It is a fact of history that we Americans believe all kinds of dumbass things. Different Americans believe different dumbass things at different times, but each of us must sooner or later fall for an urban myth, a lunatic philosophy, an obvious exaggeration, a prophecy of doom, or some other delusion. Speaking for my part, as a teenager I believed that Yoko Ono was an artist, and I was not alone. Even today some of us (I’m not naming names) think the French are right about Jerry Lewis, and still others believe all such madness is traceable to fluoridation of our water supply, like the effects of lead in ancient Rome.
Sometimes these mistaken beliefs are alarming; sometimes they look more alarming than they truly are. Earlier this month, a general hubbub arose when Gallup released a poll of college students showing, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it, “they are more committed to free speech in the abstract than in reality.” Overwhelmingly, students told Gallup’s pollsters that they value free speech on campus and off. Yet when presented with particular examples of speech that has traditionally been protected by the Constitution—“hate speech” or ethnic slurs or other language meant to wound—large percentages favored the use of campus speech codes and a ban on inviting potentially offensive speakers. A headline in the Washington Post read: “College students support free speech—unless it offends them.”
This news might seem disquieting. On the other hand, it isn’t really news. In their ambivalence about free speech, college students are following a long and not terribly honorable tradition.
Last year, the pollster Karlyn Bowman and her team at the American Enterprise Institute looked into the history of our support for the right to free speech. They found a Gallup poll dating back to 1938, the very dawn of scientific polling. It showed that 96 percent of those responding—pretty much everybody—said they believed in freedom of speech. Meanwhile, more than half of them insisted that Communists shouldn’t be allowed to “express their views in [their] community.” Another survey 16 years later showed the same overwhelming declarations of devotion to the First Amendment. Even so, 89 percent of respondents thought a Communist caught teaching in a college should be fired, and a majority thought books by Communists should be removed from the public library.
Communists don’t seem so threatening as they did during the days of the Hitler-Stalin pact or the Cold War, and for the last decade polls have shown that we are happy to let them teach, talk, and haunt our public libraries to their hearts’ content. Yet the pattern continues: We like free speech in theory, but lots of us get squirrely in the face of particular kinds of speech.
The ambivalence spans generations. In 1997, before many of today’s college students were born, one national poll showed that 75 percent of respondents said people should not be allowed “to say things in public that might be offensive to racial groups.” Some evidence even suggests that young people today are less touchy than their parents. Not long ago Pew asked a large sample of Americans to choose between two statements: first, that “too many people are offended these days”; and second, that “people need to be more careful about the language they use to avoid offending others.” Older people were more likely than young people to agree with the second statement; young people favored the first by a large majority.
So the kids are all right—or no worse than the rest of us, anyway. But this month’s Gallup poll went a little deeper. The truly alarming finding received much less attention in press accounts. The pollsters asked the students this question: “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important—a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech rights?”
The first thing that strikes you about this question is that it’s not a very good question. It is a “false choice,” to use President Obama’s favorite phrase. The two goals, a diverse society and one that protects free speech, ought to be perfectly compatible.
But are they? By 53 percent to 46, the students in the Gallup poll favored an inclusive society over one that guarantees the right to free speech. Even more disturbing, the groups most inclined to choose the inclusive society—black students, female students, and students who identify themselves as Democrats—were likewise the people most likely to favor speech codes and keeping potentially offensive speakers from campus. Evidently they see a trade-off between the two values: As free speech declines, diversity flourishes.
The poll did not define what an inclusive society is, leaving the students’ minds to caper in that vast, unmapped Shangri-La that the words diversity and inclusion are meant to embrace. A few things are clear, though. A foundational assumption of the dogma of diversity, as proselytized on college campuses, is that a community becomes stronger when its members don’t have much in common. And further: When we dwell upon—indeed, fetishize—the superficial differences of sex, race, or ethnicity, we will be stronger still.
This is a dumbass idea. Yet it is seldom held up for examination or debate. It should be obvious that no multicultural paradise would be possible at all if its citizens weren’t free to peaceably express their diverse views. Free speech is prior to diversity, as the philosophers say. It is a necessary condition of diversity, and probably diversity’s greatest guarantor. To extol inclusion at the expense of speech is incoherent and unserious—a mere reflex of campus ideology in our era of discontent.
Unserious, yes, but not unprecedented. Let’s look on the bright side: We’re not hearing any crazy talk about Yoko Ono.
