As graduation season approaches, colleges across the country are locking down commencement speakers to address the class of 2017. Harvard got Mark Zuckerberg (a Harvard dropout). Hillary Clinton is speaking at Wellesley, Bernie Sanders at Brooklyn College. Joe Biden will speak to my seniors at Colby. But if this year is anything like last, other invitees will prove more controversial, sparking another round of debates over “no-platforming”: the practice of opposing campus speakers.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a libertarian group favored by the Koch and DeVos families, refers to graduation season as “disinvitation season,” because of an apparently growing number of cancelled commencement speakers. But as FIRE itself has documented, this debate is no longer seasonal, but year-round. Since last spring, we’ve seen controversies over scheduled campus speakers including Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, and most recently Ann Coulter, whose speech next week at the University of California at Berkeley was cancelled amid security concerns. (Coulter has rejected Berkeley’s offer to reschedule the event for May, saying she’ll show up next Thursday, as originally planned.)

As with similar campus controversies, the criticism of Berkeley was not confined to the political right. “Obviously Ann Coulter’s outrageous—to my mind, off the wall,” Sanders told The Huffington Post last week. “But you know, people have a right to give their two cents-worth, give a speech, without fear of violence and intimidation.” He said that it was “a sign of intellectual weakness” to “boo, or shut her down, or prevent her from coming,” adding, “What are you afraid of—her ideas? Ask her the hard questions. Confront her intellectually.”

Some argued that no-platforming doesn’t work, or may backfire. “Pushing ideas off campus or underground will not shut down controversial viewpoints,” Suzanne Nossel, PEN America’s executive director, said. In a recent essay on attempts by students at Claremont McKenna College to block a talk by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, a critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf worried that more powerful political adversaries might someday use marginalized students’ tactics against them:

If these students succeed in changing free-speech norms in any realm, so that expression is more routinely suppressed when dubbed injurious or hateful or libelous, the history of speech restrictions on and off campus—a history routinely ignored by student censors—suggests marginalized communities will be hardest hit by their pyrrhic victory.

Students should take these warnings seriously, because left-leaning students aren’t the only ones disinviting speakers. Barack Obama and Alice Walker are among many speakers the right has attempted to disinvite. But to call students “censors” fails to understand what no-platforming entails in the broader context of higher education and its core mission. Rejecting campus speakers is not an assault on free speech. Rather, like so many other decisions made every day by college students, teachers, and administrators, it’s a value judgment.