The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
"Yes, the Last 10 Years Really Have Been Worse for Free Speech" (Focusing on Universities)
An interesting and, I think, sound analysis by Greg Lukianoff (FIRE), responding to ACLU National Legal Director (and Georgetown law professor) David Cole's review of Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott's The Canceling of the American Mind in the New York Review of Books. An excerpt:
[A]fter 9/11 only about three professors lost their jobs for speech related to the attacks or the subsequent wars, and all three were fired for reasons that extended well beyond protected speech. Meanwhile, since the dawn of Cancel Culture in 2014 there have been more than 1,000 professor cancelation attempts, with two-thirds resulting in some form of sanction and one-fifth resulting in termination ….
It's also important to note that the problem will only get worse as older faculty, who are generally far better on free speech, begin to retire in large numbers. In our 2022 survey of faculty, we saw that the younger the faculty were, the more acceptable they found anti-speech activity ….
What about students, though? Using data from UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, Jean Twenge has shown that support for censoring extreme speakers on campus has spiked in recent years: "While only 1 out of 4 students wanted to ban extreme speakers during the 1970s and 1980s, the majority wanted to do so in 2019." …
There's much more at the link.
