Anti-affirmative action bake sales--in which cookies are sold on a sliding scale according to the buyer's race--are the latest trend in conservative campus activism. Over the past year, such sales have been held at UCLA, UC Berkeley, Texas A&M, Southern Methodist University, UC Irvine, William & Mary, Northwestern, the University of Washington, Indiana University, and, most recently, at Utah State. Each time a conservative student group--usually the College Republicans--holds a sale, feathers are ruffled. Each time, the publicity the event attracts sparks debate--about affirmative action, about institutionalized racism, about the line between harassment and protest, about the competing claims of free speech and racial sensitivity. And often, school administrators become a part of the mix, forcibly shutting down sales, investigating and disciplining the groups who hold them, ignoring the sometimes violent actions of those who object to them. At the University of Washington, police had to restrain two students after they started tearing down the sale display, throwing cookies, and threatening to attack the protesters; administrators then punished the students who held the protest instead of those who attacked them, shutting down their display and then publishing a letter in the student paper denouncing the College Republicans for being "tasteless" and "hurtful."

This fall alone, administrators at SMU, William & Mary, the University of Washington, UC Irvine, and Northwestern have shut down anti-affirmative action bake sales on their campuses, ignoring the groups' right to free speech and expressive protest while indulging the angry reactions of those who would rather condone censorship than encounter a viewpoint that offends them. While admins at some schools have (presumably grudgingly) allowed the bake sales to proceed unmolested, only administrators at Indiana have stood up in defense of the expressive rights of all students at the university: "It is a freedom-of-speech issue. I know some schools have approached these events differently, but prior restraint is not something we would normally engage in," Damon Sims, associate dean of students, told the Indianapolis Star. "This is one of the more significant social and political issues of our time. . . . It is exactly the kind of dialogue that should be encouraged on college campuses."

And thus a pattern emerges: If anti-affirmative action bake sales are conservative students' newest form of activist street theater, quashing such sales are misguided administrators' newest mode of revealing their contempt for intellectual diversity, their ignorance of their legal and ethical obligations to defend and protect free speech on campus, and their affinity for censorship. Admins who shut down bake sales come up with all manner of excuses--they say the sales are harassing and discriminatory, and thus violate school policy, or that there are safety issues to consider, or that the students are committing "financial misconduct"--but ultimately, what they are really doing is saying that there are some students on campus who have a right not to be offended, and that there are others who do not have a right to express their opinions. They are also, incidentally, revealing their utter distrust of democratic process--if you censor a point of view because you are concerned that it is going to offend (or even wound), you must not have a very high opinion of those you are ostensibly trying to protect; you only try to protect a group through censorship if you don't think that group can defend itself in the marketplace of ideas. When admins shut these sales down because students are complaining, they aren't protecting them so much as they are patronizing them.

Regardless of the psychology of it all, however, there are clear legal issues at stake. When public schools shut down these sales because their viewpoint offends others, they are violating the First Amendment rights of the students running the sale. When private schools with a stated commitment to free expression and academic freedom do so, they are violating their contract with those students and arguably committing fraud by not providing the freedom they advertise in their promotional materials.

Affirmative action is such a hot button campus issue that even reasoned criticism of it is readily, almost automatically, labelled racist. For that reason, there aren't a lot of people out there willing to stand up for the rights of affirmative action's critics--such people tend also to get labelled racist, such is the kneejerk orthodoxy surrounding the issue. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is a rare exception (GMU law professor David Bernstein is another).

FIRE has been defending the rights of students to run such bake sales, and in a monster press release last Friday explained both the extent of the censorship surrounding such sales and also pointed out the simple but apparently elusive fact that political satire is protected speech. FIRE means business: it is not simply publicizing the injustices that are taking place across the country, but is contemplating legal action against the schools that refuse to respect the First Amendment rights of students who don't accept their institutions' official position on affirmative action. "We are beginning a campaign to expose their administrations and trustees as being delinquent in their duties to protect the First Amendment, to the extent that they have sanctioned criminal violence to silence political debate," FIRE CEO Thor Halvorssen told the Washington Times. "We have not ruled out a lawsuit and are in conversations with the students involved as well as members of our legal network."

UPDATE: John Rosenberg has more.