Nate Silver's "Free Speech Is in Trouble"

An excellent article about a recent survey of college students, by a man who knows a thing or two about surveys. A couple of short excerpts, though you should read the whole thing:

[A]fter seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don't concern over "cancel culture" or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left….

College students aren't very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that's true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with.

Moreover, this attitude is broad-based — not just at elite schools. I was frankly surprised at how tepid student support was. A significant minority of students don't even have much tolerance for controversial speech on positions they presumably agree with….

People obviously have strong feelings about abortion, and a complete abortion ban is unpopular. Still, this is a commonly-articulated, garden-variety unpopular political opinion that doesn't make any sort of factual claim and can't reasonably be construed as hateful. You'd think even students with a tentative, half-baked belief in free speech principles would tolerate it. And yet, 57 percent of students — including 68 percent of liberals — thought a speaker expressing this anti-abortion viewpoint shouldn't be allowed on campus. That number kind of shocked me….

[I]s there a lot of hypocrisy around free speech? Of course there is. Republicans who rail against wokeness put significant limits of their own on academic freedom. Supposed "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk has often taken a censorious approach toward content he doesn't like while tolerating censorship by foreign governments.

While I've somehow made it this far without using the words "Israel" or "Palestine", recent international events have uncovered instances of hypocrisy too. I have no interest in refereeing every incident, but cases like this — in which editor-in-chief Michael Eisen was fired from the life sciences journal eLife for retweeting an Onion article that expressed sympathy with Palestinians — fall under any definition of "cancel culture"….

And although I'm not sure I have any business talking to college students — although I have delivered a number of guest lectures and commencement addresses — if I were, I'd use this as a teaching moment, telling students that now that they've found out what it's like to stand up for a controversial, unpopular position, I'd hope they'd be more respectful of the rights of others to do the same.

Because unless someone is willing to do that — to defend free speech in a principled, non-hypocritical way — the game theory says it's just going to be a race to the bottom. And given the increasingly tenuous commitment to it in many corners of American society, free speech is going to lose out.

Thanks to the Media Law Resource Center (MLRC) MediaLawDaily for the pointer.

Comments

[loki13]

Based on personal observation, this is accurate.

I would caveat this by saying that generally, debates about free speech (especially those on the internet, especially especially those in the comments here) aren't really principled defenses, but simply some attempt to say, "Free speech for the positions I like, and some attempt to argue why the stuff I don't like is totally cool to censor."

That said, I barely even see lip service about free speech principles among many high school and college students today. It's barely even a concern. Honestly, the idea that "sticks and stone may break my bones, but words will never hurt me," seems foreign to many of them. Robust discourse, the type of speech that will offend, provoke, and shock, is anathema.

While these are generalizations, I have to agree with Silver- I have concerns about the shift in attitudes toward free speech. I do think it would be helpful to try and explore why this has occurred, as opposed to simply noting it has happened, but it's not a trend I want to continue.

[AmosArch]

the left were the supposed 'defenders of free speech' in the olden days. The so called 'Free Speech Movement' was founded in Berzerkley. Imagine that. Berzerkley of all places. Then once they gained power we found out the left really didn't care for the concept itself. It was just a means to an end for them conveniently discarded. In fact some of the alumni of the so called 'Free Speech Movement' are active in suppressing it today.

[loki13]

As usual, you don't know what you're talking about.

The Free Speech Movement was founded in Berkeley in the 1960s. Which means that a freshman at Cal in 1964 when the movement started would be ... what ... 77 years old today? And this has what to do with high school and college freshmen right now?

I get that you like to attribute things to "the other" (for you, the monolithic "left" which consists of all those things you don't like ... which is a pretty long list!) but times change, people change, and issues change over time.

Besides, it is instructive that instead of attempting to find some common ground - of which there should be some if you actually tried to read what I wrote - you immediately launched into a content free condemnation of "the left."

KTHX!

[Kazinski]

It's also worth noting that at the time the UC system and UC Berkeley banned any organized or public speech on topics like the civil rights movement, disarmament, etc.

Now I do have to say that was probably a golden age for education, in terms of allowing the university to fulfill its mission undistracted by today's campus circus. As a hanger on around the Berkeley campus in the mid 70's it was definitely a circus.

But those speech restrictions were obviously unconstitutional.

[Brett Bellmore]

Think "zero tolerance"; It's been going on in K-12 for long enough that the generation in higher ed all went through it. And what was it generally zero tolerance for, when you get right down to it?

Speech.

If I had to identify the biggest mistake the right ever made, it was thinking that "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach.", and avoiding education for industry. This handed the left the task of passing on our culture to the next generation, and they have been assiduous about warping it in the process.

[Armchair]

I would say it was the big push towards political correctness and "microaggressions" which made a major contribution towards limiting free speech.

This is coupled with a more authoritarian outlook the liberal class has taken on lately, as they've gained the proverbial reigns of power in media, movies, and government.

https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/state-free-speech-tolerance-america#overview

[Randal]

If I had to identify the biggest mistake the right ever made, it was thinking that “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach.”, and avoiding education for industry.

What, exactly, do you see “the right” out there “doing?” Seems to me like “industry” is also dominated by progressives. And the “deep state” too. And the woke military.

Are they all cops, or what? Farmers?

[JesseAz]

Actual workers vs those who "manage" and push DE&I. People who actually make things. People who actually do things. Your bias is transparent. You likely think IG is more beneficial than food.

[Randal]

So...

food

... farmers, then.

[JasonT20]

Actual workers vs those who “manage” and push DE&I. People who actually make things. People who actually do things.

This is why that George Bernard Shaw quote is so ridiculous. Teaching is doing. Teaching has its own skill set in addition to the content knowledge. It is not something a person that wasn't that good in that area could just fall back on when they can't be successful in that area.

The real mistake conservatives made over the last few decades was to think that anyone can teach successfully, so you can staff schools with the also-rans and women that like having the same time off as their kids. They did that because that way, they can easily justify paying them much less than other college-educated professionals and enjoy the lower taxes that doing so allows. And when people on the left complain about low teacher pay, they can point things like how education majors have lower test scores than the average college students as evidence that they were right! I mean, it's not like such an argument is getting the causality backwards. Who would argue that the low pay and respect (from the right) for teachers would result in higher performing students recognizing that teaching is far less desirable and avoid it? It is not like they can make double what a high school physics teacher earns if they become an engineer in some states.

[Armchair]

The classic example was computer science.

The really good programmers would be at a company programming (or running their own company). The ones who were kinda crap at it...well, they could always teach for 1/3rd the salary

[JasonT20]

Programming and teaching, even teaching programming in college (or math in K-12), are not the same skill set. Trying to compare them as you did is fatally flawed for that reason. That is why “Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach” is a stupid aphorism. If teaching attracts people with less raw talent than other professions (using things like SAT scores as proxies for raw talent), then the low pay and status of teaching would be the cause of that, not a justification for the low pay and status.

