For all the cries about free speech when it serves their purpose, 70% of students on campus believe that “speech can be as damaging as physical violence” according to a new Knight Founndation campus survey.
Sixty percent believe that “[t]he climate at my school or on my campus prevents some people from saying things they believe, because others might find it offensive,” which is down from 65% in 2021, but still substantial. At the same time, students believe it has become more difficult to express themselves, with black students feeling it most.
A decade ago, the question was whether the trend toward censorship of “improper” thoughts and hate speech would prevail over the concept of free speech. As some of us old school liberals fought for tolerance of thought and language, even that with which we disagreed, students and faculty were internalizing a very different, deeply intolerant, understanding of speech. It wasn’t that they were against free speech. It was that they were against speech they believed was bad speech and undeserving of the protections afforded speech they were taught was good speech.
In other words, their idea of free speech had been so distorted, twisted out of shape, that they lacked the capacity to grasp that speech, whether you like it, hate it or don’t care about it either way, is still speech. One person’s “bad speech” was another’s valuable speech, and that included speech that was seemingly worthless but expresses anger, rejection and disapproval.
But what this Knight survey shows is that the battle is, at least for now, lost. Much as it may be true that the percentage of students on campus who are radicalized “woke” progressives may be relatively small, when 70% of the students believe that speech is the equivalent of physical violence, it means that even those students who don’t consider themselves particularly progressive, or even left-leaning, have internalized the indoctrination. The worst excesses of the woke are now the new normal of the majority of students, progressive or not.
Their views are internally contradictory and cannot be logically explained.
Independent students express growing concerns about the fundamental security of free speech in America today while indicating their wariness of colleges limiting speech on campus. Just about 2 in 5 independent students feel that free speech is secure today, down from under half of independents in 2021, and down even more from the 3 in 4 who felt this way in 2016. Yet a large majority feel that the First Amendment protects people like them, a view that has held steady since 2019. A majority believe that colleges should allow students to be exposed to all forms of speech.
They are concerned about the security of free speech, while a large majority feel their speech is protected, and a majority believe students should be exposed to all speech. And yet, independent students still come in at 66% that speech is the equivalent of physical violence.
When it makes no sense and the inconsistencies cannot be rationally explained, it’s a matter of belief rather than thought. And indeed, the Knight survey frames it as belief rather than thought. As the old saying goes, “children feel, priests believe, lawyers think.”
To be clear, it’s not that all students “believe” this, or that their irrational beliefs aren’t subject to change when it suits their purpose. Irrational inconsistency is a hallmark of belief systems, which require no logical thinking. But when 70% of students believe that speech is the equivalent of physical violence, and that 70% goes far beyond students who identify as Democrats, or woke, or progressive, the hope of a future of free speech left in their hands is dim indeed.
We long ago hoped they would grow out of it. They won’t, and they will carry their beliefs into the future as they take their place in adult society and positions of power and influence.
Bricks and stones may break my bones
But talk don’t bother me
You made a similar point recently about pronouns, that most college kids simply accept the proposition that everybody is entitled to their own pronoun and think nothing of it, regardless of their ideology otherwise. This was the insidious creep, that element of wokeness have become so normalized that even conservative and independent students take it for granted.
The war was lost before these students ever entered college. These values are instilled in students much earlier. Schools of education have been pushing a lot of this for a long time. The idea of “harm” from speech is definitely a part of the philosophy of teachers K-12.
Surveys like this should ask about respondents’ degree of familiarity with physical violence. I still think universities would benefit from a required freshman-level course, “The Nature of Violence”, involving helmets and pugil sticks.
Esteemed One,
Stop choking on the echoes of bubbles.
The noise within and removed is noise.
Stop with that!
Adrienne Rich didn’t even make it to 85.
Her poem “What Kind of Times are These “is here:
-There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees. –
WTF is this here:
“We long ago hoped they would grow out of it. They won’t, and they will carry their beliefs into the future as they take their place in adult society and positions of power and influence.”
Really?
What the fucking, fuckidie, fuck are you doing with your tools?
You should be ashamed of yourself.