From the Heritage Foundation, I'm Doug Blair, and this is a special episode of Heritage Explains.

On our last Back to School episode, we focused on a very important aspect of modern American education, the appalling state of our civics.

This week, we're highlighting the wave of anti-free speech activism on college campuses and what can be done to stop it.

Words are power.

On a personal note, we all know the words we use affect our relationships with our loved ones and friends.

In the political arena, words have even bigger consequences.

Wars start and end as a result of the words politicians use.

Countries rise and fall based on word choice.

To put it simply, words are a pretty big deal.

The Left recognizes the power words have and has been attempting to shift the way we use them in their direction.

Universities institute speech codes and create limited free speech zones in an attempt to control what words can and cannot be used. Ultimately though, these efforts are misguided.

As Supreme Court Justice Brandeis put it in a 1927 case,

if there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech,

not enforced silence.

More than 200 schools in this country maintain what they call bias response teams.

Their job is to investigate thought crimes that

students may have committed. Okay, so just to be just to be clear, if I attempt to enter

that hall right there and sit down just to listen to somebody speak, or if I attempt to ask a

question or to engage in free speech, you will have me arrested. At this point, yes, sir.

They come to campus, this is the last chance, the last chance we could possibly give young Americans

to learn to work out their differences. And we don't do it. We have more and more deans

and processes and bias response teams so that there's always an adult to call in to settle the problem.

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