Campus Free Speech in Contested Times: What do College Handbooks Say About Free Speech?

The considerable upheaval we have seen on college campuses recently has led us to ask a simple question: what speech do colleges and universities claim to protect? We attempt a first try at answering that question through a content analysis of the student handbooks from a sample of colleges and universities within the state of Georgia. Our analysis serves as one of the first looks, through a content analysis of what types of speech do colleges and universities claim to protect. We review the previous academic research on campus free speech and find it lacking a comprehensive approach, focusing mostly on high profile cases of clashes over student speech on select college campuses. We then conduct a content analysis of the Student Handbooks for 28 private colleges in Georgia, focusing on all the language dealing with free speech, free expression, protests, and students’ political conduct. We then use Word Cloud to arrive at some initial conclusions about what types of speech, expression is protected, and which is not. We then provide some insight into the free speech codes of several Georgia private colleges. While we started our project by examining the codes of private colleges in Georgia, our goal is to ultimately extend to all public colleges in the state. We envision extending this analysis to colleges and universities in other states eventually. Toward that aim, we conclude with some general suggestions for future research in this area.