Data shows a surprising campus free speech problem: left-wingers being fired for their opinions
The American college campus, we are led to believe, is a dangerous place: If you say what you really think, particularly as a conservative, a mob of young social justice warriors will come for your faculty position or invitation to speak on campus. Entire books and
online magazines are premised on the idea that political correctness is sweeping the American university, threatening both higher education and the broader right to free speech.
But a data analysis from March by the director of Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project suggests that this “crisis” is more than a little overblown. There have been relatively few incidents of speech being squelched on college campuses, and there’s in fact limited evidence that conservatives are being unfairly targeted.
The raw numbers here should already raise questions about the so-called political correctness epidemic. According to the Department of Education, there are 4,583 colleges and universities in the United States (including two- and four-year institutions). The fact that there were roughly only 60 incidents in the past two years suggests that free speech crises are extremely rare events and don’t define university life in the way that critics suggest.
The pro-free speech Foundation for Individual Rights in Education keeps a database of speaker disinvitations from campuses. It finds only a handful of disinvitations — somewhere between 20 and 42 — in every year between 2011 and 2017. The highest single-year spike, from 21 in 2015 to 42 in 2016, is mostly the work of one provocateur launching an intentionally inflammatory college tour.“ 11 of the 42 disinvitations were for a single speaker: Breitbart editor and right-wing provocateur
Milo Yiannopoulos,”
FIRE’s Alex Morey writes. “His controversial
‘Dangerous Faggot Tour’ traveled to colleges across the country this year and seemed to prompt a new report of attempted censorship in some form or another each week.”
Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist at Canada’s Acadia University, put together a database of all incidents where a professor was dismissed for political speech in the United States between 2015 and 2017. Sachs’s results, published by the left-libertarian
Niskanen Center, actually found that left-wing professors were more frequently dismissed for their speech than conservative ones:
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Some campus free speech critics, I suspect, aren’t operating in good faith. For them, the entire debate is a way to attack universities as hopelessly and dangerously liberal — to undermine higher education for nakedly partisan reasons. Indeed,
four Republican-controlled state governments have set up new rules for political speech in public universities in response to concerns about free speech.
In Wisconsin, the strictest of these states, rules drafted by the state university’s board of regents allow students to be expelled if they are found to have disrupted the speech of other students three times. Protecting free speech on campus by expelling students for their political activism: just what the First Amendment’s drafters intended.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli...rrectness-free-speech-liberal-data-georgetown
