When it comes to technology and pop culture, the gulf between professors and students can seem enormous. But is there also a generational divide on free speech?
Judging by an endless stream of op-eds in response to student protests over controversial speakers, the answer would seem to be yes: Young people today are overly sensitive and doctrinaire, the critics argue, demanding protection from viewpoints they find offensive. Contrast that with the free-speech movement of the 1960s, when students resisted authority rather than demanding protection by it.
But free-speech advocates and student activists say those comparisons are unfair and inaccurate. Today’s students are not as intolerant, and yesterday’s were not as open-minded, as it may appear. They agree, though, that the forces shaping this generation have influenced its members’ ideas on speech and censorship. And while some of those forces have had a positive effect, they’ve also led to an increased willingness to trade one perceived good — unfettered expression — for another — inclusivity.
A series of surveys backs up those views:
- In a 2015 survey by the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of millennials said the government should be able to prevent people from making public statements offensive to minority groups, while only 27 percent of Generation X members agreed.
- A 2015 report on college freshmen by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles noted that 71 percent of those surveyed said colleges should prohibit racist and sexist speech on campuses, up from 60 percent a decade earlier. And 43 percent said that colleges had the right to ban extreme speakers.
- In a 2016 Gallup survey of college students, 72 percent said they did not think colleges should restrict speech that expresses political views upsetting or offensive to certain groups. Yet 69 percent favored restrictions on speech using slurs or other language that is intentionally offensive to some groups.
While some of those beliefs may seem contradictory, free-speech advocates say they can be explained by several social trends. For one, many students come to college far more supervised than previous generations were. Authority is not their enemy.
Welcome to The Chronicle’s first special report devoted to age diversity on campuses. This annual issue also features compelling personal essays dealing with identity and disability — be sure to check them out.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, recounts a hypothetical challenge he recently posed to some undergraduates as they discussed administrative interventions like bias-response teams. A Muslim student and a gay student get into an argument. The Muslim student tells the gay student his lifestyle is sinful; the gay student tells the Muslim student his religion is prejudiced. “My question wasn’t whether they insulted each other, it was why we’re asking a suit to rule in this,” Mr. Zimmerman recalls. “I think it diminishes people. It says you don’t have enough agency and independence to settle this on your own.”
But the students disagreed. They had grown up under systems that are highly monitored, and such intervention seemed normal to them, he says: “Prior generations wanted less authority. This generation wants more.”
The pervasiveness of social media and their experiences in elementary- and secondary-school classrooms have also profoundly shaped how today’s students view free expression, free-speech advocates say. Given how quickly small debates can go viral, students are often wary of speaking their minds. And many schools implicitly teach students that controversy is best avoided, says Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University who has written about school censorship. High schools routinely violate students’ free-speech rights in the name of harmony, she argues. Pro-Trump or pro-Hillary slogans, arguments for or against LGBT rights, T-shirts in support of our armed forces or against the war in Iraq — all of those expressions have been censored at some point in school systems, she has found.
“We shouldn’t be pointing fingers at them and saying, Those millennials don’t get it,” she says. “How should they get it if they don’t experience it?”
The current generation of college students is also more diverse and less biased against minority groups, according to national surveys. That means students in the majority are more attuned to prejudices and slights others may experience, free-speech advocates say, while minority students are increasingly comfortable speaking out when they encounter bias. That may explain a greater willingness to police hate speech.
Storm Ervin is a founding member of Concerned Student 1950 at the University of Missouri at Columbia, which has protested the treatment of black students on the campus. Speech that is clearly racist or homophobic should be policed because it has no value, she argues. “Legally I know language is protected under free speech, but morally it’s harmful,” says Ms. Ervin, who is earning a master’s in public policy at Rutgers University. “I don’t think the First Amendment is under attack; what is under attack is people’s ability to be racist.”
Prior generations wanted less authority. This generation wants more.
Zachary R. Wood, a student at Williams College, disagrees with Ms. Ervin on censoring speech. He started a program on his campus called Uncomfortable Learning, which invites speakers with controversial ideas. As a black student from a disadvantaged background, he says, he understands how young people connect specific offenses to broader social problems of prejudice and racism. But, he says, they can’t fight these problems without engaging their opponents. “Martin Luther King couldn’t achieve change by saying, ‘I’m not going to talk to people who don’t support the Voting Rights Act.’ The world is a rough, tough place. You’re going to have to deal with a lot of things.”
Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago who speaks frequently about the importance of free speech on college campuses, says that sympathizing with students’ concerns about hateful speech while explaining the relevance of the First Amendment to earlier social movements should be part of any conversation about free expression. “Make clear that we are taking seriously the underlying issues,” he says. “Universities that say, ‘Get over it, you need to understand free speech, and then we’re done,’ that’s a mistake.”
The growth of the so-called alt-right and the election of Donald J. Trump have raised the stakes for free speech. The rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., this summer, which led to the death of a young protester and assaults on several others, will make students more likely to block influential “hate speakers” from coming to their campuses, says Ms. Ervin.
Mr. Zimmerman agrees, and says he and other “free-speech warriors” have their work cut out for them. He believes that the response to Charlottesville — including rallies against hate in Boston and elsewhere — demonstrates that protections of free speech are made for such times. “Everyone did get their say, and the vast majority of it was aligned against white supremacy.” But he fears he’s in the minority in thinking that free speech proved its value in the aftermath of Charlottesville.
Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at New York University who studies social-protest movements, says such events illustrate the trade-offs people are willing to make when they feel threatened. America today is not so different from America of the late 1960s, he says, when the Free Speech Movement took a backseat to Vietnam War protests. Antiwar activists were more than willing to shut down pro-war speakers. Free expression is easy to support when nothing is at stake, Mr. Cohen says, but whenever there’s a clash of desirable aims, “people have to choose between free speech and the other good.”
Encouraging students to think deeply about our First Amendment rights and to debate the conflicts and trade-offs they present isn’t easy. For one, supporting the right of people to express opinions you find hateful or harmful doesn’t come naturally.
Colleges can begin by teaching about the history of free expression in the United States, free-speech advocates say. That would both illustrate its critical connection to movements that advanced the rights of women and minority groups, and put the current debate, which often pits conservative voices against liberal activists, into context.
“When I think of free speech, I think of the civil-rights movement and people being hosed down and thrown in jail for their speech,” says Steven Gerrard, a philosophy professor at Williams College. “So many students and younger faculty consider free speech as a dog whistle for the right.”
Mr. Gerrard is developing a course called “Free Speech and Its Enemies.” Too many academics, administrators, and students today want to fight power with power, he worries, by keeping controversial speakers off-campus. “Our responsibility in the academic community is to resist power with argument, with reason,” he says. “And that’s what I’m trying to train my students to be able to do.”
Colleges can also bring in speakers who have been at the forefront of earlier social movements, to describe how important the right to free expression was to their cause. Mr. Zimmerman, the Penn professor, asked Mary Beth Tinker to speak to one of his classes this year. As a teenager, she was suspended from school for wearing a black armband in protest of the Vietnam War, leading to a landmark Supreme Court decision, in 1969, that affirmed the First Amendment rights of public-school students.
When his students tried to make a distinction between what they viewed as her noteworthy cause and the racist or sexist speech they hear today, Ms. Tinker challenged them. What about families who had sons or brothers killed in Vietnam? Her speech had felt hateful to them, she told the students. It was an argument that both surprised and resonated with his class, Mr. Zimmerman says.
“I don’t think we have these arguments enough,” the professor says. “These students are adults, voters, citizens. They should be free to take any position they want. But they do not have the right to go unchallenged. None of us do.”
Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
