are allowed to wear headscarves and pray.

As a newly enrolled student in 2004, [William] Felkner, a free-market conservative, says it became clear that he would have to transform himself into a left-wing ideologue before he could get a master’s degree.

Felkner’s professors argue vehemently that he’s gotten his facts wrong — especially in assessing the core values of the curriculum, which are drawn from the code of ethics of the National Association of Social Workers, based in Washington, D.C.

Both the code and the RIC curriculum emphasize the role of social workers in pursuing “social justice” for the “vulnerable and oppressed” members of society.

Is that code of ethics so benign, though? Washington Post columnist George Will exposed the underlying ideology of the ethics code in an October op-ed (which also happened to mention Felkner). To wit:

In 1997, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) adopted a surreptitious political agenda in the form of a new code of ethics, enjoining social workers to advocate for social justice “from local to global levels.” A widely used textbook — “Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skill” — declares that promoting “social and economic justice” is especially imperative as a response to “the conservative trends of the past three decades.” Clearly, in the social work profession’s catechism, whatever social and economic justice are, they are the opposite of conservatism.

The story has also been picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education blog. Reading through the Providence Journal article, it’s clear that the issue is not as black and white as Felkner would like. (His teachers described him as a “fussy and difficult student.”) However, it will be interesting to see how the case pans out, especially if FIRE becomes involved.

(On a side note, a self-described “free-market conservative” entering a school of social work seems like a wacky sit-com premise at best, a Sisyphean punishment at worst, but I guess that’s Felkner’s prerogative.)