What If College Students Have the Same Views on Free Speech As Everyone Else? – New York Magazine

Ad will collapse in seconds CLOSE / campus culture wars May 5, 2017 05/05/2017 3:23 pm By Jesse Singal Share Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

College students, you may have heard, are increasingly opposed to free speech. Especially liberal ones they just cant handle views they disagree with, especially conservative ones. Except: It might be more complicated than that. Thats the takeaway of a new survey of Yale University students who made national headlines for an uproar over a Halloween-costume email back in 2015 summed up by James Freeman in The Wall Street Journal.

The survey was commissioned by the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale, and there were 872 respondents. Freeman, who is on the board of that organization, notes that 72 percent of respondents were opposed to the idea of Yale having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty. And when presented with an either-or question about controversial views, 84% opted for intellectual diversity and just 5% favored muzzling people with controversial views.

Freeman cites this as both good news, from his point of view, and as a novel finding: The first sentence of his column is At last, theres hopeful news on intellectual liberty from a college campus. But this isnt entirely new, even for Yale. Last year, in the course of debunking some claims about how ostensibly anti-free-speech college students are, I highlighted a previous iteration of that same survey of Yale students which found that they generally reported being staunchly supportive of free-speech rights, at least when the question was asked in certain ways (the slide deck I reference doesnt appear to be available online anymore, unfortunately):

Now, surveys are complicated and susceptible to rather wild swings based on question wording, so it would be wrong to cherry-pick any limited set of findings and then make sweeping generalizations about college students these days. Plus, there were some items on the survey where students werent quite so free-speech-friendly. And it goes without saying that what happens at Yale might not be applicable to the rest of the college population.

But whats striking is, zooming out a little, just how little empirical evidence there is to suggest college students differ in big ways from the broader population when it comes to their support for free speech, despite how often we hear confident assertions that campuses are free-speech no-go zones. People clearly think there is a big difference and will sometimes point to survey evidence to support this view, the best recent-ish example being a Pew survey from a year and a half ago finding that 40 percent of students favored government bans on certain forms of offensive speech. I initially covered that finding as though it were alarming, but when I looked around at other past surveys of Americans views on free speech, it was clear that the 40 percent number wasnt an outlier. In other words, as I wrote in a subsequent mea culpa:

Part of whats going on here could come down to preference intensity and opportunity. By which I mean that college students who are in favor of expanding restrictions on free speech might feel relatively more strongly about it than do their pro-free-speech peers, and they have highly visible opportunities to express those views by attempting to no-platform speakers they dont like, or responding assertively to instances of perceived administrator insensitivity. Whenever they do so, of course or whenever they engage in any other act that can be portrayed as yet another instance of out-of-control college activists it gets blown up to the status of a national news story. Twenty years ago, no one would have heard of a small group of Oberlin students protesting about the cultural appropriation of Banh Mi going on at a dining hall there, or about any of the dozen other similar blowups that seem to occur on a monthly basis.

Furthermore, its very hard for stories that buck the trend stories about how most college students arent sent into conniptions by appropriated Banh Mi to get much traction because of the whole dog-bites-man thing: No one wants to write about college students who are acting like everyday American adults with fairly standard views on free speech. So while the phrase silent majority has some unfortunate political baggage affixed to it, it might accurately capture whats going on here. There may not have been much real, substantive movement in the anti-free-speech direction on campus a lot of kids dont see the need to ban or no-platform offensive speakers, but they arent in the streets about it, and may simply not want to bother stating their own views during those instances in which things get out of hand. Because theyre quiet, they dont get much coverage, skewing everyones view of college students as a group.

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What If College Students Have the Same Views on Free Speech As Everyone Else? - New York Magazine