[Armchair]

You almost got there. You're correct in some respects.

Being a good programmer, and being able to teach programming aren't necessarily the same skill sets. The person who is teaching programming doesn't (necessarily) have the good skill set the actual programmer does.

The relatively lower pay is because it's a much easier "skill set" to obtain.

[JasonT20]

The relatively lower pay is because it’s a much easier “skill set” to obtain.

Is it? How do you know that?

[Brett Bellmore]

Conservatives gravitated towards what they saw as “doing” professions, like engineering. This made it easy for the liberals to take over management, which put them in a position to control hiring and promotion. For instance, I attended Michigan Tech, a university famous for turning out engineers who stayed engineers, never moved into management. Because you attended MTU if you WANTED to be an engineer.

So a few years ago, I was mentoring a newly hired engineer who was supposed to replace me when I retired. Sadly, he was not the sort of engineer who really wanted to be an engineer, he moved on to another company after a couple years, to take a job in project management. Yeah, HE was a liberal. He might not be doing much engineering now, but he's now in a position to decide who gets ahead doing engineering. And he's not terribly fond of conservatives...

Basically I’d say that, every time conservatives had a choice between the high ground and the low ground, they chose the low ground, ceding the high ground to the left. It's been a deadly mistake.

[JasonT20]

This made it easy for the liberals to take over management...

What world do you live in where managers in private businesses are liberals?

[Brett Bellmore]

The one where they're actually hiring DIE people, rather than showing them the door?

[JasonT20]

What if the managers evaluate their workplace and the labor market and decide that those practices are actually beneficial to their bottom line? Are you saying that a conservative would rather take a hit to profits than use those practices?

You are assuming the conclusion that paying attention to the personal dynamics of your employees in terms of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on, and making sure that all employees are welcome is going to be a negative to the business’s ability to compete.

[edit:] Business management, whether lower level managers or executives, is about looking at the facts of the market and behavior of its employees and finding ways to optimize productivity, isn't it? Politics shouldn't matter, just the facts of what works and what doesn't.

[Sarcastr0]

Brett has decided his analysis of business judgement is so correct that anyone doing differently must be putting aside profits for a leftist agenda.

[JasonT20]

If I had to identify the biggest mistake the right ever made, it was thinking that “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach.”, and avoiding education for industry. This handed the left the task of passing on our culture to the next generation, and they have been assiduous about warping it in the process.

It isn't just the lack of respect that they give the teaching professions, though that George Bernard Shaw line (it's actually from a play, so I don't know if Shaw believed it or it was the perspective of a character the audience is supposed to disagree with) does seem to be wholly integrated with conservative thoughts on education in the present. It is also the actual policies, especially in preK-12 education, that they implement when they have control.

I give credit to actual libertarians for believing in school choice as a policy to improve educational outcomes for all students, even if I think that they are wrong about that. Conservative Republicans, on the other hand, have really shown that their goal is to weaken public education and public teacher unions that support Democrats, keeping funding lower so they can have lower taxes, and making what public funds do go toward education available for conservative Christian parents to send their kids to Christian private schools that will indoctrinate them in social conservative ideology. (And, of course, keep the gay and trans students out.)

[Dr. Ed 2]

"If I had to identify the biggest mistake the right ever made, it was thinking that “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach.”, and avoiding education for industry"

As one who has spent a career in educating fighting this, I agree.

[Commenter_XY]

I am glad Professor Volokh has been out, front and center, on the free speech issue. It is not just free speech; it is also freedom of thought...for what is speech but expressed thought?

You are definitely not alone is your concerns. How do you stop the race to the bottom, though?

[loki13]

If I had a solution that would change the attitudes of "the youth of today," I would be ... well, doing something much more lucrative.

Probably involving selling them something, or TikTok.

[Commenter_XY]

TikTok 4 Good? 🙂

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

I am glad Professor Volokh has been out, front and center, on the free speech issue.

It has been more "right and righter."

Artie Ray Lee Wayne Jim-Bob Kirkland says "hello," everyone -- but not directly, of course, because he was banned from this blog's Board of Censors for making fun of (or was it saying mean things about?) conservatives.

[Stephen Lathrop]

I do think it would be helpful to try and explore why this has occurred,

Look at the comments here. Can you find even a hint that anyone commenting here notices that what now proves problematic was previously speech which could rarely get published? That is a gigantic change.

Previously, private publishers hired editors who reviewed would-be contributions before publishing them. Those editors mostly declined to publish inanely offensive advocacy, because they regarded it, correctly, as bad business.

Now, without prior editing, inanely offensive advocates publish directly, without mediation by anyone. They compete to publish world-wide, anonymously, cost free, deliberately offensive and often useless advocacy. It's still bad business. However, almost none of it gets pre-filtered anymore, so the proportion of public offense, and sometimes public harm, has multiplied many-fold.

Fundamental practices of expressive activity got revolutionized. And everyone is going around muttering how mysterious it is that public acceptance of expressive freedom became less welcoming? Look around and try to notice what changed.

[JasonT20]

Fundamental practices of expressive activity got revolutionized. And everyone is going around muttering how mysterious it is that public acceptance of expressive freedom became less welcoming? Look around and try to notice what changed.

Nah, much easier to assume that it is the fault of our ideological opponents.

[Brett Bellmore]

Your whole view of the matter is warped by your desire to shoehorn platforms into "publishing". When they're actually more like printing houses, just providing a service to the people who actually exercise the editorial control.

It's like complaining that the telephone company isn't curating your phone calls, it's a category error.

The exercise of editorial control by internet platforms is a recent development, that they pursued only AFTER gaining market dominance. They grew while acting as neutral conduits.

[JasonT20]

The exercise of editorial control by internet platforms is a recent development, that they pursued only AFTER gaining market dominance. They grew while acting as neutral conduits.

That is your impression of the history, perhaps, but it is something you would need to support with verifiable facts rather than to just assert that it was true. Did YouTube only start worrying about copyright after it grew? Or neo-Nazi propaganda? Perhaps if you find surveys or research into the practices of various platforms and services from ~2000-2010 that show what you're saying, then your point can stand.

[JasonT20]

When they’re actually more like printing houses, just providing a service to the people who actually exercise the editorial control.

Nothing compares to the speed and scale of the internet to serve as a useful analogy. People that wanted the service of a printing company weren't able to disseminate their words to millions or even just thousands of people for hardly any cost of money and time.

