Free speech was an endangered principle on many American college campuses long before woke gained control, but now, the situation is getting worse. In early March, students at Yale Law School shut down a debate on free speech because one of the speakers was a conservative – who, coincidentally, was debating an attorney with the American Humanist Association who agreed with her.
Now a group called Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) is proposing to state legislatures that if state-funded schools refuse to honor constitutionally-mandated First Amendment protections, then those schools should not be funded by the state.
"In Idaho and Wyoming, they have actually begun to impose budget cuts on schools that have programs that are based on gender ideologies," notes SAVE President Edward Bartlett. "In Oklahoma, they just introduced a new bill to review First Amendment complaints at public universities."
Bartlett says fighting directly with the schools is difficult because radical liberals have had firm control over most colleges for decades.
"How is it possible that a university can so radically depart from its original goals and ideals of being arbors of truth and justice," the SAVE president poses. "There clearly has been institutional capture."
However, as leftists paint themselves into a corner by identifying with such positions as not being able to identify what a woman is, Bartlett says hope is on the horizon.
"Every radical movement eventually turns on itself, and that's exactly what we're seeing now," he asserts regarding the so-called feminist movement for gender equality.
SAVE has conducted an in-depth analysis of 169 Title IX judicial decisions against colleges and universities, revealing a broad range of due process violations like lack of proper notice, biased investigations, faulty cross-examination, sex bias, and more. Bartlett's organization is urging state lawmakers to impose a 10% funding reduction on universities that flout anti-sex discrimination and free speech mandates.
