A Legal Examination of Operative Tension Between the Marketplace of Ideas and the Neoliberal Marketplace

• In Event: Free Speech in School and on Campus

Abstract

This paper analyzes the marketplace of ideas analogy in modern First Amendment jurisprudence as it operationalizes on a neoliberal university campus. The study focuses on students—the group that has most publicly fueled societal discourse regarding campus free speech in recent years—to determine the extent to which the marketplace of ideas as a defense of free speech conflicts with the neoliberal behaviors that institutions increasingly rely on, even if their theoretical principles exhibit parallel logic. Preliminary findings from a legal-historical analysis of student speech jurisprudence suggest that the perceived shortcomings of higher education at present is not the result of a free speech ‘crisis,’ but rather, could be increasingly interpreted as a consequence of unchecked neoliberalism in the academy.

Author

• Gillian Patricia Foss, Louisiana State University