The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is lobbying Phi Beta Kappa with this letter to enlist its support in fighting against campus speech codes.

Uh. Good luck with that.

In related news at my shop:

Today, John Lott (of More Guns, Less Crime fame) is speaking at the Capital University Law School and on the main campus. Rather than engage in a debate about his ideas, there is in fact a concerted effort to organize a boycott among faculty and students of the event. Fair enough I guess but hardly in the spirit of open engagement that universities are supposed to be about.

There have been some rumblings that one of the flyers used to publicize the event is "offensive to Catholics". (I think it's funny!) To my knowlege there has been no complaint filed using our speech code, but this illustrates exactly the type of chilling effect (to use a term that used to be popular with the left) that such speech codes can engender.