How Colleges Can Revive Free Speech on Campus

In yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the crisis of free speech on America’s college campuses, the First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams pointed out that the impulse to suppress unpopular ideas is coming primarily from militant students, rather than overreaching administrators:


“What brings us here today is that time and again, speech is being effectively banned on campuses because the speaker has ideas that offend,” said Floyd Abrams, senior counsel at the firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel and another witness. “That’s the problem. It does not arise in the main because university administrations are seeking to suppress speech, it arises more often than not because students find it intolerable to have certain speakers appear and certain ideas expressed with which they disagree and they find offensive or even outrageous.”

It is troubling that elite college students—the next generation of business and media and political leaders—are spearheading a movement of illiberalism and intolerance. But it also points to a relatively simple potential remedy: Colleges should choose students in part on the basis of their commitment to open and honest inquiry. That is, admissions officers should be directed to reward students who demonstrate intellectual humility and respect for disagreeable ideas, and penalize those who seem predisposed to respond to argument with shouting and heckling and censoring rather than debate.

There is a simple way for an enterprising colleges to do this: Simply add a short essay question to their application asking students to explain what free speech means to them and perhaps to describe time that they have learned something from material they found disagreeable or even offensive. This would help filter out students who saw free speech as a tool of oppression rather than an essential building bloc of liberal society. This essay would not be out of place among the many questions about values and personal experience that are now found on college applications. And the process of writing it might help shape opinion among the incoming class.

Many colleges have issued statements affirming their commitment to free speech in response to the recent episodes of runaway mob censorship. Fewer have backed them up. One productive step forward would be to consider ways to make students’ demonstrated respect for liberal values part of their admissions criteria.


The post How Colleges Can Revive Free Speech on Campus appeared first on The American Interest.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on June 21, 2017 05:23
No comments have been added yet.


Peter L. Berger's Blog

Peter L. Berger
Peter L. Berger isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.
Follow Peter L. Berger's blog with rss.