I never particularly cared about the campus free speech debate as an undergrad, likely because I went to a big state school where this wasn't an issue. I don't recall ever feeling like I couldn't engage with an issue for fear of saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, even when conversations got contentious. And we had a genuinely diverse student body (racially and otherwise - lots of poor/working class students, a lot of immigrants & first generation students, returning students in their 30s from industry or the military, large ideological spread etc), which according to current orthodoxies you would think would result in more conflict - so many more lived experiences to offend against! But things - at least during my time there - never got out of hand. So I assumed that the overall campus free speech thing was overblown - that most campuses were probably more or less like mine, with small groups of overzealous folks making a lot of noise but overall no real, identifiable free speech issue. Obviously, this is one person's experience at one school, so I don't know how different things were elsewhere.
I am now in grad school at an elite institution, and have noticed a shockingly pronounced difference in the free-speech attitudes of people in my program who attended elite universities for undergrad vs people who attended lower-ranked/state schools. There's this whole separate language for discussing identity issues that they seem to have learned, which frankly sounded like gibberish to me at first and often still does. But they're very attuned to it and pretty merciless with it - the denunciation of fellow students (especially in any kind of student advocacy space) who fail to use the exact correct language is swift and fierce. And that's not even touching some of the things I have heard people say about professors who are known to have verboten beliefs. There's also been the disinviting of speakers, countless petitions to get the department and university more broadly to adopt unpopular and questionably effective practices like dropping the GRE...it's messy. I find the language thing to be the most fascinating part though - even though it's kind of frightening, it's also almost funny to hear these folks, most of whom have been very wealthy their whole lives, "advocate" for poor/working class people of color using language that most of the poor/working class people of any race I've met would laugh at.
So yeah, based on my experience, it seems like a mostly-class, mostly-elite-institution thing that's really difficult to navigate if you haven't been exposed to it continuously for a long time. And I agree that the idea that its relative limitation to elite universities doesn't make it something you can just brush aside - these are people who, by dint of their education, may end up with a lot of power and influence someday. I would love to live in a world where you're not more likely to end up with a lot of power just because you went to Harvard or Stanford, but alas I do not. So a bunch of these elite students in ideological lockstep repeating crazy shit and using bizarre language conventions to gatekeep who can publicly share their opinions is, indeed, bad.
Sorry for the rambling, this has just been on my mind a lot lately as I've been trying to participate in department initiatives without stepping on any toes while still avoiding repeating bullshit mantras I don't believe. It's a tough needle to thread.
The fact that it is largely privileged students is because they have been raised (for better or worse) to be more assertive, and to some degree to not respect hierarchies. (If a professor says no, you just go over their head to the department chair or Dean, probably addressing them as "hi firstname" in your email).
Part of this is student-as-consumer culture (I'm paying to be here, I should get what I want), but part of it is a broader shift, coming from (again, in largely affluent and educated social milieus) helicopter parenting and the ways in which children are no longer taught anything like "respect your elders" or that there is ever a NO that can't be argued against.
I always come back to this askamanager piece, where the letter writer almost seems like patient zero of this kind of entitlement. It's from a college student (this was 2016), and her approach was entirely the mindset I'm talking about.
If you don't like something, you politely but assertively ask for it to be changed. And that the signatures of a bunch of interns should change company policy *because they want it to*. When I was 18 it would never have occurred to me to ask for a change in the dress code *at my job*. And this is the kind of ground shift I'm referring to: it's not just the fringe madnesses we hear about, but a complete worldview.
I consider it my job to share vaguely related white trash anecdotes. Here goes.
I had a difficult time culturally in college, as well although this was the late aughts. Biggest piece is definitely on me for not using resources but a lot of it was class resentment. I worked in a developmental biology lab and got to see a lot of the more practical side of things and I just had this overwhelming sense of people phoning it in. Like, these were the same type of people who threw up all this stuff about the spotted owl (which later turned out to be wrong) and had just destroyed my home community basically on a whim because it kinda sorta aligned with their politics if you didn’t go down to a deep level of detail. I was always put in charge of things because I could get shit done, so there’s that, but man I just stopped giving a shit. I’d raise a criticism about what we were doing and instead of addressing anything about the science of it I’d get a “you’re an undergrad, it’s complicated” then see something written for publishing that wasn’t complicated at all and still didn’t address what I knew was right. I don’t think it can be overstated how much the education as a service model has just destroyed research. You can’t trust the overwhelming majority of shit that you see. People treat peer review like it’s replication and don’t even take the time to ask themselves stuff to check their null hypothesis. Everyone wants to treat rigor abs discovery like it’s something you can put into a checkbox.
