This article originally appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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Four years ago, as Texas Republicans worried that conservative voices were being silenced at universities, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill that enshrined new free speech protections on campuses.
“Some colleges are banning free speech on college campuses. Well, no more because I’m about to sign a law that protects free speech on college campuses in Texas,” Abbott said in 2019.
And six months ago, during a celebration of Free Speech Week, University of Texas at Austin administrators touted the school’s expansive protections for free speech on campus — including speech that was anti-war or considered hate speech.
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“Hate speech is not a category of speech the government can restrict,” Amanda Cochran-McCall, the university’s vice president for legal affairs, said at a school-affiliated Free Speech Week in October. “Imagine if the government at the whim of a political party could just decide at any time what constitutes hate speech, and then just start arresting people for engaging in it.”