[Stephen Lathrop]

People that wanted the service of a printing company weren’t able to disseminate their words to millions or even just thousands of people for hardly any cost of money and time.

True of course. But it is critically important to the future of free expression that a great many more people come to understand that doing that remains impossible. It is impossible now, even with the internet.

People I call internet utopians presume the internet is a cost-free resource. In fact, costs vary according to what you are trying to do on the internet. If you are trying to use the internet as a means to operate a publishing business, costs remain considerable. Facebook, for instance, has a U.S. operating budget approximately ten times greater than the operating budget of the New York Times. Facebook's entire operating budget is about double that.

It is costly to assemble and curate an audience, and costly to assemble the means to communicate with such a large audience, and costly even to invent and operate the means to monetize that audience by selling its attention to the actual users of Facebook. Those users are not, by the way, Facebook's content contributors; they are instead the advertisers who pay the bills. It is that set of underlying facts which perfectly analogizes so-called social media platforms to other kinds of publishers, such as the NYT.

Facebook is in fact not something new in the world. It is instead a publisher which operates its business by means alike with traditional publishers, relying on novel technology primarily as a money-saving means of distribution, and secondarily as a means of audience curation, by surveillance of audience attention. Less expensive distribution is by no means unimportant. Real-time individualized audience monitoring falls short of complete novelty, but compared to older methods offers striking advantages. But to take advantage of those technical innovations does not change the kind of business which internet platforms practice. They remain publishers. Facebook has become the largest publisher the world has ever seen.

Until internet utopians come to understand those underlying facts of internet publishing, expect them to continue to demand that government deliver by policy various ill-founded solutions to vexing internet problems, none of which can be made to work practically. So long as internet utopians in great numbers continue to deny that social media platforms are in fact in the publishing business, that misunderstanding will continue as a political block to urgently needed reform. That is not a good situation for the public life of the nation, while the internet in its current policy posture continues more as a disruptor of public discourse than as a means to facilitate it.

[Dr. Ed 2]

"Nothing compares to the speed and scale of the internet to serve as a useful analogy. People that wanted the service of a printing company weren’t able to disseminate their words to millions or even just thousands of people for hardly any cost of money and time."

Nailing a piece of paper onto the church door was quite effective.

[Davy C]

It’s like complaining that the telephone company isn’t curating your phone calls, it’s a category error.

But as scam calls proliferated those complaints got some traction, so the analogy isn't a bad one.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Mimeograph and photocopy machines sorta negated your editor's efforts, not to mention the student and alternative presses of the '70s. Ever hear of a book titled "Our Bodies, Ourselves" -- it was banned in numerous states but still widely distributed amongst feminists.

Read some of that stuff -- it's still around in dusty archives -- and then tell me about this supposed halceon age of responsible editorship.

And then we can go back a few decades before this -- to WWII where some responsible editor published the fact that US Subs could go deeper the Japanese thought so they could safely sit underneath the Jap depth charges. That got a lot of our subs sunk.

And then the era of yellow journalism before that.

The era you suggest never existed.

[AmosArch]

Some supposed rightwingers haven't been as consistent on free speech as they should be but nobody has attacked free speech these days much as progs who additionally unlike the other side are often openly and proudly against it. There is no equivalence or contest between the two. Blaming the right for not acting perfectly as the source of the problem is kinda dumb.

[Bubba Jones]

Speaking against abortion is hate-speech against women.

[DaveM]

Half of the people aborted would one day have been women. Is it hateful to want to save them? I think not. (As a bonus: it's also not hateful to want to save the lives of the other half of aborted humanity who won't grow up to be women. Call it a win-win.)

[JasonT20]

Half of the people aborted would one day have been women. Is it hateful to want to save them?

How much concern are conservatives that are pro-life showing about children dying it in Gaza right now? Well, it would be hateful toward Jews to do so, right?

[damikesc]

Quite a lot of concern. Many of us loathe Hamas for forcing this to happen.

[Josh R]

More than 10 years ago, Eugene noted that liberals were a bit more protective of speech than conservatives, calling for protection of racist or anti-religious views.

Once I saw Silver’s article, I looked at the GSS data from 2022 and things have changed on racist views. Now, only 41% of liberals, 50% of moderates and 59% of conservatives (down from 67%, 58% and 62% respectively) think the speech should be allowed. That’s a clear change from the left. I’m in the process of seeing whether there is an interaction of ideology with age or education level. More to come …

Anti-religious speech is still protected in virtually the same percentages (2022: 83%, 79%, 75%, 2012: 83%, 76%, 75% for liberal, moderate and conservative respectively)m lending credence to the argument that the erosion is more form the left (assuming conservatives are more likely to disagree with anti-religious speech).

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Conservatives don't support expression of bigotry because they support free speech. Many conservatives support expression of bigotry -- and engage in it -- because they like the bigotry.

[Josh R]

Conservatives would not agree with anti-religious speech, though they think it should be protected. Silver also gave three examples of speech a majority of conservatives protect even though they disagree with it.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Conservative institutions do not think think anti-religious speech should be protected. How much research supporting abortion is conducting on superstition-flattering, right-wing campuses? How many speakers supporting abortion appear on conservative-controlled campuses?

Conservative schools collect loyalty oaths, impose statements of faith, suppress science to flatter superstition, and enforce brutal speech and conduct codes, for Christ's sake.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

For FSM's sake.

[Josh R]

Eugene reported in 2012 that less educated people were less likely to protect racist speech (48% for those without a high school education up to 79% of those graduate degrees). In 2002 those numbers go from 42% up to 59%. So, most of the reduction in tolerance is from the better educated.

However, there appears to be no interaction between ideology and education level. The overall gap is 21%-points (41% liberal versus 62% conservative). The gap is 16%-points, 20, 21, and 15 for no high school through an undergraduate degree (between is completed only high school and a junior college degree) before increasing up to 27%-points for graduate degrees.

Next up, age …

[Josh R]

Age is weird.

Overall, racist speech is protected by 42%, 58%, 52% and 42% of 18-30, 31-50, 51-70 and 71+ year old's respectively.

Conservatives are constant across age groups. Liberals are just below conservatives in 31-70. But for 18-30 and 71+, liberals are way less tolerant (22% for 18-30 and 42% for 71+). Moderates are down-right strange: 45%, 61%, 37% and 24% in the four age groups respectively.

Most of the ideological differences happen for the youngest and oldest age groups, with more the liberals in the youngest (but an effect for moderates too) and the moderates in the oldest (but an effect for liberals too).

It's easy to see that young liberals are driving the change which is consistent with Nate's data. I have no idea why moderates a driving the change in the 51+ group.

