A FREE SPEECH VICTORY EIGHT YEARS IN THE MAKING: $900,000 settlement points the way to making campus censors pay for unconstitutional abuses.

If individual administrators had to worry for even a second that they might be held personally liable for violating students’ clearly established constitutional rights, you can guarantee one thing: Incidents of abuses of student free speech and due process rights would plummet. As I explained last year in my announcement of FIRE’s Stand Up for Speech Litigation Project, many administrators choose to overreact to speech because they feel that there is no downside for doing so, whereas there is a host of potential consequences for failing to act, including harassment lawsuits, tort lawsuits, and investigations by the Department of Education. However, administrators’ fear of personal liability would likely often outweigh their fear of these other consequences, making them think twice before violating student and faculty rights. But insurance and university policies undermine this potentially elegant solution.