The First Amendment is seemingly under attack these days, a University of Illinois law professor says.

“We can’t have what we call a free exchange of ideas if we are only hearing one side and not hearing a counterargument,” says Lena Shapiro, director of the First Amendment Clinic. “We wind up not being challenged intellectually; we don’t learn how to defend and advance our own position.”

Shapiro cites a protest of a judge’s appearance at Stanford Law School, in which people simply heckled, thus accomplishing nothing because their style of protest did not change any minds. Shapiro says the protestors apparently made little or no attempt to learn the other side’s argument.

“There does seem to be a striking increase recently” in attempts to ban books, Shapiro says, citing research which counts more than 2,500 instances in the last school year alone, affecting more than four million children in 32 states.

“That’s very significant, and that certainly impacts those children’s education.”