“Once upon a time there was free, robust speech in US campuses”

[Joe Carillo]

“There was a time when people believed free speech on campus should be as wild and freewheeling as possible,” says Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE for short, in the United States. “Not anymore. Today students are apparently too sensitive to be able to deal with hard ideas or outrageous humour.”

In “Students are supposed to read books, not burn them,” an article in Spike written by its editor Brendan O’Neill, Lukianoff laments that freedom of thought and speech in US campuses is today “being beaten up by the massed ranks of self-righteous students allergic to being offended, speech-policing university administrators who see it as their job to remould young people’s belief systems, and even some professors who now monitor what their students say in class and the tone in which they say it.”

Lukianoff says this assault on free speech on campus is a consequence of today’s broader academic culture that, instead of highly prizing combative debate and the unfettered freedom to scuffle over ideas and knowledge, increasingly demonizes such things as potentially hurtful and damaging. By doing this, he says, this academic culture is destroying its own raison d’être, which is to foster thought, discussion, and enlightenment.

Instead, Lukianoff proposes moving away from the idea that “words are like bullets” and that speech is a form of physical assault, and recognizing that being argued with, even vociferously, is not the same as being beaten up. “The fact that words can hurt feelings, the fact that they carry emotional charges, is all the more reason for protecting them from censorship,” he explains. “Because the whole point of free speech is to have deep, meaningful, robust debates. We have to have deadly serious discussions about deadly serious things – and we can’t do that if everyone is listening out for potentially offensive words rather than thinking about and responding to the ideas being expressed.” 

Read Brendan O’Neill’s “Students are supposed to read books, not burn them” in Spike now!

[forjobstuff]

This is in response to the video of Greg Lukianoff on campus censorship.

Is there a problem with campus censorship? By law, I would agree that it is. It is, no doubt, hardly an arguable case that certain groups of people are denied of rights more so than another group. I’ve seen this with my own eyes. They’re the ones in the world we see, frustrated, because they just don’t receive the same opportunities and treatment as others do, and censorship has definitely played a part in this development. Perhaps they’re schooling did not allow them to speak their opinion on matters that directly effected them so that this forbiddance became a normal condition.

This brings about the birth of ignorant behavior, ignorant in the sense of literally not correctly informed to the rights each person has. On the same token, I do feel that there should be a limit to what is said and what can be said. Though we all have the right to free speech, we should take into account that it also is an email with an attachment, or in other words, it is a right with a consequence. An example of this is a person would not scream bomb at an airport, though one could argue its his free will to say whatever he wants.

Of course it may not be the wisest decision to make, for it one does exercise that free will, he will suffer dire consequences. Again, you wouldn’t enter someone’s home and openly say everything that comes to mind, even knowing that your words have offensive tones to the householder. Why not? Because one recognizes that with free speech comes costly consequence. So, the ending result of my response is this: We are all free moral agents and if it does not directly attack another persons rights, we should be able to express our views, but remembering that it is merely our own personal view, not necessarily fact.