Opinion: What is behind the denial of free speech on campuses – The Mercury News

No fascists in Berkeley! shouts the young woman intent on closing down a meeting of Trump supporters, a handful of her Republican classmates.

Such scenes have become commonplace on campus.What goes into that denial of free speech?

As a lifelong academic, Im perplexed and pained.After all, this is so against all the obvious lessons that have been given students about free speech: that speech you disagree with, or find distasteful, or even abhorrent, is permissible, and has as much right to exist as your own speech, which someone else may disagree with or find distasteful or abhorrent.

Surely this has been drummed into them since they learned about the First Amendment and its importance in a democratic society. So how can these protesters so blatantly ignore what must be considered Free Speech 101, The Basic Message?

Here are a few possibilities.

They never got the free speech idea, or they knew it and ignored it, or were unaware of how it applied to them. The phenomenon of knowing something but not applying it to yourself is all too familiar.Or they know it but have been confused by the recent injection of the concept of hate speech into matters of free speech. Suddenly there is this other kind of speech that is not acceptable. It became easy for a protester to proclaim, Hate speech is not free speech!

But I see a much stronger, more emotional component at work in college protesters.

There is an almost sensual surrender to the feeling that We Too Are Victims, persecuted for being righteous. The sense of victimhood leads inevitably to anger, and even outrage, however self-defined that condition may be.

Add to this the excitement of the protest, its drama, and they become freedom fighters in their own eyes, battling evil.

Are these feelings sincere and genuine? I think they are: We feel what were allowed to feel, sanctioned to feel, encouraged to feel.

Outrage is something that people are frequently urged to experience, and therefore want to feel, and so feel.

Are you angry, sir? asks the reporter of someone who suffered at the hands of, say, clumsy bureaucracy or an inflated hospital bill. And of course the person answers, You bet I am, and feels a righteous anger swelling in his or her chest.

Changes in what we feel are fairly easy to trace from decade to decade. At a given point, we learned about the dangers of second-hand smoke, and learned that we were greatly bothered by cigarette smoke: A heretofore small annoyance became major discomfort. Or a sexist comment went from being just annoying to giving serious offense.

Sincerity has little to with it. We were sincere both times.

Our feelings are more malleable than we know. We are subject to the prevailing sentiment of our time and place, of other people, of fashion and feelings rise and fall with time and place. Just as one set of circumstances might kindle certain feelings in one culture and different ones in another, so one period of time can ignite feelings different from another time.

Knowing this might restrain your own emotional reaction to protesters though would hopefully still allow you, and us, to tell them once again about the beauties of free speech.

Manfred Wolf is a retired professor from San Francisco State University, and the author, most recently, of Survival in Paradise: Sketches from a Refugee Life in Curacao. He wrote this for The Mercury News.

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Opinion: What is behind the denial of free speech on campuses - The Mercury News