I used to resent my upbringing a lot and thought I was a failure for just not getting it but looking back on it I think the sort of mentality I got from being raised around men who had their fingers/limbs ripped off by machinery has served me well.
Ex:
When I was in fourth grade my teacher died in the middle of class.
My dad was late picking me up in part because he had to make sure someone else could take over the cut off saw at the sawmill.
When he found me crying he got down on one knee, put his hand on my shoulder, and gave the sincerely best advice he knew how to give me and said: “Don’t be a pussy.”
Meaning, life is hard, terrible things are normal, and you’ve got to find it within yourself to persevere and still find good because no one else can do it for you.
I used to think that was really bad, but now that I’ve seen blue check mark Twitter I think it was for the best. Like literally. I make a decent income, own a home, and have a family. I don’t think any of that would be the case if I had “succeeded” at college and ended up doing research of no value to anyone.
I'm a tenured professor in a school usually ranked around 30th-40th in the US; we have Nobel Laureates wandering the campus and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. As a "2nd tier" university I used to marvel at the madness at the top tier places and thought "thank god that's not us." But by 2020 it was us as well. The administrative staffing around "diversity" and associated progressive causes has exploded, and the tuition costs alongside it (note: there is some controversy around whether these two things have a causal relationship). I felt safe as a professor in a field far from politics, but I recently said something that caused an "investigation" to be initiated into whether my views are "properly aligned with those of the university." Fun times.
I was at a dinner with my brother and his then girlfriend a few years back. I had clumsily recited a Chappelle bit (can't remember which but I remember it was pretty tame). I could clearly tell I had upset her, after apologizing if I offended. Her response was that she thought that kind of humor shouldn't be allowed.
I nearly spilt my coffee out my mouth, I thought she had got me and I started laughing at what I thought was her joke. She was dead serious and explained to me that it was harm and shouldn't be allowed along with a litany of other thought crimes.
My brother would tell me later (his facial expression at that diner made it clear to let it then let it go) that she adopted this way of life in a elite New England college.
That was my first "something's wrong' moment in terms of dealing with this new mindset of free speech and it's acceptance. Normally you'd expect this sort of thinking from busy body conservatives.
Solid, great argumentation as always. I think Jesse‘s attention to detail, deep dive approach is synonymous with intellectual honesty. His articles could be titled: “hold your horses, let’s take a proper look at what is being said.”
Great article!! ( or piece? I don't know). Anyway, that story about the Smith college janitor was infuriating. I pity the future boss and co-workers of Kanoute.
"The issue is much more what college administrators do when a small minority of students try to inflict illiberalism and misery on the broader campus community..."
I'm a college professor at a non-elite public university in flyover country. The overwhelming majority of my students are just trying to get through their coursework while juggling work, bills, and anxiety. Some are also intellectually motivated, engaged, and open-minded, but exceedingly few are so dogmatic in their views that they won't entertain contrarian ideas, which I frequently introduce in my courses. Most students at the majority of universities no one cares about simply don't have the time or massive sense of entitlement required to take their professors' or classmates' words out of context and attempt to cancel them by whipping up outrage on social media.
That being said, all it takes is one student who wants to become twitter famous by outing their professor as a racist, sexist, or transphobic to destroy someone's career. I am not so arrogant as to believe I'm immune from this and I tread carefully while teaching political science courses. For instance, I teach about Title IX and while I cover how it governs the way universities adjudicate cases of alleged sexual assault, harassment, and misconduct, I don't touch transgender issues with a ten foot pole.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out..."
They're now coming for the professors and ironically, we're the ones who birthed these students...The snake eats its own tail.
Late capitalism’s class war waged by comfortably off types against the losers from decades of financialism and globalisation is a breathtaking moment.
But where are the representatives of those people? Where are the Jesse Singals, Matt Yglasii, F deBoers with actual political gravitas rather than good wordsmithery? They are endlessly exploited and let down by this lack of quality representation. In turn this creates a feedback loop where they cling to someone like Trump (or Le Pen where I live) and are then mocked and vilified, kind of understandably but unfairly.
Frankly I’m bored until an articulate representative of the least privileged people of ALL colours and cultural backgrounds bothers to show up.
