I’m a Longtime Professor. The Real Campus “Free Speech Crisis” Is Not What You Think.

MSN.com ^ | April 16, 2022 | Lucas Mann, Slate

[buwaya]

He could have written it in two paragraphs. Or a few bullet points. Its clear enough even as it is. His argument:

1. All the high profile anti-free speech stuff is limited to a few elite colleges.
2. In bread and butter schools like his, which are the vast majority of college-level institutions, its a non-issue.
3. They have other problems, mainly about getting the kids to care at all, much less fight over ideology.
4. Therefore overall its a non-issue.

I dont agree, but his point is clear.

[2manydegrees]

I read the article. Long and hopelessly naive about life realities on campus.

I taught at several colleges. Faculty and students relentlessly enforce a narrow social perspective. Not everyone, of course, but unanimity isn’t required.

One bad student review, a complaint of insensitivity or harassment and a faculty career is over.

A complaint of insensitivity or abuse about another student changes a friendly environment for adolescent social development into a hostile desert. No student should tolerate such an environment and few do. Students either knuckle under to prevailing social consensus or they move on.

The students and faculty the author describes comprise the community of “what’s left after the purge.”

The author knows perfectly well what would happen at UMass Dartmouth if anybody, student or faculty, were to say “I like Dickens better than Toni Morrison”. The author just thinks it is so obvious that the social perspectives in Morrison’s work are so superior to the social perspectives in Dickens’ that the statement would justify the expected outrage and campus cleansing.