(from The Atlantic):
By Jonathan R. Cole
No great universities exist in the world without a deep institutional commitment to academic freedom, free inquiry, and free expression. For the past 60 years, American research universities have been vigilant against external and internal attempts to limit or destroy these values. The First Amendment scholar Geoffrey Stone has noted that free expression, in one form or another, has been continually under attack on campuses for the past 100 years. Today, these core university values are being questioned again, but from a new source: the students who are being educated at them.
What explains this recent outcry against free expression on campus? Multiple possible explanations exist, of course, including the hypothesis that parents have coddled a generation of youngsters to the point where students feel that they should not be exposed to anything harmful to their psyches or beliefs. Whether or not these psychological narratives are valid, there are, I believe, additional cultural, institutional, and societal explanations for what is going on. And the overarching theme is that today’s youngsters, beginning in preschool, are responding to living in a contrived culture of fear and distrust.
There’s hardly consensus among students on the forms or appropriateness of these restrictions on speech. Today, nearly half of a random sample of roughly 3,000 college students surveyed by Gallup earlier this year are supportive of restrictions on certain forms of free speech on campus, and 69 percent support disciplinary action against either students or faculty members who use intentionally offensive language or commit “microagressions”—speech they deem racist, sexist, or homophobic. According to a free-speech survey conducted by Yale last year, of those who knew what trigger warnings are, 63 percent would favor their professors using them—by attaching advisories to the books on their reading lists that might offend or disrespect some students, for example—while only 23 percent would oppose. Counterintuitively, liberal students are more likely than conservative students to say the First Amendment is outdated.
Consider a few recent cases: Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, Williams College, and Haverford College, among others schools, withdrew speaking invitations, including those for commencement addresses, because students objected to the views or political ideology of the invited speaker. Brandeis University began to monitor the class of a professor who had explained that Mexican immigrants to the United States are sometime called “wetbacks,” a comment about the history of a derogatory term that outraged some Mexican American students. Black students at Princeton University protested against the “racial climate on campus” and demanded that Woodrow Wilson’s name be removed from its school of Public and International Affairs. The chilling effect of these kind of restrictions on speech were not lost in 1947 on Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, who opined during the McCarthy period: “The question is not how many professors have been fired for their beliefs, but how many think they might be.” CONTINUE READING HERE