Your thoughts on free speech (and why college students don't seem to care about it, much less fight for it)

Yesterday's post generated a LOT of emails and comments - the apparent lack of support for a fundamental American right obviously disturbs many of you too.

Yesterday, I lamented limp student attendance at my free speech speech¹ at the University of North Carolina in an article headlined Why don't college students care about free speech?

The question was meant rhetorically, it must have resonated. Many of you emailed with your thoughts - most serious, some less so. Some of the best follow.

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Paul R.:

They're very likely gonna get a brutal lesson in the rights they do not value, historically, when you don't defend these rights, they will be stripped and used against you, and usually in a very bloody fashion.

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G.S.:

I have no solution either, but I can indeed tell you why: kids don’t experience free speech growing up, and therefore don’t view it as a “norm,” let alone a right. Everything kids can say and do, and everything their teachers can say and do, is now very tightly controlled. They simply accept that if a kid or teacher utters the “n-word,” that person’s 9-5 life is effectively over. (To illustrate: I cannot even type the “n-word” in a private email to you. The only other word like that---the “f-word”--I can say, type and scream out loud anytime I want in the 21^st century! It’s fucking crazy!)

It’s like that for many words, phrases, and accusations now. Call another kid by his or her “dead name”? Serious official punishment and social ostracism is expected. (This is now so widespread, the pronouns “he/she” and “his/her” are nearly dead themselves among Gen Z, replaces by the ubiquitous “they” and “their.”) Say you’re not racist because you “have lots of black friends”? Open ridicule, possible violence. Wear a MAGA hat? Likely violence.

When you live like that for your first 18 years of life, you don’t have any expectation of free speech as you begin adulthood. Life involves speech codes to them—and they simply accept it, just like people do in totalitarian societies.

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(Pay for me, get the readers for free!)

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James H:

Next time try giving the same speech, but naming it something different like, "Free Speech is Ridiculous", or "I Can't Take Your Blue Hair Seriously", or "Why Taylor Swift Hates Free Speech", or "The End of Pride Flags", and you'll probably get thousands of students attending. Maybe for the wrong reasons...at first. But people will come...people will most definitely come. 

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Jay S.:

There is no "college" anymore, that’s why.  They're concentrated pockets of extreme liberal academics who indoctrinate young minds to think exactly like them or be forced out. 

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Eric S:

I think there is a correlation between the lack of concern over free speech and the falling birth rates. It is not 1:1. But both attitudes seem to exhibit a feeling of resignation and hopelessness. I am almost 46 and even I am demoralized by our current state of affairs. 

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Terry K.

I agree with everything you wrote. However students today have lived in a peaceful, enabling and passive time. The U.S. is not at war. They were not taught civics or history and have no benchmarks to begin to understand or debate. Could you be tilting at windmills?

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Leslie H:

My son majored in history - 2008 through 2012. He felt comfortable (and said his friends did also) expressing his views in only one teacher's classes. The other teachers would denigrate students whose views they opposed.

By contrast, my major was political science - 1967 through 1971. We were REQUIRED to be able to defend any side of an issue - after class we adjourned to the grill for coffee and honey buns :) Students today are not taught to think!

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Finally, Norm A. has a suggestion for next time:

You would have gotten a better response if you had added beer to the menu.  Pizza and beer will attract the college kids.  I would have thought you would have known that.

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Original article here:

1. Say that five times fast.