Opinion: There Is No Free Speech Crisis

Cards on the table: there is no university free speech crisis, support for free speech is not declining, and campus SJWs are not running amok.

Just don’t try telling the alarmists that. Over the last three or four years, a rising tide of hysteria has swept through media, the political establishment, and the academy itself over the threat that political correctness poses to free speech on campus. Led by a brigade of so-called Social Justice Warriors, campus Jacobins are using the language of “diversity” and “tolerance” to snuff out free and open inquiry.

That’s the claim, at any rate. So let’s set aside for a moment the curious silence of these same alarmists when it is the political Right (and not the Left) doing the snuffing. What should really interest us is the validity of their charge: Is there a crisis on campus? Are young people turning their backs on free speech?

The most comprehensive data on these questions comes from the United States, where about 22 million undergraduate students are enrolled in some 4,700 colleges and universities. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), there were 29 attempts in 2017 to disinvite or block an invited speaker from speaking on campus. Twenty-nine…and most of those attempts failed. The numbers were higher in 2016 (43 attempts were made), but the average over the last five years is just 31. Out of a country with 4,700 schools. And not only did most of those attempts at blocking speakers fail, but those that did succeed were more likely to come from the Right, not the Left.

So much for blocking speakers, where the truth doesn’t seem to live up to the hype. But what about campus speech codes? They’re all the rage right now, we’re told, put in place by cowardly administrators desperate to placate the social justice Left. Again, the hard numbers throw some cold water on that notion. The number of US colleges and universities with formal speech codes has declined every year since 2009, including a seven percent drop last year alone. Let me put that another way, just so there’s no confusion: when it comes to formal speech codes, things are getting better on campus, and have been for some time.

“Okay, whatever” (I can hear the alarmist saying), “this doesn’t change the fact that young people today are turning their backs on free speech.” But again, this is simply not what the data shows. Now I will concede from the start that it is exceedingly difficult to gauge public support for free speech. Social scientists use all sorts of tests and measures to get at the question (you can read more about them here), but none are perfect. Nonetheless, one of the most respected and comprehensive such attempts is carried out by the US-based General Social Survey (GSS), which has been asking about free speech since 1972.

Called the “Stouffer Questions” (after their original author), these questions ask people to imagine that someone in their community – an anti-American Muslim cleric, a militarist, a racist, a supporter of homosexuality, etc. – wants to give a speech, teach in a local school, or have his or her books carried in the public library. Should that person be prohibited? Should the speech be censored, the teacher fired, or the books banned? The idea is to test, when push comes to shove, just how tolerant of potentially offensive speech Americans really are.

As it turns out, they’re pretty tolerant, with healthy majorities answering “no” to most of those questions. But here’s the important part for our purposes: not only are Americans in general tolerant of offensive speech, but those aged 18 to 34 are the most tolerant. Don’t take my word for it; play around with the GSS’s data for yourself (links to this and all other claims can be found in the online version of this article). Switch around the Age filter and test the various questions. Young, college-age Americans are more likely to oppose restrictions on free speech than every other age group in the country, and in some cases by a considerable margin. The only exception is with racist speech, which young Americans are less likely to tolerate than their elders. But even there, the difference is just 4% below the national average – a far cry from a generational crisis.

There’s more. Not only are young people more tolerant of offensive speech than any other age group, but young people today are more tolerant than they have been at any other point since the GSS began asking the Stouffer Questions over forty years ago. In other words, young people are actually growing more supportive of free speech over time, not less.

Other surveys tell a similar story. The alarmists like to ignore longitudinal data or comparisons between age groups because it complicates their case. They want a simple story, preferably featuring eye-catching anecdotes that involve censorship or language policing. Those anecdotes are real, as recent events at Wilfrid Laurier University and Middlebury College illustrate, but anecdotes do not constitute a crisis. That takes data, and the data is not on their side.

(My general piece of advice: the next time someone presents you with some shocking statistic purporting to show how students today have turned their backs on free speech, be sure to ask them compared to who and compared to when. Unless they can answer both those questions, interpret their statistic with extreme caution.)

A final note. It is difficult to divorce this free speech hysteria from the larger populist moment in which we all seem to be living. The alarmists imagine themselves to be battling a pack of smug “diversity-obsessed” elites. In reality, it is those who have historically tended to hold the least amount of power in society (e.g. women, black and indigenous Canadians, LGBTQ) who bear the brunt of their attacks. That’s an unfortunate fact, and one that perhaps merits some reflection.

Free speech is integral to the academic project and must be safe-guarded, but there is no reason why we cannot do so with compassion, respect, and (I would hope) a full command of the facts. That would indeed be a conversation well worth having.

