Young, college-educated Americans are more accepting of controversial speech

By THE DATA TEAM

CRITICS like to talk about American college campuses in apoplectic, dystopian terms. Political correctness has run amok; snowflakery festers in the ivory towers. To be fair, a handful of well-publicised incidents, in which students at some of the country’s most prestigious universities have shouted down or even assaulted speakers whose views they found offensive and cried foul over culturally inauthentic sushi, have provided evidence supporting this perspective. Right-leaning pundits are fond of portraying these antics as an inevitable consequence of squishy leftism and liberal intolerance. But are brainier students really fonder of such bullying?

Answers can be found in General Social Survey (GSS), an academic questionnaire which has probed American attitudes on free speech for decades. It will come as no surprise that illiberal impulses can be found in many corners of society. But young Americans who have attended college are in fact more accommodating of controversial speakers, such as avowed racists, than those who have not. The sole exception seems to be letting communists teach in college; young educated Americans are less keen on this than their peers without a degree.

Views on these issues seem not to have changed much in recent years. That suggests that the campus stunts, disturbing as they may be, afflict only a fraction of students. Reporting by the media that focuses on campus discord more than harmony can create a misleadingly gloomy impression. Much of the press gleefully reported on a scrum that occurred in March when Charles Murray, a political scientist made radioactive by his writing on racial differences in intelligence, got into a violent scrape when speaking at Middlebury College. His subsequent talks at Harvard and Columbia, from which he emerged unscathed, went largely uncovered in the media.

Other data inspire further hope. A survey of 3,000 college students by Gallup for the Knight Foundation and the Newseum Institute finds that 78% favour campuses where offensive and biased speech is permitted. A separate study found that even at Yale, a hotbed of student protest, 72% oppose codes that circumscribe speech, compared with 16% in favour. Truly illiberal tendencies are limited to about 20% of college students. This is the fraction that thinks it is acceptable to use violence to prevent a “very controversial speaker” from speaking, according to a survey published by the Brookings Institution immediately after violence broke out this August at a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Yet although they may be outnumbered, this vocal minority can have a chilling effect on what everyone else thinks they can say. At Yale, 42% of students (and 71% of conservatives) say they feel uncomfortable giving their opinions on politics, race, religion and gender. Self-censorship becomes more common as students progress through university: 61% of freshmen feel comfortable gabbing about their views, but the same is true of just 56% of sophomores, 49% of juniors and 30% of seniors.