[Stephen Lathrop]

It's because the 51+ age group lived their formative years during the Reagan revolution in the culture wars. The so-called moderates among them are greatly enriched in actual cultural conservatives. They are people who learned at an early age that they lived in a society which would tolerate exploitation of bigotry for political advantage. It's a group which includes many who want to preserve that advantage.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Tax something, get less of it. Subsidize something, get more of it.

The problem with taxing something for revenue is keeping the tax low enough to still get revenue.

The problem with subsidies is that the unnatural increase is of lower quality.

So it is with government subsidy of science and college education. You get marginal scientists researching and teaching marginal fields to marginal students; thus gender fluidentity majors and CRT and Project 1619.

And of course these marginal researchers and students know they are marginal, and because the fields are so marginal, they have plenty of spare time to demand everyone else pay them the unearned respect that STEM fields earn.

Which leads to intolerance, bigotry, and Marxism, because nothing has earned its reputation for shoddy thought as much as Marxism.

[Sarcastr0]

“In 2020, the various critical studies programs accounted for 0.36% of all bachelor's degrees granted. That's about 7,000 degrees out of 2 million total.”
https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-ethnic-gender-and-cultural-studies-at-the-university-level/

Seems you are focusing on something because you want it to be the problem.

[Michael P]

How To Lie, by David Frum. With statistics.

[Don Nico]

That is 7,000 young people who got a worthless degree. (Make English Lit seem like vocational training)
I hope it did not land them too far into debt.

[Sarcastr0]

Partially whinging that the degree is only for partisan whinging tires my ass out.

Point is, those departments not really tipping the scale of campus culture, despite all the yelling about them.

And the STEMLording. Oy the STEMLording.

[JesseAz]

Just looked up just one a school, my alma mater. They graduated nearly 400 from the primary critical studies and 2000 from humanities which have fully embraced them taking a look at course catalogues. So as usual you will push lies and narratives that support your liberal proclivities.

Won't even delve into what is not required for the education colleges that includes coursework in critical theories.

[Sarcastr0]

Nice new goalposts.

Now all of humanities. Really everything but STEM, are all woke wastes of time.

It always comes back to that shit with you lot.

[Don Nico]

"Really everything but STEM, are all woke wastes of time."
That is a plain old LIE. You do it every time. There is nothing wrong with economics or psychology or even sociology (and I could go on), IF the courses insist on good analytic skills, proper use of statistics. The bullshit is teaching and insisting victimhood and blaming the ret of the world.
Talk about goalposts; you don't know what those are.

[Sarcastr0]

Dudes, his comment explicitly expands the scope to 'humanities.'

You continually are unable to read the most elementary of implications from a comment and then get angry at me.

If he wants to clarify, he can. But it's in his comment.

There is nothing wrong with economics or psychology or even sociology (and I could go on), IF the courses insist on good analytic skills, proper use of statistics.
This is yet a third goalpost, different from Alphabet's grievance studies (very few of them) and JesseAz humanities (insanely overinclusive).
It's also unsupported. You assume some schools teach social science without analytical rigor. Which you provide no evidence for. Certainly nothing statistical, since I expect you got the idea from the anecdotes the right loves to share and pretend are broadly applicable just by vibes.

[Commenter_XY]

STEM-Lording...never heard that before. But I like it.

Sarcastr0, they're the ones with any brains, the STEM-Lords.

[Sarcastr0]

No.

I have a physics masters. All my coworkers are PhDs. My day job is bathed in not just PhDs but people actively using their STEM background. On policy, on grants administration and selection. On grants performance. I love STEM, and

But I sure as hell don't want a country where only STEM folks are around. The idea that STEM folks are the only ones with wisdom or intelligence is pure myopic pride.

[Don Nico]

The fact remain that they are worthless degrees.

[Sarcastr0]

People want to make a living examining our society and thinking of ways to improve it from a particular point of view are fine actually, even if I disagree with them.

Moreover, we don't run society based on maximizing 'worth.' That's putting the collective ahead of the individual.

[Don Nico]

"examining our society and thinking of ways to improve it "
you mean blaming others for their own misery.

[Sarcastr0]

'I don't like it so it's worthless' is a child's argument.

People are willing to pay for the degree and then are able to find gainful work with it. Even if your politics are made sad, worthless is not what the market calls it.

[JesseAz]

List us what Frum considers critical theories. He is being exclusionary to very small portion of all critical theory.

[Sarcastr0]

Above I see you prefer 'everything that isn't hard science' in your definition. You're the one with the idiosyncratic definition.

You could read the link. Then you'd know Frum isn't actually who I linked to, but rather Drum.

The linked to stats (because Drum is a pro) shows you the definition is: "Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies" as defined by the Digest of Educational Statistics.

If you find critical studies lots of other places, I'd want to see proof. Heck, if you find critical theory (a legal discipline) as a required course in any kind of widespread manner, I'd want to see proof.

People around here like to make up what's going on in schools when they've not been on campus in decades.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

That is such weak sauce. You didn't even phone it in. It's like showing up at major league tryouts with a whiffle bat.

[Sarcastr0]

Pure insults. Truly the sign you've reasoned your way to your conclusion.

Like so many STEMLords, you claim reason but when pushed are revealed to be operating via anything but.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf, every arts-and-history related major you disdain has a better chance than a typical STEM graduate to figure out how to solve pressing political and social problems. During most of my professional lifetime, STEM graduates exploited supposed practical material advantages conferred by their training to denigrate and to disadvantage professionally people who were better trained and more skilled at dealing with policy-related topics than the STEMers were.

That was true especially when it came to practice of the learned professions. From medicine, to history, to political economy, to archival practice, to marketing, to urban design, and in many other fields even including law, non-STEM professionals have been hampered professionally by over-emphasis on privileging STEM training in the job market. That ended up meaning far too much STEM influence in the policy process.

What the STEMers trumpeted as, "creative destruction," was too often mere destruction—a distinction which STEM fans (and even many intimidated arts majors) were too poorly trained to recognize. Our society has suffered for that.

STEMers have a lot to answer for. And now, wielding AI inventions which no one understands, STEMers are poised to hyper-accelerate the pace of destruction willy-nilly, while typically-intimidated policy makers take themselves to the sidelines. It is a baleful prospect.

[Don Nico]

"wielding AI inventions which no one understands,"
you had to trumpet your own deficiency as a feature not a flaw.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Nico, care to say more?

[kkoshkin]

Of the millions of young people who are attending, have recently attended, or will soon attend universities, many will attend law school, of whom some will become judges, and of whom several will become Supreme Court justices. It will then be a matter of time until some law criminalizing “hate speech,” or “offensive speech,” or "racist speech," or some such will be upheld under a decision finding the First Amendment does not guarantee the right to utter the disfavored speech. At that point, the First Amendment is dead.

