The high-profile yet rare instances of prominent conservatives shouted down and in some cases even assaulted by student mobs are often used to caricature college as an engine of indoctrination, filled with budding Stalinists wanting to crush any viewpoint they disagree with.
Data show that students are increasingly less likely to tolerate some controversial, hateful speech. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s been a total deterioration of free-speech principles. Consider the context around those shifts, and the picture’s not so simplistic.
For one, demographics on campuses are changing. These days, colleges serve far more women and minorities than a generation ago, so survey results represent a more diverse demographic. Moreover, this new diversity has prompted administrators to spend more time promoting inclusion of people from all backgrounds.
In 2017, when students were asked which value they felt was more important — diversity and inclusion, or free speech — 53 percent chose inclusion and 46 percent chose free speech, according to a survey of more than 3,000 U.S. college students by Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
But the survey showed stark differences that broke along gender, racial, and political lines. White, male, and Republican respondents were more likely to value protecting speech. Black, female, and Democratic respondents were more likely to value protecting inclusion.
The data point to a potential shift “in the sensibility about what it means to do harm,” says Sam Gill, vice president for communities and impact at the Knight Foundation.
“The founders didn’t think about shouting fire in a theater as being the kind of speech that shouldn’t be protected,” Gill said. “That’s something we decided in the 20th century. I think you’re seeing some young people in the 21st century potentially making the argument that certain kinds of words are more harmful than maybe current understanding or current mores around free expression enables.”
Broader cultural shifts also play a role in students’ changing attitudes. A survey from the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago, has for more than four decades asked whether a racist who claims that black people are inferior should be allowed to speak in the community.
In 2018, the latest year available, 61 percent of respondents who had graduated college stated that the racist should be allowed to speak in the community. Over the past 42 years, the college group saw, by far, the biggest decline in respondents stating the speaker should be allowed to speak, falling 24 percentage points from a high of 85 percent.
But Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, which has weathered its share of controversies that balanced free speech and inclusivity, said the decline reveals more about the content of the speech than it does about free-speech principles.
He pointed out that a question in the same survey asking whether an “anti-religionist” should be allowed to teach in the community found the opposite result: Far more people, including those with a college degree, supported the right of that person to teach in the community than they did in the 1970s, indicating a shift in social mores.
“The free speechers want us to say, ‘Well, the content shouldn’t matter,’ but it clearly does,” Roth says. “It’s obviously the case that we were much more tolerant of racism 40 years ago than we are today. Is that a good thing that we would have tolerated racist speech?”
What’s more, a higher percentage of college graduates were tolerant of the racist speaker than people with a high-school degree, 54 percent, and people without a high school degree, 45 percent. This suggests people with a college degree are more open to allowing the airing of controversial speech than the public at large.
Divides Among Students Over Whether to Ban Offensive Speech
Students were split along racial, gender, and political lines when asked which type of learning environment they preferred.
SOURCE: Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey
Students’ attitudes can also be influenced by the tenor of current events. A survey conducted by a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and published by the Brookings Institution tried to gauge tolerance of offensive speech by surveying what students thought was an acceptable response to it.
The study by John Villasenor, a professor of engineering and law, found that 51 percent of students surveyed — 62 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of Republicans — indicated it was acceptable for a student group to shout so the audience couldn’t hear the speaker. Nearly one in five respondents — roughly equally split between Democrats and Republicans — said they’d support a student group’s use of violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. Villasenor said at the time that his results established that, on campuses, “freedom of expression is deeply imperiled.”
In a coincidence, however, the survey was conducted shortly after the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Villasenor says. Asked to think about speech that needed to be combated, respondents may have had images in their heads of tiki-torch-wielding white supremacists.
“It doesn’t mean it’s bad data. It just means it was taken at a moment of high societal stress,” he says. “If you look historically at some of our most important failures to uphold civil liberties, those occurred during times of stress.”
Roth, the Wesleyan president, says students today are more attuned to how the political right has used free speech as a tool for harassment and intimidation and therefore are more willing to entertain what restrictions on it are appropriate.
“They see the right wing has appropriated a libertarian approach to protected speech that’s very different from the conservative approach to protected speech that existed, say, 40 years ago,” he says. “Our students are saying, wait a minute, this very good idea is being used to advance an agenda that we oppose, and we don’t have to not oppose the agenda because we’re afraid of violating this pure procedure.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
