Also, the fact that only a small minority of college liberals are agitating against free speech on campus doesn’t mean the problem is insignificant. The alt-right protestors in Charlottesville only represented a tiny minority of right-wingers, too, but they still caused a tremendous amount of damage.
The problem is not that there are a few nutjobs on campus trying to shout down speakers it is that they are winning in many places. When the crazy people were yelling at the professors at Yale because they didn’t want halloween costumes censored that was not the problem. The problem was that the protestors suffered no consequences and the professors are no longer at the campus. The professor who was protested at Evergreen for not participating in the Day of Absence had to leave his job. The professor who participated in the Charles Murray lecture at Middlebury College is still suffering from the assault and no protesters were even suspended. What the protesters want is to define what is acceptable to be said on campus. The speakers and the student groups inviting them have to pay extra for security now which makes it harder for the speakers to come to campus. It doesn’t matter if 95% of students believe in free speech on campus if the other 5% can control who is allowed to speak and what they are allowed to say.
This does not adequately address the point made by Shodan (and later Blalron).
Suppose, as the OP states, the level of support among left-wingers for allowing a “racist” speaker is the same at it was in 1970, but the definition of racist has expanded dramatically since that time, from encompassing KKK ideologies to encompassing views that were and are pretty much mainstream right-wing views. In that case, it would simultaneously be true that support for allowing “racist” speakers has remained constant while tolerance of opposing viewpoints has decreased dramatically. In light of this, I think you can’t establish anything at all about tolerance until this is clarified.
Somewhat related to the above, I think it’s unsurprising that there would be more support for a speaker favoring a military coup than for a racist. A military coup is a position that has virtually no support in the US, and having such a speaker is not threatening to many people. Racism in its various forms is something which has or is perceived to have much more support, and as such is much more threatening. (The connection to the prior paragraph is that semi/quasi/supposed racism might provoke much more vociferous opposition than genuine actual racism, by virtue of being more commonly held and thus more threatening.)
There’s reason to think the situation isn’t quite as rosy as the OP paints it.
A new Gallup poll finds (for instance) that 37% of students find it OK to shout down speakers, and that 10% think it’s acceptable to use violence to keep them from speaking.
That’s certainly a big enough group to cause trouble.
Another study finds disturbing attitudes towards free speech on campus:
“Just ask college students. A fifth of undergrads now say it’s acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes “offensive and hurtful statements.”…when students were asked whether the First Amendment protects “hate speech,” 4 in 10 said no. This is, of course, incorrect. Speech promoting hatred — or at least, speech perceived as promoting hatred — may be abhorrent, but it is nonetheless constitutionally protected.”
And while the free-speech group FIRE reports that the number of colleges with the most restrictive speech policies is declining, 90% still have rules that either explicitly restrict free speech or could be applied to limit it.
“Nothing to see here, move along” is not an adequate response.
If you look at the underlying analysis (here) it looks like the survey participants were asked about “a person who believes that Blacks are genetically inferior”, which is what they use as the definition of “racist.” So while I agree that there has been an effort to expand the definition of “racist speaker,” this survey doesn’t seem to address that.
Yes, I think this is exactly the problem. The tactic of the minority of authoritarian/regressive nutjobs is to attempt to de-platform anyone who disagrees with them, calling their speech literal “violence”; and then to lump anyone who disagrees with these anti-free speech tactics as equally guilty of promoting “violence”. It takes courage to challenge this narrative, and I think too often the majority are being cowed into silence.
OK. “Suppose” you guys come up with some data to support whether or not that has actually happened.
I agree. I had not seen that definition, and I withdraw that point.
I don’t know about that in particular. Right wing radicals are pretty well in control of the machinery of the state at this point, though, and they have far more effective tools, including shutting down entire centers that they disagree with. That is, in my opinion, a far greater threat to academic freedom than a couple of trolls like Milo and Maher getting shouted at by some undergrads and adjuncts.
But if you really want something equivalent, there were always the terroristic death threats made against Evergreen students, or the death threats against Anita Sarkeesian when she tried to speak on campus. These are possibly as alarming as the quiet shutdown of unpopular political opinions by the state, as happened in NC, but definitely much more alarming than hollering at Milo.
No, they’re in favour of free speech for racists too, just a bit less strongly than the other groups. Look at the graphs in the linked article, approval is still above 50%.
Anyway, as others have noted, it’s generally moderates who are least supportive of free speech, liberals and conservatives are more so.
Makes sense, when you think about it.
