July 18, 2013 1:05PM # Feds’ Campus-Speech Blueprint: “Sentence First, Verdict Afterward” By [Walter Olson](https://www.cato.org/people/walter-olson) --- SHARE As discussed in this space a [few weeks back](https://www.cato.org/blog/tolerate-any-unwelcome-campus-speech-sexual-nature-lose-federal-funds), the federal government is pushing a new “blueprint” ordering universities to open the way to wider complaints over unwelcome speech. Although the U.S. Department of Education [quickly retreated to](http://overlawyered.com/2013/06/after-furor-feds-walk-back-campus-speechdiscipline-code-bit/) a seemingly less extreme interpretation of the law, the dangers remain that the field offices of its Office for Civil Rights will arm-twist academic institutions into stacked disciplinary methods and new curbs on speech. I’m in the July Commentary with an article [bringing the controversy](http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/sentence-first-verdict-afterward/) up to date. Two points worth noting: first, while the Obama administration has pushed the new plan hard, the wider trend of gradually stepped-up federal supervision over university life has been going on for decades under Republicans and Democrats alike. There’s not much resistance: university officials and organized professors are relatively half-hearted about sticking up for their own institutional autonomy. Indeed, the federal prescriptions represent in some ways a consolidation of power by already-powerful elements within the academy, as opposed to a perceived hostile takeover from the outside. In the same issue of Commentary, Philip Hamburger [has an excellent article](http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-censorship-youve-never-heard-of/) outlining how university researchers have for decades now tamely submitted to federally prescribed controls — overseen by so-called IRBs, or institutional review boards — over such relatively innocuous forms of “human-subjects research” as interviewing politicians and observing passersby in public places. In 2007, David Hyman wrote for Cato’s Regulation magazine on “[The Pathologies of Institutional Review Boards](https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2007/7/v30n2-5.pdf).” (adapted from a [post at Overlawyered](http://overlawyered.com/2013/07/now-available-sentence-first-verdict-afterward/)). ##### Related Tags [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).