The First Step Is Admitting You've Got a Problem

To restore free expression and the unfettered exchange of ideas to censorious college campuses, the nation's liberal thought leaders will have to admit we have a problem on our hands. Events of this week presented some encouraging signs that they're getting closer. While restless campuses erupted in sadly predictable episodes of students demanding administrators acquiesce to their demands, institutions of the center-left establishment showed a growing willingness to confront the demons now endemic to the bright college years.

For one thing, the American Civil Liberties Union—not always exactly an equal opportunity watchdog—condemned the University of California's submission to a "heckler's veto" at Berkeley, where Ann Coulter's on-again-off-again speaking engagement sparked viral debate across the political spectrum. (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren also spoke out against the effort to shut down Coulter.) Shouting down a politically unpopular speaker is an established trend that's reached new heights recent months. It's a symptom of "carving out" freedom of expression from the first amendment, the result of a failure to teach civics and compounded by the college-aged generation's early exposure to social media. Or so argues Jeffrey Herbst, the president of the reliably left-leaning Newseum, whose timely white paper "Addressing the Real Crisis of Free Expression on Campus" published this week:

Systematic public opinion polling and anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that the real problem of free expression on college campuses is much deeper than episodic moments of censorship: With little comment, an alternate understanding of the First Amendment has emerged among young people that can be called "the right to non-offensive speech."

While Berkeley cowered from controversy, lest it burn again, undergrads due south at Pomona College decided the presence of visiting professor Alice Goffman, a sociologist whose book On the Run inspired criticism of her anachronistic research methods and charges of racism, was the last straw. Speakers swan in and out under siege, but faculty are forever (or at least a couple of years, the undergraduate definition of forever). Students, being sensitive and enlightened beyond any earlier generation, want a voice in hiring from now on. Nothing illustrates Herbst's appraisal of what's caused the "crisis of free expression on campus" quite so well as these students' demand to micromanage faculty selection.

While such dramatic events aren't culturally representative of the more than 4,000 colleges across the country, Herbst told me, they do illustrate his thesis: Students arrive on campuses already skeptical of the foundational value of free speech, and they come already accustomed to curating all the information they receive. He says in the paper: