CNN —Last week, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that makes it harder to hold people responsible for harassment. So it’s clearly urgent for institutions to strike the right balance in protecting the free speech of critics without allowing them to chill the free speech of those with whom they disagree. It sends a symbolic message that protecting freedom of speech requires tolerating lower-level harassment speech, which often intimidates speakers into silencing themselves. Free speech is crucial to academic discourse, but something is wrong with a statement of “free speech” that allows courses to be censored due to online harassment of their instructors. The Supreme Court’s newly declared permissiveness toward online harassment is only likely to embolden more of it.

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Persons: Kara Alaimo, Coles Whalen, ” Kara Alaimo, Rebecca Journey, Daniel Schmidt, Schmidt, Journey, ” Schmidt, “, — Organizations: Fairleigh Dickinson University, Women, Press, CNN, University of Chicago, ”, Twitter, University, The New York Times, University of Waterloo, Facebook, Court Locations: Chicago, Canada