Jeffrey Sachs teaches in the departments of History and Politics, where he specializes in Islamic and Middle Eastern politics.

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Conservatives and Classic Liberals would love to have a conversation about free speech on campus without it devolving into name calling and personal attacks. The recent Winston Laurier incident is ongoing with Lindsay Shepherd being demonized. Dalhousie and Acadia are having free speech issues. UBC has been incapable of coming up with a workable free speech policy. Many Ontario Universities are suffering from toxic working environments due to battles over free speech. What about the witch hunt at Evergreen College. No free speech crisis?

Dr. Sachs makes wildly incoherent point throughout the article making small references to justify his radical and unjustifiable beliefs.

He uses sources/claims such as “it is the political Right” to make his claim without context

1) Drexel university professor got in trouble for also attacking his students views and refusing to speak to the school.

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/12/29/professor-who-tweeted-all-i-want-for-christmas-is-white-genocide-resigns-after-year-of-threats/?utm_term=.d2a44681ddd1

2) “Police stand guard outside Florida university class on ‘white racism'”

* Because the class gives no context to the situation at hand, a Jewish person Im considered white but have historically experienced more racism/prejudice in the last 100+ than any group of people

* How about the Slavic kids that attend his school who are considered white yet come a group of people who were statistically the most enslaved group of people in history the term Slavic comes from the Latin word for “Slave”

Overall the professor said he created the class to teach people about the history and privilege white people have, this ignores the fact 100,000s of people in the state of Florida are first generation immigrants from Eastern Europe who suffered in the past 100s alone 20M+ death due to racial discrimination from Germans or Russian aggression in Ukraine.

3) “Hecklers shout down California attorney general and Assembly majority leader at Whittier College”

* This was wrong but they didn’t end the event they booed and complained then got up and left, they didn’t pull the fire alarm like other radical leftist groups or blow air horns.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO_X4DkwA_Q

4) “Professor fired after defending blacks-only event to Fox News. ‘I was publicly lynched,’ she says.”

* Watch the video and look up her other statements saying white people can’t feel emotions or they can’t understand any struggle

* ALSO: what you left out she was attempting to stop white kids from entering a publically funded Memorial Service on school grounds

Do you support Separate but equal statanards or somthing? Because that what she was arguing for.

>there were 29 attempts in 2017 to disinvite or block an invited speaker from speaking on campus. Twenty-nine…and most of those attempts failed.

29 major events which lead to some examples $1Ms worth of damage to public institutions and private property.

* “The current tally of roughly $1.4 million is expected to multiply if an event organized by Yiannopoulos — billed as “Free Speech Week” ”

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-09-14/uc-berkeley-under-tight-security-for-conservative-speaker

>did succeed were more likely to come from the Right, not the Left.

Not True: http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/20/us/campus-free-speech-trnd/index.html

>“Okay, whatever” (I can hear the alarmist saying), “this doesn’t change the fact that young people today are turning their backs on free speech.” But again, this is simply not what the data shows.

* Brookings Institution Poll question: “A student group opposed to the speaker disrupts the speech by loudly and repeatedly shouting so that the audience cannot hear the speaker. Do you agree or disagree that the student group’s actions are acceptable?”

RESULTS: “The responses to the above question show a very distinct variation across political affiliation, with 62 percent of Democrats but “only” 39 percent of Republicans agreeing that it was acceptable to shout down the speaker. ”

(https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/views-among-college-students-regarding-the-first-amendment-results-from-a-new-survey/)

**Overall***

Sorry if my formatting is off.

This is a tactful response to an uncomfortably close outbreak of right wing hysterics. The anti-PC narrative always presents exceptional events, like the Berkeley riots, as typical of a general trend, and not as a local reaction to unusual pressures. If we are to generalize, I think we should remind ourselves that violence and threats are themselves the product of a breakdown in speech, and that speech requires the good faith of its intended audience. In the States, financial donations are speech; everywhere, vested interests set the tone of public conversation, with transparent biases and little tolerance for ‘insolence’ from the wrong quarters. The windmills with which our racist gadlies spar are the oversized shadows of their own protections within a system that ultimately shares their values. Despite the structures of official tolerance organizing school life, students time and again must reinsert themselves into these debates by force.

Lol what a joke. “Pompous sycophant who hasn’t dirtied his hands in 30 years and pretends to understand populist speech” should be the truthful title.

I don’t know what’s in the water at Acadia but I can tell you the blue collar / no collar valley residents are tired of pompous Acadia profs and their lies and platitudes.