Kansas University’s Students for a Sustainable Future (SFASF) raised academic integrity concerns regarding the business school’s lecturer, Art Hall. I refer those young scholars to the opinion of Justice Louis Brandeis in Whitney v. California: “No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

SFASF is reportedly a member of a larger group called Unkoch My Campus (UMC). The ham-handed attempts of SFASF to discredit and silence Hall due to his relationship to the Koch brothers and their political and economic philosophy is an affront to liberalism, diversity and the freedom of association implicit in the First Amendment of our Constitution. Despite the tribulations of SFASF and UMC posed by Hall and his like-minded thinkers, KU is not an exclusive enclave of progressive-minded, “bigger government is better” advocates. There is plenty of room for faculty that argues for free market-based, private sector-led solutions.

SFASF should address any “falsehood and fallacies” in the argumentation of Hall’s publications and not his legitimate connection with highly successful businessmen whose views vastly diverge from those voiced in the stunted cloister of the progressive echo chamber inhabited by SFASF and UMC.