Washington D.C., Mar 30, 2023 / 12:00 pm
A scholar whose talk was shut down at a university and a student who witnessed the silencing of speech on campus recounted their experiences at a U.S. House subcommittee on Wednesday.
Manhattan Institute scholar Ilya Shapiro and Stanford sophomore Josiah Joner were among the four witnesses who testified before the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development. They discussed the absence of free speech at public universities and alleged bias against conservative and religious students and speakers.
Shapiro, who wound up in a firestorm over a Tweet that criticized affirmative action, had his speech shut down at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, formerly called UC Hastings.
“Shut up, was the response, in more obscene terms, that I got from students at UC Hastings when I tried to speak there just over a year ago about my last book, ‘Supreme Disorder,’” Shapiro told the committee members. “They prevented the event from taking place, chanting and banging as if it was Occupy Wall Street.”