Protecting College Students From Real Life
Virginia Postrel writes at Bloomberg about the disturbing trend by colleges to restrict free speech to a "free speech zone":

Speech-zone rules require students to ask permission to do such things as hand out leaflets, collect petition signatures, or give speeches; demand that students apply days or weeks in advance; and corral their activities in tiny areas of the campus, often away from the main pathways and quads. The rules aren't about noise or crowds. They aren't about disrupting classes. They're about what you can do in public outdoor areas, and they apply even to just one or two people engaged in unobtrusive activities. They significantly infringe on students' constitutionally protected speech.

...Contrary to what many people seem to think, higher education doesn't exist to hand out job credentials to everyone who follows a clearly outlined set of rules. (Will this be on the exam? Do I have to come to class?) Education isn't a matter of sitting students down and dumping pre-digested information into their heads.

Higher education exists to advance and transmit knowledge, and learning requires disagreement and argument. Even the most vocational curriculum -- accounting, physical therapy, civil engineering, graphic design -- represents knowledge accumulated through trial and error, experimentation and criticism. That open-ended process isn't easy and it often isn't comfortable. The idea that students should be protected from disagreeable ideas is a profoundly anti-educational concept.

As for the claim that free expression is "distracting," that's true. Learning to deal with such distractions -- whether by engaging or ignoring them -- is a big part of learning how to function as a responsible adult in a free and media-rich society. The irony of the shopping mall model is that shoppers know perfectly well how to do this. Walking through a mall, we negotiate all sorts of advertising signs and sample peddlers without a problem. Surely college students can do the same with sales pitches for ideas.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, theFIRE.org, fights the free speech violations by colleges, hoping to make it too expensive for them to try to curtail students' civil liberties.