Last month, my fellow teachers at the University of Maryland, College Park, began their fall classes with the usual concerns: learning students’ names, logging into the WiFi, searching for bartending gigs if they didn’t get enough classes. But we received a new challenge this year: Nine pages of restrictive rules about who can say what, when, and where on campus. Our administration is afraid of what its students and teachers might say, so they unleashed new rules that would make a homeowners’ association blush. College Park is not alone. Instructors at the University of California system, Indiana University and dozens of other colleges are facing identical new rules, creating a culture of fear in places where ideas should flow freely.
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