UNC Wilmington Professor Mike Adams Defends Campus Free Speech, Due Process During Congressional Hearing

University of North Carolina Wilmington Professor Mike Adams aggressively defended campus free speech and due process during a congressional hearing on Thursday.

UNC Wilmington, Professor Mike Adams was the star of a Thursday congressional hearing on the state of intellectual freedom in America. During his testimony, Adams spoke about issues he faced on his campus as a conservative Republican member of the faculty. Adams specifically noted that conservative and Christian students were often subjected to unconstitutional speech and funding restrictions.

As bad as my ordeal was, conservative and Christian students on the campuses I visit have it much worse. They are routinely confined to unconstitutional speech zones and punished under unconstitutional speech codes. Their groups are routinely denied recognition or denied funding that left-leaning groups get almost automatically. Generally speaking, these students are not well versed in constitutional law. They simply do not know the university is violating their rights. To make matters worse, administrators routinely deceive these students about the scope of their rights.

Adams also highlighted a policy from the Obama administration that limited due process rights for students accused of sexual assault on college campuses. Adams noted that university risked losing their funding if they wouldn’t agree to the policies, which lowered the burden of proof for such accusations to the lowest standard possible.

During the Obama administration, we saw something that was unprecedented in the history of education policy. Under the guise of enforcing Title IX, the Obama Department of Education actually made the receipt of federal funding contingent upon depriving students accused of sexual assault of basic constitutional protections. Universities were coerced into weakening basic due process protections. Now, it is time to reverse course and make the receipt of federal education funding contingent upon honoring the Constitution, rather than violating it.

Adams finished by urging the committee members to use their authority as members of the Congress to ensure that public universities uphold the principles in the Constitution.