It won’t happen for a few more decades, but it’s coming. And it will happen in many of our lifetimes.

The social norms that are coming will make their way into the law, and that will be a tragic day.

[TwelveInchPianist]

[I]s there a lot of hypocrisy around free speech? Of course there is. Republicans who rail against wokeness put significant limits of their own on academic freedom.

This isn't hypocritical, it just rejects the notion that public university professors have free speech rights in the classroom. And there's a solid case for such a rejection. Chemistry professors have a first amendment right talk about Shakespeare, but we don't want them teaching Shakespeare when they're supposed to be teaching Chemistry.

[Don Nico]

"Chemistry professors have a first amendment right talk about Shakespeare, but we don’t want them teaching Shakespeare when they’re supposed to be teaching Chemistry."
That is a contractual matter for their employers not for the public.

[Bob from Ohio]

"their employers not for the public"

The public is the ultimate employer at public universities.

Its totally appropriate for the public, or the public's elected officials, to tell hired employees [administrators] how to run the public's institutions.

[Don Nico]

The employment contract is not with the public, Bob.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Doesn't matter. The public is entitled to prevent public school professors from teaching Shakespeare when they're supposed to be teaching Chemistry, or from teaching that the world is flat, or whatever, regardless of what the nominal employer thinks.

[Nige]

'The public' don't have anything to do with whether a teacher is fulfilling their remit.

[damikesc]

They are the ones, ultimately, paying the salary. They have absolute say-so in determining their accomplishing of their job. The professors (or any teacher of any level) is unbelievably incapable of judging themselves.

[Sarcastr0]

All public service serve at the pleasure of the plebiscite?

Try again.

[TwelveInchPianist]

That's not what he said. Try again.

[Nige]

Wish this principle applied to cops or the military, the people who cost billions and kill people all the time. No, just teachers and books and other things the right hates.

[damikesc]

The President removes military leadership as needed.

So...try again.

[TwelveInchPianist]

It does apply to cops and the military.

[M L]

“That is a contractual matter for their employers not for the public.”

It should be, yes.

Unfortunately though, many universities are public, and even the ones that aren’t “public” are somewhat public as they are curiously enough funded by trillions of dollars in taxpayer money.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

“Chemistry professors have a first amendment right talk about Shakespeare, but we don’t want them teaching Shakespeare when they’re supposed to be teaching Chemistry.”
That is a contractual matter for their employers not for the public.

Who do you think the employer is at public schools?

[Don Nico]

The Board of Regents. But not the Governor or the Legislature.
Public universities may be state entities, but they are not the state government. That is a real albeit subtle distinction.

[Brett Bellmore]

It's a distinction so subtle as to be practically non-existent; It's like saying that police departments may be state entities, but they aren't the state government.

My hand is a me entity, but it's not ME. Same way.

[Sarcastr0]

The kinds of policies put forth by a Board of Regents is different from the legislature of governor.

That remove matters.

[ducksalad]

This isn’t hypocritical, it just rejects the notion that public university professors have free speech rights in the classroom

I agree that there isn't free speech in the classroom, or maybe a better way to say it is that academic freedom and freedom of speech are different things.

However, as a defense of Republican/conservatives on free speech, you're incorrect. There are many documented cases of the right going after leftish professors for exercising their free speech OUTSIDE the classroom.

Since Reason doesn't allow lots of links, I'll just post names and if anyone wants they can Google. Warning: the opinions they expressed are in some cases pretty damn bad. Nevertheless they were outside the classroom.

Lora Burnett - fired for tweets critical of Mike Pence.
David Guth - fired for tweets critical of NRA.
Michael Isaacson - suspended for anti-police tweets (maybe partly justified since he connected it with his teaching)
Joy Alonzo - suspended for comments about opioids made at conference.
James Livingston - suspended for anti-white comments on Facebook.
Asheen Phansey - fired for anti-Trump facebook post.

[TwelveInchPianist]

OK, but I don't think that contradicts anything I've said.

[Sarcastr0]

It just calls your focus into question, thus undercutting your thesis is all.

[TwelveInchPianist]

No it doesn't.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Read again what you said above. I hope you mis-expressed your true intent. What you said puts you on record as an enemy of expressive freedom, with "the people," empowered to censor everything.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"What you said puts you on record as an enemy of expressive freedom, with “the people,” empowered to censor everything."

Not everything, just speech by the government.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Don't forget the teacher dumped by Wheaton (a leading right-wing religious school) for the offense of saying something nice about Muslims.

Conservatives claiming to ride a high horse on freedom of expression, cancel culture, and similar issues can line up alphabetically and kiss my ass.

Carry on, bigoted and hypocritical clingers.

[jb]

LOLOL. "When you want to censor people, it's because you hate free speech. When I want to censor people, it's because they don't deserve free speech in the first place."

[TwelveInchPianist]

Um, no.

[Randal]

I agree with lolol. That is, literally, what you just said.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

College students aren't very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that's true for liberal or left-wing students,

I understand what attracted Prof. Volokh to this, but it is bullshit. Conservative-controlled campuses engage in strenuous censorship, enforce dogma, reject academic freedom, impose old-timey speech and conduct codes, etc. -- but, much like FIRE, plenty of speakers ignore the disdain for free speech on conservative-controlled campuses and focus on complaints that stronger schools are insufficiently hospitable to conservative intolerance, nonsense (including superstition offered in reasoned debate), and dogma.

[trekmyn]

The great eye dee ten tee Rev. A. Dlokcuc bringing up whataboutism about things that don't exist... Weak sauce

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Prof. Volokh, the best the right-wingers can manage as a free speech champion, imposes viewpoint-driven censorship at the blog at which he claims to champion free speech.

No wonder mainstream academia has rejected Republican and conservative views (although the right-wing bigotry is also an important factor in this context).

[Ed Grinberg]

Other [survey] questions ask about efforts to disrupt controversial speech — for instance, by shouting down a speaker. In these cases, there can be competing interpretations of what constitutes free speech — i.e. the students might say they are exercising free speech by disrupting the speaker — so these aren’t straightforward to interpret.

Au contraire! I think it's pretty straightforward:
According to Wikipedia, one of the main functions of the Brownshirts was "disrupting the meetings of opposing parties."
You speaking your mind is "free speech." You preventing someone else from speaking his mind isn't.
Calling Brownshirts-like behavior "free speech" is downright Orwellian.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Grinberg, what do you think about political partisans showing up in full battle array at peaceable political assemblies? Brownshirts? Or just another chance to celebrate our precious 2A gun liberty?

[Ed Grinberg]

The author addresses this point, but calling these openly anti-free-speech students "liberal" is a sad joke.

[Dr. Ed 2]

"telling students that now that they've found out what it's like to stand up for a controversial, unpopular position, I'd hope they'd be more respectful of the rights of others to do the same."

