The NY Times Magazine published a lengthy article today titled “The Battle Over College Speech Will Outlive the Encampments.” The article attempts to summarize the history of free speech arguments going back to the 1960s and to put the current campus protests into context.
One aspect of the story I found interesting, which appears later in the article, involves how an argument introduced by an early proponent of Critical Race Theory impacted all of this.
In an influential 1989 law-review article, Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii and an early critical-race theorist, argued that the significance of speech and its acceptability on a university campus turned on who was speaking and who was being spoken to. Racist speech, in particular, could be more than offensive. When it reflected historic imbalances of power — when a white student hurled a racial slur at a…
