In the abstract, college students favor free speech. In reality, they stop short because of how social media affects them.
“Seventy-eight percent of college students believe their campuses should strive to create an open environment where they are exposed to many different types of speech and views. Seventy-two percent say that colleges should not restrict political speech even if it upsets or offends certain groups,” Jeffrey Herbst, president of the Newseum, wrote about a Gallup poll commissioned by the Newseum.
That’s the good news. Students realize the importance of political speech and the chilling effect that campus dictates can have on expression. The platitudes about the importance of speech and expression in an open society have sunk in.
However. Students are quick to find exceptions that are uncouth, rude, or degrading. They want to limit those expressions, but they don’t recognize the danger that those limitations pose for the speech they find legitimate.
“We found that today’s college students favor restrictions on free speech when it comes to slurs and language that is deliberately upsetting to some groups. Sixty-nine percent favor limitations on this kind of speech, while 63 percent support policies that restrict the wearing of costumes that stereotype particular groups,” Herbst noted.
That was consistent across race, gender, and political views.
That puts speech protections in a difficult situation. Policies and restrictions are blunt objects used to fix a problem. As has been seen among many cases that involved the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, university efforts to limit slurs have silenced legitimate speech and discussion as well. The latest example is the rise of “Bias Response Teams” which investigate speech protected by the First Amendment, but some students find offensive.
“Encouraging students to report on one another—if you hear something, say something (to administrators)—may not be conducive to the free and open debate that makes higher education valuable. Moreover, subjecting students and faculty to investigations can have a chilling effect on speech, even where no official punishment is ultimately meted out,” FIRE’s Adam Steinbaugh wrote.
The methods of protecting speech — and preventing slurs — that students favor contradict their professed values.
“Unfortunately, students appear to want to realize their desire to have a civil, inclusive conversation by imposing restrictions on speech that contravene the First Amendment,” Herbst wrote.
In Herbst’s analysis, he found the explanation in how college students experience debate in social media. Social media is positively viewed, but the anonymous speech that can be rude, vulgar, and threatening has made them more aware of the painful effects of speech. Therefore, students want the contradictory: preserve free speech, but shut down the vulgarity of it.
“The real challenge to free speech on campuses is that students seem unable or unwilling in critical instances to talk to each other, especially on the digital platforms that are closely associated with their identities,” Herbst wrote. “That has led them down the dangerous path of being too willing to endorse and even demand restrictions on the very speech they are trying to exercise in the service of their own ideas and causes. It is this system of informal censorship that is the most significant challenge to the idea that campuses might still be marketplaces of ideas.”
Social media has given millennials an unprecedented platform for speech and expression. They organize political movements with it, criticize policies, and develop communities. Yet its excesses have soured them on a liberal, tolerant concept of speech and expression. To preserve the atmosphere of academic freedom on campus, students and administrators alike have to confront those contradictions.
