ABSTRACT
The debates surrounding ideological diversity and free speech on campus are often driven by individual examples. There has been some effort to collect more extensive data on the ideological diversity of members of university faculties, but there has been little effort to examine a broad set of the public speakers on campus who often generate public controversy over free speech. In this essay, I hope to provide some context for thinking about these public incidents of intolerance for campus speakers by considering who exactly speaks on college campuses. Is it the case that colleges have insulated themselves from diverse public debate, and thus the occasional conservative speaker like Charles Murray face unique challenges? Or are conservative speakers regularly welcomed to campus but only rarely obstructed? This essay will describe public intellectual landscape on campus from two perspectives. One will be a sample of several hundred college commencement speakers from the spring of 2017, and the other will be a sample of public lectures across an academic year at a sample of institutions as reported by college newspapers.