This is coming from a dimension of reality that is completely foreign to these students in that they don't even believe that their position is controversial. It would be like me trying to explain frostbite and how to avoid it to folks who have lived in LA all their lives -- only worse because the folks in LA can comprehend the concept of cold, and may have been in a walk-in freezer at some point in their lives.

These "students" are not (small "l") "liberals." They neither believe in free speech nor do they believe that they are exercising free speech rights -- the concept of "free" speech is foreign to them.

To understand them you have to go back to the Puritans and the Puritan belief that "the old deluder" was always waiting to grab souls. Hence there was the concept of "good" speech and "bad" speech -- "bad" speech being that which enabled the Devil to steal souls.

"Bad" speech thus can not be allowed because it is a clear and present danger to the public safety. The Puritans believed this, and it remains (to a lesser extent) a belief in Protestant theology today. I mention this because the Black activists that started the concept of hate speech 30-40 years had been brought up in the traditions of the Baptist & AME churches (as children) and as a Protestant myself, I recognized the theology in some of their initial writings defending the first generation of hate speech codes.

They thought that if "bad" speech, e.g racist speech, were permitted, the society would fall victim to it, and hence it had to be prohibited at all costs. There's no concept of free speech involved.

And then with the Palestinians, it again is a concept of good and bad -- Israel bad. Instead of thinking of this as them using their free speech rights to say unpopular things, think of it as them believing they are exercising their inalienable right to -- essentially -- fight witchcraft.

There is no analogy here -- none more than lots of evil supporters of Israel interfering with their university. They don't believe in free speech,

[Sarcastr0]

I sometimes wonder if Ed has ever met an actual kid in his life.

[Ed Grinberg]

re: "hypocrisy" - "academic freedom"
I say: he who pays the piper calls the tune.
1. Private colleges & universities should be free to teach anything they like and to allow whatever student / faculty speech they like. Conversely, they should be free to "punish" whatever student / faculty speech they don't like. The government should stay out of it altogether.
(I've been nothing but consistent on this.)
2. We need to shut down all public colleges & universities. Until that happens, someone gets to decide what gets taught there / who gets "punished" for what. Since the taxpayers are footing the bill, they (through their elected representatives) get to make those calls.
(I've been nothing but consistent on this.)

re: "hypocrisy" - "cancel culture"
My thinking on this has evolved. You are free to speak your mind; I'm free to criticize. I should also be free not to associate with you if I'm sufficiently bothered by what you said.
BTW: The real hypocrisy -- worse than hypocrisy actually -- is the claim by "liberals" (ha!) / "progressives" that only they should be free to decide who to associate with.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/10/11/may-private-employers-fire-or-refuse-to-hire-employees-because-of-their-praise-of-hamas-or-praise-of-israel/?comments=true#comment-10271453

[Bob from Ohio]

Liberals caused this atmosphere to flourish. Silver, a liberal, now laments the leopards eating his face.

[Sarcastr0]

Is Nate cancelled or something? Or are you just hating.

[Commenter_XY]

No, Nate is pretty fucking late to the party.

[Armchair]

To an extent, yes.

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/fivethirtyeight-nate-silver-leaves-abc-news-disney-layoffs-1235594060/

[Brett Bellmore]

They got rid of him at 538, at least in part because he wasn't reliably sticking to the party line. I used to be a regular reader at 538; It was always a left-wing site, but with the 2016 election, they started getting rid of everybody who even had a bit of nuance to their leftism.

I suspect Nate got axed because he wasn't reliable in following the Covid party line.

Of course, in retrospect Silver was right. Probably because he was right based on the information they had at the time, too...

[Sarcastr0]

They got rid of him at 538, at least in part because he wasn’t reliably sticking to the party line.

Making this leap is well within your usual reputation, Brett.

The piece you link is pathetic. It goes through a twitter spat and then posits that it's causal to Silver's departure. It's so thinly sourced on the causality it could have been written by you.

[Nige]

Liberals succesfully made ther ideas more attractive than conservatives did. That's the problem. Not free speech. It's people and colleges not being conservative enough.

[damikesc]

Progressives will go after your life in every way possible if you disagree.

Conservatives do not.

Cannot figure out why some people would side with progressives over conservatives, when one will happily try to ruin your life and the other does not.

[Sarcastr0]

You are so brave for posting.

[Nige]

Unless you're a school or a children's hosptial or an alleged victim of rape or sexual assault or a female Democratic politician or a female non-white Democratic politician or a judge's clerk or a witness against Trump or a judge in a Trump case, just some of the minor exceptions.

[damikesc]

Except the hospital was BRAGGING about their mutilation of children until LibsofTilTok caught it and mentioned it. The stuff put up was put up...by the hospital.

Ditto the schools.

Name this rape victim because I'm sure you are not referring to Tara Reade or Paula Jones.

Every utterance from a politician is something they made publicly. And they brag about to certain constituents. What you are whining about is called reporting. C'est la vie.

[CJColucci]

When, exactly, has free speech, as such, ever been popular? There has always been plenty of free speech opportunism, based on whose ox was gored, but in my seven decades on this earth I've seen very few people actually practice free speech -- a costly pastime -- and even fewer principled advocates of it. As for our college students, how many of then have ever experienced or observed the vigorous practice of free speech during their earlier education?

[M L]

It's been popular enough throughout this nation's history to be enshrined in the Constitution and then, more importantly, more or less practiced, followed, and enforced up to this point. It's very possible for all that to discontinue.

[CJColucci]

You must be very young. Or perhaps, like so many, you've never needed free speech protection.

[Savagely Average]

Similar to Nate, I had some idea that support for free speech among the young had eroded. But I am shocked that a supermajority of liberals (68%!) believe an anti-abortion rights speaker shouldn't even be allowed to speak on campus.

The idea that hearing disagreeable opinions doesn't hurt you and might actually *help* you by forcing you to interrogate and sharpen your own views -- or, hey, maybe you decide the other side is right and you change your mind -- appears to have zero currency among today's university students.

The phrase "I apologize to everyone who was harmed by my opinions" can't be reconciled with a free society. But we're hearing it more and more.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

How welcome are speakers supporting abortion on conservative-controlled campuses?

The record indicates right-wingers have zero entitlement to claim any genuine interest in freedom of speech or to claim superiority in this context. They just like sniping at the culture war's winners.

[Savagely Average]

"How welcome are speakers supporting abortion on conservative-controlled campuses?"

Probably not welcome at all, I would wager.

That the assault on free speech is coming from both political sides makes the problem more dire, not less, wouldn't you agree?

