What Snowflakes Get Right About Free Speech pulls the lens back on today’s free-speech campus controversies to reveal that they are not about the feelings of offended students but about our democracy’s commitment to equality. Once free speech is framed as an absolute abstraction to be decided by legal principles alone, the debate between the university’s purpose of pursuing the truth and the premise that all knowledge should be debated in the marketplace of ideas leads to a dead end.

But there’s another way of looking at these controversies that allows universities to draw a clear line when it comes to speech. By focusing on the legal mandate and moral principle of equality which undergirds both universities and our nation, Baer offers a creative and principled way out of the speech debates. He shows how and why free speech has become the rallying cry that forges an otherwise uneasy alliance of liberals and ultra-conservatives, and why this apparent consensus of First Amendment absolutism is neither tenable in law nor in society in general.