"I’m interested in the norms that prevail in elite institutions on issues of identity, speech, and disagreement, because these norms go a long way toward determining what academic research is funded and disseminated, how young thinkers are socialized, what news stories get written versus ignored or suppressed, and so on."
I also wonder how elite institutions influence the wider landscape of higher ed. I'd have to think, say, Harvard's practices have a trickle-down effect, right?
I think this trend at elite colleges will continue, and they'll continue to crow about their minority and/or first generation student body. And that's due to the preponderance of wacky faculty there, but also because they can live on their huge endowments. But mid-tier schools lack the funds to hand out massive scholarships to bolster their diversity credentials. And more importantly, these first generation students don't come from a culture of alumni giving. And most of them are wound up at college to hate their alma mater for systemic racism etc. By forsaking children of longstanding alumni families in favor of mediocre students with no previous connection to the school and who probably graduate hating the school, I'm 100% sure alumni donations will plummet. That's ok for Yale, but not for Villanova.
I also think he misses the point. I taught many first-generation & working class students at a Catholic college—many held conservative, traditional views on religion, authority, and social hierarchies. So, many students seemed to perceive that debate with other students or with the professors was disrespectful. Many of them assumed there was a “correct” answer and they probably thought my effort to generate conflicting views in class discussions was some kind of trick or trap. I finally decided I wasn’t going to be able to single-handedly grant them the sense of entitlement to engage in open debate with an authority figure, especially one who was grading them.
Is there any chance you could unlock this article so that I could share it with my students? We just had our class wrap-up, and to a fault students in my first year seminar (required humanities course with students from all disciplines) talked about how important it was to them to be able to have respectful, open discusses with their peers. They get to stay together in a rather small class for the entire year, so the opportunity to build trust and community is there. If possible, would like to put this on the syllabus in the fall to open up discussions right at the beginning of the year. Your hard work and willingness to take unwarranted abuse are tremendous marks of courage. p.s. I bet you will have particular insight into the Florida textbook case about CRT using the IAT (a great part of your book).
I never particularly cared about the campus free speech debate as an undergrad, likely because I went to a big state school where this wasn't an issue. I don't recall ever feeling like I couldn't engage with an issue for fear of saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, even when conversations got contentious. And we had a genuinely diverse student body (racially and otherwise - lots of poor/working class students, a lot of immigrants & first generation students, returning students in their 30s from industry or the military, large ideological spread etc), which according to current orthodoxies you would think would result in more conflict - so many more lived experiences to offend against! But things - at least during my time there - never got out of hand. So I assumed that the overall campus free speech thing was overblown - that most campuses were probably more or less like mine, with small groups of overzealous folks making a lot of noise but overall no real, identifiable free speech issue. Obviously, this is one person's experience at one school, so I don't know how different things were elsewhere.
I am now in grad school at an elite institution, and have noticed a shockingly pronounced difference in the free-speech attitudes of people in my program who attended elite universities for undergrad vs people who attended lower-ranked/state schools. There's this whole separate language for discussing identity issues that they seem to have learned, which frankly sounded like gibberish to me at first and often still does. But they're very attuned to it and pretty merciless with it - the denunciation of fellow students (especially in any kind of student advocacy space) who fail to use the exact correct language is swift and fierce. And that's not even touching some of the things I have heard people say about professors who are known to have verboten beliefs. There's also been the disinviting of speakers, countless petitions to get the department and university more broadly to adopt unpopular and questionably effective practices like dropping the GRE...it's messy. I find the language thing to be the most fascinating part though - even though it's kind of frightening, it's also almost funny to hear these folks, most of whom have been very wealthy their whole lives, "advocate" for poor/working class people of color using language that most of the poor/working class people of any race I've met would laugh at.
So yeah, based on my experience, it seems like a mostly-class, mostly-elite-institution thing that's really difficult to navigate if you haven't been exposed to it continuously for a long time. And I agree that the idea that its relative limitation to elite universities doesn't make it something you can just brush aside - these are people who, by dint of their education, may end up with a lot of power and influence someday. I would love to live in a world where you're not more likely to end up with a lot of power just because you went to Harvard or Stanford, but alas I do not. So a bunch of these elite students in ideological lockstep repeating crazy shit and using bizarre language conventions to gatekeep who can publicly share their opinions is, indeed, bad.
Sorry for the rambling, this has just been on my mind a lot lately as I've been trying to participate in department initiatives without stepping on any toes while still avoiding repeating bullshit mantras I don't believe. It's a tough needle to thread.
