Americans With Disabilities Act Regulations Another Obstacle to Free Speech at Berkeley: New at Reason

Closed captioning can be prohibitively expensive for archived lectures the school wants to make available to the public.

John Stossel writes:

A third threat to free speech at University of California, Berkeley has led to more censorship than political rioters or college administrators.

It’s the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Berkeley is expensive. Out of state students must pay $60,000 a year. But for five years, Berkeley generously posted 20,000 of its professors’ lectures online. Anyone could watch them for free.

Then government regulators stepped in.

The Americans with Disabilities Act stipulates, “No qualified individual with a disability shall… be denied the benefits of… services.”

As with most laws, people can spend years debating what terms like “denied,” “benefits” and “services” mean.

President Obama’s eager regulators, in response to a complaint from activists, decided that Berkeley’s videos violated the ADA. The Justice Department sent the school a threatening letter: “Berkeley is in violation of title II… The Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit.”

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