Protesters shout before a speaking engagement by Ben Shapiro at the University of California Berkeley in Berkeley, California, 14 September 2017. (AP Photo/Josh Edelson)

By Bernd Debusmann

Is it acceptable for students to resort to violence to silence a speaker whose views offend them? Or to drown, with chants and boos, a speech expressing repugnant thought? What about angry demonstrations to force university administrators to cancel invitations for controversial figures?

Such methods clash with the notion of the university as a bastion of free speech and open debate, a marketplace of ideas where people learn best when their beliefs are challenged.

But for a radical minority, mostly on the political left, that concept is outdated and there should be limits on the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Adopted 226 years ago, that amendment affords expansive protections for the freedom of speech that  have no parallel in other countries.

In the United States, you can burn the national flag (an act deemed “symbolic  speech”), mock the president, praise Hitler, parade with swastika flags, insult minorities, denigrate immigrants, call for an American  version of apartheid, deny the holocaust, argue that blacks are less intelligent than whites and  demonize Muslims. The list goes on.

Freedom of speech is under threat.

Admirers of such vast freedoms see them as a mark of American exceptionalism.

But a string of protests and demonstrations at universities over the past few years and a new survey of student attitudes highlight that freedom of speech is under threat from vocal groups who think there should be limits and that expressions of hate and bigotry do not deserve constitutional protection.

According to a survey of 1,500 students of colleges across the United States, one in five said it was acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker’s “offensive and hurtful” statements.

Just over half thought that it was OK to prevent an audience from hearing a controversial speaker “by loudly and repeatedly shouting.”

The survey was conducted by John Villasenor , a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.

Misgivings about the breadth of protection for offensive speech are not restricted to college students. Two years ago, the Pew Research Center, another Washington think tank, found that 40 percent of American millennials (those aged 18 to 34) held that the government should be able to prevent people from making statements offensive to minority groups.

The main targets of university protests have been figures on the far right of the political spectrum such as Richard Spencer, a white supremacist who advocates the creation of an “ethno-state,” peopled by white Americans to be created through “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”  How this is to be done remains unexplained.

Generation Snowflake and trigger warnings

Opposition to allowing such fringe ideas to be aired in academia has grown along with the influence over the past decade or so of what conservatives mock as “Generation Snowflake” – students so fragile and sensitive they melt when confronted with beliefs that are offensive and do not match their own world view.

To accommodate student demands, scores of colleges and universities have introduced over the past few years “trigger warnings” alerting them to course materials and books that could upset them. Some of the world’s greatest works of literature have been deemed to warrant such warnings.

The list includes Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” (incest and murder),  Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (sexual assault), Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (antisemitism), Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” (frequent use of the word “nigger”), Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (colonialism, violence),  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (domestic  abuse) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (suicide).

Like many American trends, trigger warnings have traveled across the Atlantic, and British students have demanded them at various universities, including Oxford and the London School of Economics. University invitations to guest speakers often go through a vetting process by student unions intent on shielding fellow students from uncomfortable thought.

Censorship by any other name is still censorship, however, and makes a mockery of academic freedom.

But there are signs of an incipient climate change less hospitable to snowflakes.

This summer, the acceptance package that the University of Chicago sent  to incoming freshmen included a note from the dean of students, John Ellison, that heartened free speech advocates, unhappy with what they see as political correctness run amok on campuses.

“Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” Ellison wrote.

Three cheers for the University of Chicago.

(The views are the author’s. We would welcome reaction and opposing viewpoints in the interest of civil debate.)


Bernd Debusmann

Bernd Debusmann is a former columnist for Reuters who has worked as a correspondent, bureau chief and editor in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and United States. He has reported from more than 100 countries and lived in nine. He was shot twice in the course of his work – once covering a night battle in the center of Beirut and once in an assassination attempt prompted by his reporting on Syria.

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