The fact that it is largely privileged students is because they have been raised (for better or worse) to be more assertive, and to some degree to not respect hierarchies. (If a professor says no, you just go over their head to the department chair or Dean, probably addressing them as "hi firstname" in your email).
Part of this is student-as-consumer culture (I'm paying to be here, I should get what I want), but part of it is a broader shift, coming from (again, in largely affluent and educated social milieus) helicopter parenting and the ways in which children are no longer taught anything like "respect your elders" or that there is ever a NO that can't be argued against.
I always come back to this askamanager piece, where the letter writer almost seems like patient zero of this kind of entitlement. It's from a college student (this was 2016), and her approach was entirely the mindset I'm talking about.
https://www.askamanager.org/2016/06/i-was-fired-from-my-internship-for-writing-a-proposal-for-a-more-flexible-dress-code.html
If you don't like something, you politely but assertively ask for it to be changed. And that the signatures of a bunch of interns should change company policy *because they want it to*. When I was 18 it would never have occurred to me to ask for a change in the dress code *at my job*. And this is the kind of ground shift I'm referring to: it's not just the fringe madnesses we hear about, but a complete worldview.
I consider it my job to share vaguely related white trash anecdotes. Here goes.
I had a difficult time culturally in college, as well although this was the late aughts. Biggest piece is definitely on me for not using resources but a lot of it was class resentment. I worked in a developmental biology lab and got to see a lot of the more practical side of things and I just had this overwhelming sense of people phoning it in. Like, these were the same type of people who threw up all this stuff about the spotted owl (which later turned out to be wrong) and had just destroyed my home community basically on a whim because it kinda sorta aligned with their politics if you didn’t go down to a deep level of detail. I was always put in charge of things because I could get shit done, so there’s that, but man I just stopped giving a shit. I’d raise a criticism about what we were doing and instead of addressing anything about the science of it I’d get a “you’re an undergrad, it’s complicated” then see something written for publishing that wasn’t complicated at all and still didn’t address what I knew was right. I don’t think it can be overstated how much the education as a service model has just destroyed research. You can’t trust the overwhelming majority of shit that you see. People treat peer review like it’s replication and don’t even take the time to ask themselves stuff to check their null hypothesis. Everyone wants to treat rigor abs discovery like it’s something you can put into a checkbox.
I used to resent my upbringing a lot and thought I was a failure for just not getting it but looking back on it I think the sort of mentality I got from being raised around men who had their fingers/limbs ripped off by machinery has served me well.
Ex:
When I was in fourth grade my teacher died in the middle of class.
My dad was late picking me up in part because he had to make sure someone else could take over the cut off saw at the sawmill.
When he found me crying he got down on one knee, put his hand on my shoulder, and gave the sincerely best advice he knew how to give me and said: “Don’t be a pussy.”
Meaning, life is hard, terrible things are normal, and you’ve got to find it within yourself to persevere and still find good because no one else can do it for you.
I used to think that was really bad, but now that I’ve seen blue check mark Twitter I think it was for the best. Like literally. I make a decent income, own a home, and have a family. I don’t think any of that would be the case if I had “succeeded” at college and ended up doing research of no value to anyone.
I'm a tenured professor in a school usually ranked around 30th-40th in the US; we have Nobel Laureates wandering the campus and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. As a "2nd tier" university I used to marvel at the madness at the top tier places and thought "thank god that's not us." But by 2020 it was us as well. The administrative staffing around "diversity" and associated progressive causes has exploded, and the tuition costs alongside it (note: there is some controversy around whether these two things have a causal relationship). I felt safe as a professor in a field far from politics, but I recently said something that caused an "investigation" to be initiated into whether my views are "properly aligned with those of the university." Fun times.
I was at a dinner with my brother and his then girlfriend a few years back. I had clumsily recited a Chappelle bit (can't remember which but I remember it was pretty tame). I could clearly tell I had upset her, after apologizing if I offended. Her response was that she thought that kind of humor shouldn't be allowed.
I nearly spilt my coffee out my mouth, I thought she had got me and I started laughing at what I thought was her joke. She was dead serious and explained to me that it was harm and shouldn't be allowed along with a litany of other thought crimes.
My brother would tell me later (his facial expression at that diner made it clear to let it then let it go) that she adopted this way of life in a elite New England college.
That was my first "something's wrong' moment in terms of dealing with this new mindset of free speech and it's acceptance. Normally you'd expect this sort of thinking from busy body conservatives.
