As College Decision Day Approaches, Parents Should Beware

As 3.6 million high school seniors prepare to make the biggest decision of their short lives, they might want to keep two words in mind in the runup to College Decision Day:

Caveat emptor.

Why “let the buyer beware”? Because sometimes schools promise students one college experience and deliver quite another one.

In particular, students and parents might want to pay attention to how university administrations react to problems on campus.

Last week, law students at the City University of New York disrupted professor Josh Blackman’s guest lecture by shouting inane slogans, standing on stage, and preventing him from giving his original presentation. Although Frederick Douglass once said “[t]o suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker,” apparently the school’s dean, Mary Lu Bilek, disagrees. She dismissed criticism of the event by asserting that the protesters’ actions were within bounds. As George Mason University professor David Bernstein acerbically notes, “we now know that the law school’s official position is that eight minutes of disruption is ‘a reasonable exercise of free speech.’”

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