This is the article that sparked my interest in this:
In short, the author (Matt Yglesias) argues that the claimed rising tide of illiberalism that’s not allowing speech on campus is much less significant than portrayed, and in fact political attitudes on both the left and the right are becoming more in favor of free speech rather than less. He cites a polling trend:
Support for allowing the speaker has risen relatively consistently over time for all of these hypothetical speakers except for the racist. By this, I think it’s reasonable to say that society has been growing less tolerant of racism (support for allowing the racist rose a tad in the 80s and declined a tad in the 90s and 00s, but is close to flat), but more in favor of free speech in general.
The polling data also broke down the results by political ideology. From looking at the curves for self-identified liberals, moderates, and conservatives, liberals generally had higher support for allowing the homosexual, anti-theist, militarist (!) and communist to speak, and about the same or slightly less support for allowing the racist to speak. If I’m reading those curves right, then it’s reasonable to assert that liberals generally are more likely to support someone with extreme views being allowed to speak than conservatives. I’ll also note that those describing themselves as “extremely conservative” had lower tolerances for most of the speakers than the other groups if I’m reading it right (the curves presented are kind of small so I’m having to estimate).
I’ve long suspected this to be the case. We live in a country with over 300 million people. It’s easy to cherrypick a handful of incidents to construct a narrative that free speech is under attack by the left, and conservatives are the victims.
I’m still against deplatforming on college campuses, but it’s very low on my list of concerns.
Polling data only shows what people think. It doesn’t show what people do, especially the very active fringe. It only takes a minority to make a big stink and shut someone down. I suspect the vast majority of students, both liberal and conservative, aren’t participating in free speech shut-downs, so aggregate data on beliefs isn’t telling us much about what actually happens.
If so, then I think the main thrust of the article is supported – that this is just a very few fringe bad-actors, and it says little or nothing about liberals as a whole, or about campus and societal attitudes towards free speech as a whole.
Probably. After all, it seems that ground zero for shutting down free speech is college campuses, and college students (and faculty) are a minority of Americans of either political stripe. I think the allegation that you hear most is that Millenials are being raised as special snowflakes who can’t bear to hear views that conflict with their world-view (a bit of an exaggeration, but I think you get the point).
I don’t think it is particularly illuminating. Liberals support free speech for everyone except racists. Since non-PC speech gets defined as racism, this is a restatement of the idea that liberals will tolerate any ideas, except those with which they disagree.
Hell, Mona Charen, a conservative who apparently wasn’t quite far right enough, needed to be protected by security guards after her speech at CPAC, where she was roundly booed during her speech.
But that’s not supported by the data. If you look at folks in the middle of both political views, they all have roughly the same tolerance level for racist speech-- about 50-60%. What’s interesting is that both of the extremes (liberal and conservative) have a higher tolerance of racists speech.
I doubt those lamenting the decline of free speech in colleges would be surprised at these results. More tolerance for gays, atheists, communists, and military authoritarians is pretty much a part of 21st century society.
In any case, the more disturbing effect of the crazed leftist violence is not the shutdown of speakers, it is the chilling effect on discourse. If your fellow students are screaming in someone’s face that they are a racist or transphobic because of some free-market position they take, I doubt many will have the courage to take those positions in a classroom.
Without data breaking down the survey responses by age (or other polling data), I’m skeptical that anything more than a very small minority of college students have these fringe beliefs.
For all the right wing loves to obsess over the Problem of Free Speech on Campus, I’ve never seen evidence there is a problem. The much publicized incidents where some weirdo like Milo Yiannopoulos has a talk cancelled are a tiny fraction of Milo Yiannopoulos’s own speaking engagements, and to be honest I don’t think Yiannopolous himself minds, since it gives him lots more publicity and sympathy for the 96% of his speeches that aren’t cancelled. If I were the business manager for someone like that I’d advise having a speech cancelled by a protest at least a few times a year. People shit their pants about Jordan Peterson, but Peterson’s making millions all the same, in part BECAUSE people shit their pants about the things he says.
Of course, jackasses gonna jackass, and some people will protest and scream at the drop of a hat, and some people don’t give a shit about free speech, it’s true. But this was just as true when I went to university in 1990-1994 as it is today, and it wasn’t a new phenomenon then. Campuses were certainly way more ferocious in this regard during Vietnam. If free speech wasn’t shut down in 1969 or 1991, why should I believe this alleged chilling effect is going to be different this time?
The obsession conservative writers have with free speech on campus baffles me.
I think you misunderstand. I didn’t say that college campuses were hotbeds of anti-free speech sentiment. I just said that seems to be where the action is, to the extent that there is action. But it’s not just Milo who is affected. Bill Maher had issues as well.
Whether or not things were worse in the 60s, I honestly don’t remember. But that was a long time ago. There does seem to be a rise in anti-free speech sentiment on college campuses even if it’s not an everyday occurrence.
Is racism clearly defined in the poll? An anti-immigration speaker may not be considered racist by conservatives but (if what I’ve seen both on campuses, on Twitter, and even on this board) is fairly likely to be considered racist by liberals.
