In this essay in The Chronicle Review, David Bromwich argues that students are leading an assault on free speech, and that faculty members and administrators are enabling them.
Mr. Bromwich, a professor of English at Yale University, writes that in previous generations, “conflict was said to be essential to the purpose of education, one of the things that distinguished a campus from a factory floor or a public-relations office.”
But things have changed, he argues. That’s in part because administrators “are reluctant to back the principle of free speech without a supplementary clause that gives equal weight to feelings of community. They often go further and signify, to those who cite altruistic motives for breaking campus rules, that deep down they sympathize with the rule-breakers. And, sentimentally speaking, they do.”
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