Not remotely the point of the article, but a pro-mask mandate protest? Nearly one year after the vaccine? What the fuck?
Solid, great argumentation as always. I think Jesse‘s attention to detail, deep dive approach is synonymous with intellectual honesty. His articles could be titled: “hold your horses, let’s take a proper look at what is being said.”
Great article!! ( or piece? I don't know). Anyway, that story about the Smith college janitor was infuriating. I pity the future boss and co-workers of Kanoute.
This hits the nail on the head:
"The issue is much more what college administrators do when a small minority of students try to inflict illiberalism and misery on the broader campus community..."
I'm a college professor at a non-elite public university in flyover country. The overwhelming majority of my students are just trying to get through their coursework while juggling work, bills, and anxiety. Some are also intellectually motivated, engaged, and open-minded, but exceedingly few are so dogmatic in their views that they won't entertain contrarian ideas, which I frequently introduce in my courses. Most students at the majority of universities no one cares about simply don't have the time or massive sense of entitlement required to take their professors' or classmates' words out of context and attempt to cancel them by whipping up outrage on social media.
That being said, all it takes is one student who wants to become twitter famous by outing their professor as a racist, sexist, or transphobic to destroy someone's career. I am not so arrogant as to believe I'm immune from this and I tread carefully while teaching political science courses. For instance, I teach about Title IX and while I cover how it governs the way universities adjudicate cases of alleged sexual assault, harassment, and misconduct, I don't touch transgender issues with a ten foot pole.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out..."
They're now coming for the professors and ironically, we're the ones who birthed these students...The snake eats its own tail.
Late capitalism’s class war waged by comfortably off types against the losers from decades of financialism and globalisation is a breathtaking moment.
But where are the representatives of those people? Where are the Jesse Singals, Matt Yglasii, F deBoers with actual political gravitas rather than good wordsmithery? They are endlessly exploited and let down by this lack of quality representation. In turn this creates a feedback loop where they cling to someone like Trump (or Le Pen where I live) and are then mocked and vilified, kind of understandably but unfairly.
Frankly I’m bored until an articulate representative of the least privileged people of ALL colours and cultural backgrounds bothers to show up.
"I’m interested in the norms that prevail in elite institutions on issues of identity, speech, and disagreement, because these norms go a long way toward determining what academic research is funded and disseminated, how young thinkers are socialized, what news stories get written versus ignored or suppressed, and so on."
I also wonder how elite institutions influence the wider landscape of higher ed. I'd have to think, say, Harvard's practices have a trickle-down effect, right?
I think this trend at elite colleges will continue, and they'll continue to crow about their minority and/or first generation student body. And that's due to the preponderance of wacky faculty there, but also because they can live on their huge endowments. But mid-tier schools lack the funds to hand out massive scholarships to bolster their diversity credentials. And more importantly, these first generation students don't come from a culture of alumni giving. And most of them are wound up at college to hate their alma mater for systemic racism etc. By forsaking children of longstanding alumni families in favor of mediocre students with no previous connection to the school and who probably graduate hating the school, I'm 100% sure alumni donations will plummet. That's ok for Yale, but not for Villanova.
I also think he misses the point. I taught many first-generation & working class students at a Catholic college—many held conservative, traditional views on religion, authority, and social hierarchies. So, many students seemed to perceive that debate with other students or with the professors was disrespectful. Many of them assumed there was a “correct” answer and they probably thought my effort to generate conflicting views in class discussions was some kind of trick or trap. I finally decided I wasn’t going to be able to single-handedly grant them the sense of entitlement to engage in open debate with an authority figure, especially one who was grading them.
I recommend this essay by Batya Ungar-Sargon....should not be paywalled.
"The New Class Chasm in the Culture Wars"
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/04/20/the_new_class_chasm_in_the_culture_wars_147496.html
It's all about the Karens. Seeking consensus is a wonderful thing. But consensus is hard to find. So once found, it must be enforced!
Is there any chance you could unlock this article so that I could share it with my students? We just had our class wrap-up, and to a fault students in my first year seminar (required humanities course with students from all disciplines) talked about how important it was to them to be able to have respectful, open discusses with their peers. They get to stay together in a rather small class for the entire year, so the opportunity to build trust and community is there. If possible, would like to put this on the syllabus in the fall to open up discussions right at the beginning of the year. Your hard work and willingness to take unwarranted abuse are tremendous marks of courage. p.s. I bet you will have particular insight into the Florida textbook case about CRT using the IAT (a great part of your book).