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The following selection is excerpted from ����ֱ��’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus.

The government may not require citizens to adopt or to indicate their adherence to an official point of view on any particular political, philosophical, social, or other such subject. While the government can often force citizens to conform their conduct to the requirements of the law, the realm of the mind, the spirit, and the heart is, in any free and decent society, beyond the reach of official power. 

The obligation to profess a governmental creed — political, religious, or ideological — invades perhaps the most sacred of our constitutional and moral rights: freedom of belief and conscience. The rights of individual conscience are fundamental to our liberty, and it is intolerable that the government — in a state capital, in Washington, D.C., or at a public college or university — would even contemplate, let alone practice, the violation of such rights. When George Orwell, in his chilling analysis of totalitarianism, 1984, tried to imagine the worst tyranny of all, it was the State’s effort (successful, sadly, in his book) to get “inside” of our souls. Many public campuses, however, trample on the right to conscience with such audacity that ����ֱ�� has devoted an entire Guide to this subject (see ����ֱ��’s Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus). 

Because the right to conscience has its roots in the First Amendment, we take up the subject briefly here.

The Constitutional ban on establishing a political orthodoxy

At the outset, it is useful to think of the First Amendment’s free speech clause as having two related sides. The first, with which we are most familiar, deals with censorship. It prohibits the government from interfering with the right of citizens to say what they believe or simply wish to say. The second side, less frequently recognized, prohibits the government from forcing citizens to say something that they do not believe. This second aspect of the First Amendment, recognized emphatically by the Supreme Court, denies the government the power to establish officially approved beliefs or orthodoxies that citizens are compelled to believe or say they believe. Free men and women choose their own beliefs and professions of belief. Put simply, the First Amendment protects your right to speak and not to speak. 

The Supreme Court has recognized that forcing citizens to state belief in something with which they differ is at least as invasive as censoring expressions in which they believe, because compelled belief or utterance invades the heart and soul of the human being, intruding upon the deepest and most private recesses of one’s inner self. 

The government is permitted to advance its own message only so long as people who disagree or who simply do not want to hear the message can take reasonable steps to avoid hearing it and have the absolute right to state their disagreement with that message.

This freedom from imposed government, roughly described as the right to conscience, was most clearly and eloquently articulated in the landmark Supreme Court case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), in which the Court struck down a West Virginia state law requiring all public school students to participate in a compulsory daily flag salute and recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. The Court ruled, even in the dark days of World War II, that the patriotic requirement was unconstitutional because it forced citizens to “declare a belief.” This, it held, violated the First Amendment, whose purpose is to protect the “sphere of intellect and spirit” from “official control.” As Justice Robert Jackson wrote for the Court, in some of the most famous words in American constitutional history: 

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. 

Any student, and indeed any American citizen, would do well to read Barnette. Academic administrators on public campuses stand in vital need of understanding the limits this holding places on their power. They, like the members of the West Virginia Board of Education reined in by Barnette, are precisely the sort of “petty officials” who must understand that the Bill of Rights restrains their effort to violate our freedom to make the voluntary choices that belong to all free men and women. Barnette dealt with the case of school children. 

As we have seen, the constitutional protections of the rights of young adults are far, far greater. Barnette, both morally and legally, should stop abusive public administrators in their tracks.

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Political orthodoxies on campus

Under Barnette, it is unconstitutional for the government to adopt a point of view on a particular subject and force citizens to agree. Thus, the administration of a public college or university may impose certain requirements for student conduct, but it may not require statements of student belief. 

This has some very practical results. It would be unconstitutional under Barnette for a public university to impose ideological prerequisites for course admission: One could not be required to declare one’s agreement with the university’s nondiscrimination policy, for example, to be admitted to a civil rights course, or to declare oneself a feminist to take a course on feminism, or to declare oneself a Christian to take a course on Christianity.

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Mandatory “diversity training” and freshman orientation programs at which students are introduced to the university’s official viewpoint on issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation may well be unconstitutional under Barnette. Such sessions would most likely be constitutional if they were truly educational — for example, informing students of the university’s policies governing student conduct. If such sessions are aimed at forcing students to change their minds or adopt officially sanctioned attitudes, however, they may very well cross the line established by Barnette.  

The government is permitted to advance its own message only so long as people who disagree or who simply do not want to hear the message can take reasonable steps to avoid hearing it and have the absolute right to state their disagreement with that message.

Students should also be aware that in 2011, the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced that colleges and universities receiving any federal funding (that is, virtually all of them, both public and private) are now strongly encouraged to “implement preventive education programs” regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus. However, since 2011, this guidance has been the subject of back-and-forth rescission and implementation. In 2017, the Department of Education rescinded the guidance, and in 2020, issued new guidance that rolled back most of 2011’s changes, and raised the legal bar for defining hostile environment sexual harassment on campus to align with the Supreme Court’s definition from Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999). In 2024, the department issued new guidance in line with the 2011 letter’s standards, but because of legal challenges, this guidance only went into effect in 24 states. As of 2025, the Office of Civil Rights has stated that it will enforce the 2020 guidance. 

While many or all campus programs, in practice, may prove to be the types of truly educational sessions that pass constitutional muster and do not infringe upon freedom of conscience, they will likely vary considerably from campus to campus. As a result, students should still be alert to any mandatory educational program that requires participants to adopt an “official,” school-approved viewpoint regarding gender relationships or other subjects. 

Training students about the definition of sexual harassment is one thing; requiring students to believe, for example, that all men accused of sexual assault are presumptively guilty, as some universities have, is entirely another. We urge students to be vigilant about preserving their right to come to their own conclusions, even — indeed, especially — about contentious topics.