But we don’t want to let too much time elapse before taking note of this year’s Muzzle Awards from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

The “awards” — like the Razzies — recognize bad behavior, not good.

What’s notable about this year’s “winners” (drawn from 2016 events) is that many of them seem to carry over a theme from the previous year.

Last year, a Muzzle was awarded to higher education in general, due to the undeniable — and indefensible — trend of stifling free speech on college campuses. 

Speaking for the Jefferson Center, Clay Hansen noted at the time that campuses historically have been at the center of the free-speech debate — traditionally with the aim of encouraging and protecting freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression. Campuses were places of openness when outside forces wished to restrict them.

Now, he said, the opposite is occurring. Colleges and universities (and their faculty and students) are restricting free speech, while outside interests are seeking to protect and expand this freedom.

That was last year.

This year’s Muzzles show, discouragingly, that little has changed. Many of the awards again went to educational institutions, both higher and secondary. They include the following examples:

» A California community college restricted a student from passing out Spanish-language Constitutions outside a designated “free-speech zone.”

What could better illustrate the Kafka-esque nature of these restrictions than an effort to limit dissemination of the U.S. Constitution, the very foundation of our liberties — and the home of the First Amendment?

» A Florida high school suspended a student who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Hillary for Prison.” The shirt prompted complaints from other students, who disrupted class to protest it.

The important point here is that the school punished the speech, not the disruption.

Disrupting class should be a punishable offense — but making (or wearing) a comment about politics ought not be. The unruly students were the ones who disrupted class — and the school district lost a teachable moment in which it could have explained the concepts of debate, dialog and respect for differences of opinion.

The stifling of free speech at colleges, universities and public schools has been going on for far longer than just the past two years, of course, as a look at the list of Muzzles over the past 25 years will confirm.

So it’s no wonder that so much of our discourse in the public square today is a deformed version of what free speech ought to look like. We’ve been graduating class after class of students who have been taught that if speech makes them uncomfortable, it is therefore bad.

Instead of protecting free speech, we’ve been protecting young people from growth, from new ideas, from the opportunity to flex their intellectual muscles and define and refine their own beliefs.

We’ve taught them that listening to the other side of the debate isn’t necessary — that instead, silencing the other side is not just acceptable but preferred.

And we ask why debates in the public square today are so polarized?

“The cost of free speech is sometimes we have to hear things we don’t want to hear,” reminded Jefferson Center Director Josh Wheeler this year. “There is a price to pay for free speech, but the benefits far outweigh that cost.”