Tomorrow, the Emory University faculty will vote on whether to revoke the school's speech code. This is a potentially historic event, one that should make the faculties, administrators, and student bodies at the hundreds of other American colleges and universities that prefer speech codes to free inquiry take notice.

There are two back stories worth noting.

The first and most immediate back story concerns events on Emory's campus this past fall. The short version: at a campus panel, anthropology professor Carol Worthman describes her fellow biological anthropologists as the "niggers in the woodpile" of anthropology proper; Worthman is overheard by assistant professor of anthropology Tracy Rone, who takes offense and files charges against Worthman under Emory's Discriminatory Harassment policy; Worthman apologizes but is sanctioned nonetheless; the entire anthropology department is sentenced to sensitivity training; debates about free speech and racism erupt all over campus; the fact of the speech code becomes a part of that debate--the members of the Emory community become newly aware that there is no free speech at Emory, and newly interested in revisiting the question of whether it is ethically or intellectually proper for a school such as Emory to restrict the free expression of ideas via a punitive and chilling policy. I wrote about the Emory case at length here, here, here, here, and here.

The other back story is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). If you follow FIRE's work at all, you know that a great deal of its energy has been devoted to rolling back speech codes on campuses across the country. FIRE has been fighting campus speech codes systematically since it opened its doors in 1999; it has framed the debate about campus speech codes, and it has presented rock solid arguments for why colleges and universities cannot faithfully or even legally fulfill their obligations to the free exchange of ideas when they have on their books punitive policies that restrict speech. FIRE's most programmatic assault on speech codes can be seen in the exemplary lawsuits FIRE has coordinated against schools whose codes are particularly chilling (Citrus College, Texas Tech, Shippensburg University). FIRE did not engineer the vote at Emory, and it certainly does not have any control over the outcome. But it is the work of FIRE that made that vote imaginable.

Here's to Emory's faculty making the right decision tomorrow, and here's to other faculties, administrators, and student bodies across the country following suit.

Thanks to Maurice Black for the link and for the discussion out of which this post grew.