[Purple Martin]

That someone responded to the seemingly partisan point you were arguing rather than a different nonpartisan point you were not making, is unsurprising, wouldn't you agree?

[Nige]

Not inviting speakers is not an assault on free speech. Preferring some speakers over others be invited is not an assault on free speech. This sums up the whole performative free speech posturing. This isn't about free speech this is anger because speech you like gets rejected.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

And yet, 57 percent of students — including 68 percent of liberals — thought a speaker expressing this anti-abortion viewpoint shouldn't be allowed on campus. That number kind of shocked me….

Did that number shock him because it wasn't higher? If not, has be been living in a cave for the past decade or two?

[Kazinski]

I applaud Silver’s recognition of the problem, but I will note his example of Elon Musk’s censorious censorious activity is a “journalist” tweeting out the real time location of Musk’s jet. X has a policy against doxxing, and that definitely has real world security implications.

Surely if Musk is censoring others any any way that is problematic he could find a better example.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

Yeah, it looks like Silver didn't bother to read past the misleading headline of the Verge piece he linked to.

[Sarcastr0]

Plenty of other examples of you care to look. Not criticism of him, his companies, and nowadays just criticizing right wing assholes.

https://x.com/AriDrennen/status/1720111653516390733

“ USA Today reporter
@willcarless
may have been banned from search suggestions on X following his publication of an interview with Chaya Raichik in a piece discussing the full impact of Libs of TikTok”

[Nige]

He took over a hugely popular social media plaftorm and fucked it up. Is that censoring? Maybe, maybe not, but look at the way a super-rich dude can mess with eveyone else’s speech just because they don’t like they way they’re speaking. With that example in mind, maybe students are just more clued in about how the world works than you like to think. If they perceive 'free speech' as an illusion or a political cudgel or something that the super-rich can dispense with or which politicians can get around, maybe the real reason they don't value it is because it's seen as the thing people use to defend nazis, racists et al, but opposing racists, nazis et al is a 'woke mind virus' that must be wiped out. Easy conclusion to draw is that the people who go on about free speech the most believe in it the least.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Did Musk endorse any more bigots today on Twitter or elsewhere?

[Commenter_XY]

Elon Musk did America a favor by 'doxxing' the FBI and DOJ, and a bunch of other federal government agencies who were censoring Americans by pressuring Twitter (now X -- seriously, I really do not know what Elon was thinking with 'X', companies need a name IMHO) inappropriately.

The Twitter files were eye-opening. It is not over yet.

I will never look at the Federal government the same way again.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Why is that? You don't seem to have changed the way you looked at the federal government before.

[Nige]

The most eye-opening thing was that there wasn't a single example of the FBI pressuring Twitter to do anything.

[Noscitur a sociis]

What, in your opinion, was the single most egregious incident that the Twitter Files revealed?

[JasonT20]

I've seen this so many times it is cliche. Some mass of emails or other private communications are hacked, stolen, or otherwise collected. The existence of this mass of is portrayed as a huge scandal showing how controlling and dishonest people on the left are about some issue. 95% of the commentary and reporting from the right never actually quotes anything from these communications, and those that do are horribly out of context or misinterpreted to be nefarious when they aren't. The right-wing audience takes it all in says that it proves that the left acted wrongly even though they can only repeat the broad accusations, not any details.

I first saw this unfold with "Climategate" in 2009. I still see climate change deniers cite this as proof that climate scientists are all conspiring to bring down the world economy.

[gVOR08]

I may disagree with much of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. And laugh at your pretension you have a right to say it in any venue or on any platform you want.

[JasonT20]

Correct. Freedom of Speech is not a right to use someone else's megaphone.

[Josh R]

Is it the government's megaphone (i.e., government speech) when they give the public access to the library for guest speakers? I don't think so. That strikes me as a designated (or perhaps limited) public forum where the government can't turn down speakers based on viewpoint. The same ought to apply to public universities inviting speakers, and in spirit private universities as well.

[Randal]

I’m less concerned about all this than it seems like everyone else is.

The focus in the free-speech debate lately hasn’t really been at all about First Amendment style free-speech. It’s been about things like cancel culture and private editorial decisions. The questions are around access to megaphones and how much responsibility people should have for what they say into them.

Take the Silver survey. He focuses on questions about whether certain speakers should be invited to campus. Replying “no,” an anti-abortionist shouldn’t be invited to campus, is plainly not a statement against the free-speech rights of the anti-abortionist. That person can speak about unborn baby slaughter all day long and not get fined or thrown in prison.

I think these kids consider “being invited to speak on campus” to be an endorsement by the university of the views of the speaker to at least some extent… and they’re not totally wrong. There certainly are some speakers that the university wouldn’t allow, like an advocate for pedophilia or a talk on “The Joys of Fentanyl” even though those are topics that would be First Amendment protected. So if the university is already drawing lines apart from “whatever’s legal,” what’s the basis for those lines if not some sort of value judgement of the content?

So while I completely agree that society is shifting towards a greater emphasis on responsible speech, I don’t think that necessarily implicates free speech.

The question remains whether expanding speech taboos is itself a problem. I have mixed feelings. I’m anti-snowflake, but that works both ways. I think these students are lame for being ultra-sensitive about views they find distasteful, but I also think the people who spout hateful rhetoric are lame for whining about the fact that other people don’t want to hear it.

[Savagely Average]

Of course universities have always engaged in value judgments about speech. If the value of the speech is either nil or extremely disproportionate to the amount of offense and disruption it's likely to cause, you probably shouldn't allow the speaker. Your pedophilia and fentanyl examples would be easy calls.

The problem is that the survey questions aren't about speakers espousing fringe views like that. These are mainstream opinions held by many Americans on controversial subjects.

It's hard to escape the conclusion, reading this survey, that a large majority of university students just believe there's zero value in speech with which they strongly disagree. That is a problem for free speech because if speech you strongly disagree with has no value - why protect it?

[Randal]

That is a problem for free speech because if speech you strongly disagree with has no value – why protect it?

No no no no no no no. This is the whole point. Free speech isn't about only protecting speech deemed valuable. Then you have to decide who's doing the deeming and the valuing, and that's where you get into trouble.

So hopefully, these kids know what we all do, which is that free speech is all about protecting speech that has no value, so that we can avoid even having to decide what speech is valuable and what isn't, which is too much power for anyone to have.

You don't have to believe that speech has value in order to think it should be protected. In fact the hallmark of being pro-free-speech is advocacting for the protection of speech that has no value. But that doesn't mean you need to invite it to campus.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Randal, you are right as far as you go. But the solution to the access and megaphone problem is not to disregard access issues, nor to distribute megaphones to everyone. The solution—and it is a time-tested solution which works—is to get public policy out of the speech arena by dispersing authority over content to a myriad of competing private publishers. Establishing public policy to accomplish that is as far as government ought to be permitted to go.

