Da. The increased calls for sensitivity-based censorship represent the dark side of what are otherwise several positive developments for human civilization. As I will explain in the next section, I believe that we are not passing through some temporary phase in which an out-of-touch and hypersensitive elite attempts — and often fails — to impose its speech-restrictive norms on society. It’s worse than that: people all over the globe are coming to expect emotional and intellectual comfort as though it were a right. This is precisely what you would expect when you train a generation to believe that they have a right not to be offended. Eventually, they stop demanding freedom of speech and start demanding freedom from speech. To be crystal clear, I am in no way absolving higher education of its culpability in exacerbating the movement against free speech. Higher education deserves profound criticism for maintaining and promoting illiberal and unconstitutional speech codes and punishing students and faculty for what they say. However, I believe the even greater failure of higher education is neglecting to teach the intellectual habits that promote debate and discussion, tolerance for views we hate, epistemic humility, and genuine pluralism. I will spend most of the following pages discussing how the rise of “disinvitation season” on campus and the mounting calls for “trigger warnings” represent an increasingly suffocating environment for speech on campus. If, as I suspect, this push for freedom from speech is something like a predictable and natural (if pernicious) force, the single institution that could be doing the most to combat it is higher education, both within and outside the United States. Unfortunately, far from teaching the intellectual discipline that welcomes a free and robust exchange of ideas, campuses are actively accelerating the push for freedom from speech. feedproxy.google/~r/volokh/mainfeed/~3/fGIoAipp8Vg/story01.htm
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 17:56:48 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015