Writing for U.S. News & World Report, John Leo delivers an excellent summary of the current state of campus speech. Particularly good is his summary of the groups that have been using litigation to press schools to respect the constitutional rights of their students:

The litigation is being handled by groups such as the Center for Individual Rights, the Alliance Defense Fund, and--most spectacularly--by the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is now a major player in the campus wars. These groups have been winning free-speech cases one after another, creating momentum that is forcing many censorship-minded administrators into a defensive crouch.

For most of the 1990s, speech restrictions met little resistance. After the courts struck down campus speech codes, universities simply (and dishonestly) recast the speech codes as behavior and antiharassment policies, using extremely broad language to forbid expression that annoys, embarrasses, or ridicules. The language made almost every accused student guilty as charged. The mainstream press ignored the issue, and students generally held their tongues, fearing retaliation. Now the students know how to call FIRE, and FIRE knows how to call Fox News. "The difference is that students now know they can win," said Thor Halvorssen, who recently stepped down as the chief executive officer of FIRE. Sometimes the victories are astonishingly easy. When FIRE sued Citrus College in California, the college quickly yielded, lifting its policy banning all "offensive . . . expression or language" and eliminating its policy of confining student protest to three small areas on campus.

The Center for Individual Rights is working out a settlement in the case of a white student punished for "disruption" after quietly posting a flier at the multicultural center of California Polytechnic State University. There was no disruption. The black students who complained simply didn't like the flier, which promoted a speech by a black conservative author. Cal Poly's action seemed clearly unconstitutional but typical of what many colleges got away with when nobody was watching. Terry Pell of CIR says his friends, left and right, are appalled when they hear about the Cal Poly case. CIR's attorney in the case, Carol Sobel, frequently works for the American Civil Liberties Union. And Pell says that judges of all political persuasions are appalled when CIR brings them cases like this, too.