The further removed you are from the political middle of the road, the more likely you are to have your own free speech threatened.
I think the article misses the point entirely. I don’t think the current outrage is over the fact that there are weenies who will protest speech that they find offensive. The problem is that we expect universities to educate and mature these weenies, but that instead universities are coddling them by giving in to the their demands. In other words, we don’t expect the principles of free speech to be upheld by the students as much as we expect them to be upheld by the educators responsible for those students. A poll of students regarding whether they would be opposed to these categories of speech is therefore meaningless, and a poll of educational administrators asking whether they would bow to protesters’ demands to shut down these categories of speech would be more relevant to identifying whether there is a rising problem.
IMHO, few school administrators would admit to it in a poll, but when push came to shove, administrators would be more likely than they would admit to bow to demands of protesters when the speech was claimed to be offensive to high profile protected classes (race, sexual orientation, gender, etc.). I believe this would be the case only for a small minority of universities - more than in recent history, but still very few.
And never forget that complaining about free speech on campuses is part of a very deliberate campaign by some conservatives to discredit not only the left, but the public education system as a whole. The exaggeration of the threat, coupled with deliberate rabble-rousing by Milo et al, is pretty transparent, and it’s dismaying how many people are snookered by this bush-league gambit.
How did you reach this conclusion?
I think the moot point is whether the threat is exaggerated. And one way to discredit this campaign by the right is to stop giving them ammunition. Perhaps it’s only a small minority doing this, but these are not false flag operations.
I have watched conservatives attack public education in a lot of different ways. I have watched conservatives complain about the pernicious liberal control of public universities. And I have watched conservatives exaggerate the effects of leftist censorship on campus.
When the same people are doing similar things that have similar ends, there’s a certain Occam’s Razor to imputing the same motive behind their actions.
That is, if you don’t mind me saying so, exactly the type of intellectually dishonest nonsense that we expect from Matt Yglesias and Vox. Here’s the first and most obvious way in which he tries to mislead his readers. He begins by saying that he’s discussing the climate involving college students on campus. Then he cites survey data about college graduates. College graduates and college students are obviously two separate groups of people. The set of all college graduates contains people who were in college 20, 40, or 60 years ago. A survey of college graduates tells us nothing about what present-day college students think. Yglesias presents no data whatsoever about where present-day college students stand on freedom of speech.
We could say a lot more about Yglesias’ dishonesty. He mentions “the heckling of Christina Hoff Sommers” and links the words to this article. The article mentions of lot more than heckling. Sommers was giving a speech at Lewis and Clark College presenting facts that rebutted some common left-wing claims. A group of students loudly disrupted her speech, and then the “dean of diversity” told her to end the speech. Obviously being denied the right to speak is a lot worse than mere heckling.
But instead of picking on Yglesias endlessly, let’s look at real survey data about college students:
[ul]
[li]81% of respondents stated that they agreed with the following statement: “Words can be a form of violence.”[/li][li]Fewer than half of the respondents believe that the First Amendment protects hate speech.[/li][li]A public university invites a very controversial speaker to an on-campus event. The speaker is known for making offensive and hurtful statements. A student group opposed to the speaker uses violence to prevent the speaker from speaking. Do you agree or disagree that the student group’s actions are acceptable? 19% of the respondents stated that they agreed with the student group’s actions, while 81% stated that they disagreed.[/li][/ul]
So I would agree that it’s not true that free speech has been wiped out and a massive wave of censorship is sweeping the country’s institutions of higher education. However, it definitely is true that there are areas of concern, with many students opposed to free speech and even more not understanding what the First Amendment even means. Since universities are supposed to educate their students, one would hope they would look at the data and taken action to improve the situation by teaching students the difference between words and violence and explaining what the First Amendment actually says.
Unless you consider the term “emotional violence” to be a near-oxymoron, then you’re off-base here. Of course words can be a “kind” of violence–at best, denying this is a matter of semantics, and at worst, it’s blatantly ignoring the very real psychological harm that, say, a parent can inflict on a child through saying terrible things to the child.
That’s a funny take on things.
I love how you handle this. You link to that same article, but lets see what the article ACTUALLY says the dean of diversity did:
He didn’t tell, he asked; he didn’t say to end the speech, but to wrap it up quickly.
If you want us to join with your outrage at people who do not correctly represent the content of their cites, be careful where that outrage goes next.
Well, I’m a liberal and I support free speech for everyone, even racists, so there’s that.
I feel the fastest way to turn people against racism is to let them hear the racists speak.