On March 2, 2016, the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Ways & Means Committee held a hearing on "Protecting the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses."  Subcommittee chair Peter Roskam was quite enthused over the topic; ranking member John Lewis not so much. The witnesses at the hearing included two college students, Alexander Atkins from Georgetown University and Joshua Zuckerman from Princeton.  They in many respects represent polar opposites politically (as well as alphabetically).  Atkins and Zuckerman each recounted obstacles to the free expression of ideas on campus. What struck me the most about the stories they told to the subcommittee is the proactive roles of the college administrations in imposing obstacles to free expression, in ways and to extents unfamiliar to me from my undergraduate and postgraduate days of the 1970s and 1980s. Also testifying was Catherine Sevchenko of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, as...(Read Full Post)