But a critic of the bill suggested that its punitive approach to protest was itself a threat to free speech rights. “Our colleges and universities should be a place to vigorously debate ideas and ultimately learn from one another,” State Representative Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Instead, this campus gag rule creates an atmosphere of fear where free expression and dissent are discouraged.”

For years, I have been a staunch critic of activists who shut down invited speakers with whom they disagree, whether through force or sustained chanting and disruption. And I agree with the premise that students who repeatedly engage in that sort of behavior should be punished. Denying members of an academic community the ability to host controversial speakers, or to hear hotly contested ideas, jeopardizes the core missions of undergraduate education and knowledge generation.

Administrators at many institutions of higher education have been derelict in protecting those missions from censorious student activists with authoritarian tendencies. What’s more, recent, prominently reported shut-downs of speakers like Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald have caused faculty and students hoping to avoid the shutdown of their next event to shy away from speakers who might be controversial—a chilling effect that could be reversed by clearly communicating that denying others the right to speak will no longer be tolerated on college campuses.

But I had several misgivings about the Wisconsin bill as originally drafted that went beyond my general aversion to state legislators trying to micromanage student life at public universities, especially ones that haven’t themselves experienced a rash of shutdowns.

The original language was based on model legislation from the Goldwater Institute. Its features were described as follows by Wisconsin’s legislative analyst in the official summary:

The policy must include a range of disciplinary sanctions for anyone who engages in violent, abusive, indecent, profane, boisterous, obscene, unreasonably loud, or other disorderly conduct that interferes with the free expression of others. In addition, the policy must provide that in disciplinary cases involving expressive conduct, students are entitled to a disciplinary hearing under published procedures that include specified rights. Also, the second time that a student is found responsible for interfering with the expressive rights of others, the policy must require the student to be suspended for a minimum of one semester or expelled.

I objected most to the language that requires punishment not just when student protesters prevent an event from happening, or disrupt it in a way that denies others free speech, but when there is mere interference with another person’s speech or expression. Should a protester be punished for briefly interrupting a speech with a sign, then leaving voluntarily when asked? How about loudly booing a speaker or interrupting and talking over a speaker during a question and answer session? I have been disrupted while speaking to college students, but never in a way that denied me the ability to express myself or stopped the event in question. There was never a need to bring formal discipline into those situations.