Sometimes, for those of us who are constantly reading statistics and poll results, something stands out that you didn’t expect to see — a number that makes you think the future will not be what you have been expecting.
My latest sighting of such a number was in a March 12 New York Times report of a poll of college students sponsored by the American Council on Education, the Charles Koch Foundation, and the Stanton Foundation. It asked students about free speech on campus, whether it is allowed and whether it should be.
College and university campuses have been transformed over the past half-century from the zone most tolerant of free speech to the zone least tolerant. Astonishingly, most colleges and universities have speech codes and maintain bureaucracies charged with restricting speech on campus. One-tenth limit this freedom to tiny and remote “free speech zones.”
The percentage of schools with restrictive speech codes has been declining, thanks largely to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But speech restrictions are still the norm, not the exception. Their stated purpose is to prevent speech that is “offensive,” an inevitably subjective standard, especially to those thought to contribute to “inclusion” and “diversity.”
Majorities of students polled said they supported both free speech and “inclusion and diversity.” When asked which was more important, 53 percent said inclusion and diversity and only 46 percent said free speech.
What I found most striking — the numbers that stood out for me — was the difference between men and women. Among men, 61 percent favored free speech. But only 35 percent of women did so. That’s a result I certainly hadn’t expected.
That number is of particular concern, because women are now a majority of college and university students. They appear to be a preponderance of the campus administrators who enforce schools’ speech and sexual assault codes, at a time when administrators outnumber teachers in higher education.
Historically, speech restrictions have been opposed by disadvantaged groups — civil rights advocates, labor union organizers, left-wing radicals. Now, as the Times gingerly notes, those students who most value free speech are from “groups historically or currently in positions of power.” Historically, perhaps; but not currently. It is left-wing and liberal orthodoxies, and policies of racial quotas and preferences, that campus speech restrictors are attempting to shield from comments anyone deems “offensive.”
So the difference between male and female students may reflect different power positions, with those most at risk of proscription more favorably disposed toward free speech. It may also reflect differences between male and female temperaments on average. Psychological studies over many years conclude that women tend to prize agreeableness and consensus, while men tend to seek out conflict and competition. One can easily imagine evolutionary explanations for this group difference, which of course would not be apparent in every individual.
Female students’ willingness to subordinate free speech to political values is disturbing, in a time when habits of mind and behavior developed on campus tend to leach out to the larger society.
That has been apparent in the behavior of Silicon Valley firms like Google and Facebook, which have imposed campus-like standards in censoring material on YouTube and Facebook feeds. Their corps of recent graduates have often labeled anodyne conservative themes as “hate speech,” while granting full access to bigots like Louis Farrakhan.
This attitude was on display when Google fired engineer James Damore for circulating a memo arguing that the company’s efforts to achieve gender equality were ineffective. Google executives Sundar Pichai and Susan Wojcicki inaccurately accused him of saying women were inferior. His real offense: saying things that were politically incorrect.
The liberal bias of Silicon Valley, like the left-wing tilt of the universities, is not in doubt. It is evident in the controversy over whether President Trump’s 2016 campaign consultant Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to influence voter attitudes.
That’s seen as illegitimate by many of the same people who hailed President Barack Obama’s similar 2012 campaign use of Facebook data as a brilliant creative initiative. The Obama director of integration and media analytics recently revealed that Facebook execs candidly admitted “that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
Those who have welcomed women’s greater opportunities and increasing achievements have assumed that a less male-dominated world would be more welcoming and free. The campus poll and Silicon Valley practices suggest it may turn out to be at least a little more Orwellian.