The problem now is complicated, but made far worse by the disproportionate influence a few internet giants enjoy to shape public expression. That power needs to be kept in private hands, to keep it out of the hands of government, but it also needs to be very broadly distributed—which is not the case now. You only have to look around to see how unhappy the present arrangement has made almost everyone.

[Nige]

'which is that free speech is all about protecting speech that has no value'

Every single person is entitled to decide what speech has value to them and what doesn't. Which is the whole point of the survey questions, even though Silver doesn't see it. Good point.

[DaveM]

Free speech and free markets will take care of wokeness, regardless of how much students are indoctrinated in public schools. The writing is on the wall already. Just look at the rise in homeschooling.

[SimonP]

Silver isn't worth taking very seriously any more. For whatever reason, he's gone down the path of writing for people like Eugene - pearl-clutching, flimsy analyses, not adding much of interest to the debate.

Similarly, most of the comments here - placing the blame on shifting attitudes regarding free speech to "woke" ideologies and professors - are just-so stories that can be dismissed without further discussion. Like the "media bias" complaints they resemble, they fail to provide much illumination on the underlying problem, ultimately just repeating a tired right-wing trope that has been with us for decades.

I think Stephen Lathrop hits closer to the mark, with his suggestion that attitudes toward "free speech" have changed because the media has changed. Our canonical, traditional thinking about "free speech" - where people debate on the merits, and the truth wins out - was developed in a media environment where public discourse was predominantly shaped by publishers, editors, and other gatekeepers. Those gatekeeping points still exist, for a portion of our current media environment, but there is a vast and growing area where there is little or no barrier to entry.

In that media environment, what we've found is that the "truth" and "reasonable debate" no longer really determine the contours of public discourse. The crop of Republicans in the House - and Trump himself - have figured this out. For them, the point is attention. Do and say the most outlandish things, and you'll dominate the conversation - even if most of what's said is about you, and critical.

When "debates" in this new media environment are "won" by simply out-shouting the "other side," then it's no surprise at all to see people on the left trying to "silence" certain viewpoints, or people on the right being in favor of the kind of "free speech" they are eager to engage in.

There's another way to view this, though, and it's this: "free speech" was never really free. As noted above, the substantive content of public discourse historically has been determined by the gatekeepers. They would decide whether a point of view really deserved broader public attention; so it is their standards that would determine what counted as a useful contribution to public discourse, or not. That being the case, the "traditional" view of free speech also inherently reflected the blindnesses and silences of those gatekeepers. We talked a lot about the "truth winning out," from the perspective of the ones who would actually be determining what's "true."

The shift we're seeing, then, may reflect not so much a rejection of "free speech," per se, but rather a shift of the implicit standards that inform what is and is not a useful contribution to public discourse. Previous generations would reject that women or Black speakers/authors would have any kind of unique perspective on matters under debate; current generations might recognize that the only way to know whether they do would be to see what they have to say, first. Commenters on foreign policy from within the first world perspective would feel comfortable with their premises and assumptions about the world, and would reject third-world criticisms as simply unsophisticated; current generations would recognize in that rejection itself an important clue to the first-world's own blind spots.

It is not really too hard to imagine, for instance, a college administrator in a previous generation rejecting a Black power agitator's call for liberation "by any means necessary" as engaged in something other than "free speech", or a communist's impassioned appeal for a global worker's revolution as dangerously subversive speech. The same can be said for many VC commenters. But they would say so while at the same time claiming to be in favor of "free speech." Nowadays, the same contradictory framework exists; only its substantive contours have shifted to a different group, perhaps a younger generation.

Seen through this lens, the critiques of Silver, Eugene, and hacks like Josh and David, read more like reactionary appeals of one group of gatekeepers complaining over their loss of power. "Oh my goodness, young leftists these days are hostile to free speech!" No - more accurately, they are hostile to your "free speech."

[Nige]

+1

[Heedless]

It would have been much shorter to write "I don't believe in free speech because ideas I disagree with are getting too much attention. Also Trump."

The accuracy of the media has always been appalling. Gatekeepers kept acceptable opinion narrow, but they did not do a particularly good job of making it accurate. The biggest difference now is that there are more sources available, so it is easier to find dissenting views.

[SimonP]

It would have been much shorter to write “I don’t believe in free speech because ideas I disagree with are getting too much attention. Also Trump.”

Yes, it would have been shorter to write that. But it's not what I wanted to say, so...

The accuracy of the media has always been appalling. Gatekeepers kept acceptable opinion narrow, but they did not do a particularly good job of making it accurate. The biggest difference now is that there are more sources available, so it is easier to find dissenting views.

To wit - there is nothing stopping you from leaving a sophomoric, irrelevant comment as a response to my own. There's no real getting away from morons with a point of view, online, is there?

[Religion and Politics, my life]

College students trip over 3 things before they even get to the irrelevant free speech part
1) words no longer have a set meaning. This is Plato's point against the Sophists
2) To go to school at great cost to learn there is no Truth, no God, no real morals means what you say is only defensible if you have a 'good will' because truth is no defense. This is what Hillary taught the world : Complain that things aren't perfect, they could be perfect, and all statements against that are 'deplorable'
3) Once you accept abortion and homosexuality the core of any decent society THE FAMILY must be the enemy. Insofar as you defend the most basic belief and institution you must be anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-abortion, anti-woman

So by the time somebody shouts you down they have NOTHING to defend and only moral decent rational speech to attack.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Superstition-addled bigots are among my favorite culture war casualties.

Were you a victim of childhood indoctrination by substandard parents, or are you afflicted by adult-onset superstition?

Carry on, clinger. So far as your betters permit. If you don't like that, feel free to continue to whine about it as much as you like . . . or maybe pray on it a spell.

[DavidTaylor]

After roughly 40 years as a faculty member at several R1 universities, I don't recognize your 3 things as anything but wing-nut fantasies that fail to engage the real issues.

And during those 40 years as a Prof, one thing that always struck me was the willingness of young college students to succumb to the in loco parentis role of the college. Over and over those naive 18 and 19 year old kids would remind one another that their parents would scold them for inappropriate speech at the dinner table, and not one of them ever offered the retort that their right of free speech trumped their parents' right to police their speech. So they found nothing problematic about their college doing the same. By the time they enter graduate or professional school they are more insightful thinkers and understand the issues somewhat better, maturity being a slowly acquired feature.

The most common exception I found was military veterans who used their GI Bill benefits to earn a college degree after their service. They were older, more mature, and politically more astute. They were also puzzling to many undergrads, but good role models that often provided the first glimpse of what a serious, mature, goal-directed fellow student could be like.