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Well, what do you know?

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But a brand new data analysis from Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project suggests that this “crisis” is more than a little overblown. There have been relatively few incidents of speech being squelched on college campuses, and there’s in fact limited evidence that conservatives are being unfairly targeted.

The Free Speech Project’s researchers have cataloged more than 90 incidents since 2016 that fit their criteria for a person’s free speech rights being threatened. Of those 90, about two-thirds took place on college campuses. These incidents range from a speaker being disinvited to a faculty member being fired over allegedly offensive comments to a student-run play being canceled over concerns it would offend.

The raw numbers here should already raise questions about the so-called political correctness epidemic. According to the Department of Education, there are 4,583 colleges and universities in the United States (including two- and four-year institutions). The fact that there were roughly only 60 incidents in the past two years suggests that free speech crises are extremely rare events and don’t define university life in the way that critics suggest.

Moreover, there’s a consistent pattern in the data when it comes to conservatives — one that tells a different story than you hear among free speech panickers.

“Most of the incidents where presumptively conservative speech has been interrupted or squelched in the last two or three years seem to involve the same few speakers: Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Ann Coulter ,” Sanford Ungar, the Free Speech Project’s director, writes. “In some instances, they seem to invite, and delight in, disruption.”

What Ungar is suggesting here is that the “campus free speech” crisis is somewhat manufactured. Conservative student groups invite speakers famous for offensive and racially charged speech — all of the above speakers fit that bill — in a deliberate attempt to provoke the campus left. In other words, they’re trolling. When students react by protesting or disrupting the event, the conservatives use it as proof that there’s real intolerance for conservative ideas.

The other key thing that emerges from the Georgetown data, according to Ungar, is that these protests and disruptions don’t just target the right. “Our data also include many incidents, generally less well-publicized, where lower-profile scholars, speakers, or students who could be considered to be on the left have been silenced or shut down,” he writes.

Examples include Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s commencement speech being canceled after receiving death threats for criticizing President Donald Trump and the president of Sonoma State University apologizing for allowing a black student to read a poem critical of police violence at commencement.

There’s little reason, according to Ungar, to conclude from any of this that conservative views are uniquely unwelcome on campus.

“One among many untested concepts,” he writes, “is whether the survey results would be different if conservative student groups, instead of repeatedly inviting campus visitors who have built a brand of disruption, were to sponsor serious intellectual dialogue with thinkers on the right.”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17644180/political-correctness-free-speech-liberal-data-georgetown

I can't wait for Bari Weiss to completely ignore this study in her next NYT column.  

Posted

Oh great, the right wingers will be here shortly to tell us how wrong this is.  Paging Slorch, Onboard and EMAWesome

Posted
13 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Oh great, the right wingers will be here shortly to tell us how wrong this is.  Paging Slorch, Onboard and EMAWesome

Maybe it would help their perspective if any of those people had, y'know, actually stepped foot on a college campus once in their lives.

  • Like 1
  • 6 years later...
Posted (edited)

A decade ago universities were vigorously expelling students from campus who sexually assaulted women on campus.  In the book Missoula, Jon Krakauer chronicles how UM (in my opinion) erred on the side of victims on campus and kicked off assaulters with less due process and burden of proof than a criminal court would require.   Which was fine by me. They eventually lost that battle.

I think the underlying issue is similar in that schools could have taken an approach where they punished/expelled anyone who created a legitimately hostile environment towards other students.  That's not to say that any of the recent protesters did that.  But these schools would have been better served had they decided that they were going to go absolutely overboard in terms of time and place restrictions and if they made examples of any students who created  hostile environment directed at specific students rather than at towards non-student entities. 

Caveat:  Do I know whether there were any such directed hostile actions?  No.  But hard to imagine that there weren't any that went either way.  

The schools weren't afraid to err on the side of the victims in the sexual assault cases - they should have marketed the same attitude in regard to potential student victims.

Republicans won the perception battle in that regard, and now they are attacking free speech.  The schools were sloppy and didn't accurately forsee the danger.

Edited by The Original Greaser Bob


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