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Video: “Does Free Speech Offend You?”
Today I’m pleased to announce the release of a new video I made with Prager University. The video — Does Free Speech Offend You? — discusses the threats freedom of speech faces worldwide.
In the video I talk about both old and new threats to freedom of speech, including European governmental censorship, campus speech codes, and novel issues posted by newer theories and practices like trigger warnings and microaggressions. I also cover these topics in more detail in my short book Freedom From Speech and The Coddling of the American Mind, the article I co-wrote with Jonathan Haidt for The Atlantic. Check out the video (after the jump) and let me know what you think!
Published in Education, General
Love it. Will promote on FB etc.
Hmmm.
If you follow the Supreme Court rulings, free speech is actually more protected by law now than it has ever been in American history.
If you are worried about a cultural shift because of what’s happening on college campuses changing that in later generations, I’m not sure that will happen.
Schools have never been treated as tiny representations of American freedoms and students have always had different constitutional rights/protections while on campus. From compulsory attendance, to loosened search and seizure laws, to limitations on content in school newspapers, we’ve allowed a different set of rules on campus and America survived.
Accordingly I’m having difficulty accepting the premise of your complaint here.
An interesting take Tommy.
Perhaps it would be better to say that campuses are currently engaging in a new form of legal private puritanism that offends, and marginalizes conservatives. Essentially the liberals have become the establishment of the Campus and are using their entrenched power to now do what in essence what other did to them so long ago when different people ruled academia.
Now we are on the outside looking in. When do we start our long march through the institutions? Fighting back with FIRE is our modern take on sit-ins and student protests. It is time we take the fight to them. Conservatives are the new radicals baby. Let the revolution start down with them man.
I heard somebody say that “When I hear or read something offensive it reminds me that I am free” or words to that effect. Wish I knew who coined that.
I agree with you that the current rules tend to weigh against conservative thinkers. Perhaps there is a way to use their rules against them until we can be rid of the rules.
Tommy, if I understand you correctly, you really are speaking of secondary schools, middle schools and high schools, not colleges, when addressing the issue by saying that school have establish rules that are different than those of the general public. I haven’t been on a college campus in quite a few years, but I do not remember any time when a student at any of the schools I attended was subject to compulsory attendance (other than specific rules instituted by a professor to attend his/her class regularly) or seach and seizure. These are things one does see on a regular basis in public secondary schools.
Universities have always been hotbeds of controversial thought and speech. One doesn’t have to look too far into the past to find any number of movements that found a home on college campuses which were, at the time, contrary to the general trend and were tolerated.
Quite to the contrary of your argument is the imposition of rules of speech and conduct which fall well in to the realm political correctness, banning the speech of those whose view, say denial of Climate Change, are deemed to be objectionable. Books are banned because they “offend.” Organized groups are denied student funds because they are not toeing the party line. What is happening is exactly what Mao meant when he coined the phrase “political correctness.” It is the limiting of viewpoints to those advocated by those in power, the political left.
Eugene I’ll admit it’s been awhile since I read the Supreme Court TLO decision, but I don’t recall there being a limitation to just high schools on down.
And if my recollection serves, all colleges reserve editorial rights over the content of student run papers.
Also, colleges routinely decide what clubs they will and won’t allow on campus.
I stand by my assertion that college campuses have always had exceptions to constitutional requirements of the outside world based upon the interest of keeping order for student safety.
Tommy, you are, I am sure, correct at to the right of the institution to make decisions based upon the interest of keeping order. The difference is the range of things that they are now choosing to make a “safety” issue. Such things as the use of second person singular pronouns, he/she, are being banned in some places. Books long considered classics and held as essentials of well rounded education are being removed from curriculum because of fear of offending one victim group or another. I suppose the question becomes one of to what degree to young adults attending a college or university need to be protected from the real world for which they are allegedly being prepared? Where does education end and brainwashing begin?
Great video. Notwithstanding the present first amendment jurisprudence (FIRE’s litigation track record is good because the law is on its side), a new generation of potential leaders is being taught to believe that censorship and self-censorship are the new normal. Couple that with legal realism, and the potential threat to a weakening or abandonment of the familiar first amendment jurisprudence is possible. Additionally, there has been a recent Supreme Court case that weakened the right to free association (freedom to exclude) that has made it easier to exclude certain groups from campus.
It seems the best way to foil their plans is to file endless microagression claims against atheists and liberals for creating a hostile environment for religious and conservative students. Have them try to reject you and then get FIRE to take them to court for not living up to their own stupid standards. Certainly you want to publicize their hypocrisy whenever you can. Then what you can also do is move the levers of power to squeeze universities for cash. Cut funding to state schools unless they give up their illiberal ways. Cut grants to universities found guilty of violating students rights. Tax their endowments into oblivion.
The modern University system is ruled by an endless chase for government grants, and private donations. The goal is to use their rhetoric and ideas in a cynical ploy to destroy them or at least gravely wound them. Certainly cutting their funding will force them into some deep soul searching about their priorities. Do you spend your money on classes or an endless administration that chases micro aggressive phantoms around?
Reading the YouTube comments, it’s hilarious how many refer to Lukianoff as a conservative, white man defending the right of conservative, white men to harass women and minorities. Guess it’s too hard to actually listen to a five minute video and Google the guy presenting it.
Having the right to severely limit speech, doesn’t mean colleges should. Maybe the inanity of safe spaces will never bleed out into wider culture, but the possibility that it might has me on edge. I’m terrified that the elites of the future will have come of age in institutions that enforce intellectual conformity to such an extent that a pleasant old woman like Christina Hoff Sommers is deemed dangerous. PC of one form will always be with us and I’ll always fight it.
Greg, a very impressive video (also I love your acronym FIRE). Keep on doing what you’re doing. These college speech codes are the road to totalitarianism. I laugh at the young lefties who seem to think they’re being so edgy and anti-establishment. Don’t they understand that the Left IS the Establishment now? You want to be a counter-culture rebel? You want to stick it to the Man? Hate to tell ya, young 99%ers, but you ARE the Man. Being a counter-culture rebel these days means being a conservative.