iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

by Jean M. Twenge

When UC Irvine law professors Howard Gillman and Erwin Chemerinsky taught a college freshman seminar on freedom of speech, they were shocked by how often the students favored restricting speech protected by the First Amendment. It was a generational shift, they realized: the students had witnessed the harm of hateful speech but not the harm of censorship or punishment of dissent. The professors pointed out that restricting speech you dislike could easily lead to restricting speech you like. When officials have the power to regulate speech, they noted, “that power is inevitably abused. . . . Over the course of U.S. history, officials censored or punished those whose speech they disliked: abolitionists, labor activists, religious minorities, communists and socialists, cultural critics, gays and lesbians,” they wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “. . . Our students came to realize that there was no way to create a ‘safe space’ on campuses where students could be free from one set of offenses without engaging in massive censorship, and perhaps creating another kind of offense.” The culture of speech restriction has created another victim: humor. Comedians such as Chris Rock say they no longer perform on college campuses because students are too easily offended. Writing in The Atlantic about campus comedy shows, Caitlin Flanagan concluded that college students preferred “comedy that was 100 percent risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single studen...