What's behind the rise in local college censorship and deplatforming?
Depicted: Mario Savio at a victory rally in UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza on Dec. 9, 1964.
From San Jose State to Stanford, Berkeley to SF State, it's hard to ignore the chilling rise in local student (and administrative) efforts to shut down speech and speakers that run afoul of present dogma. Greg Lukianoff at the Eternally Radical Idea parses the metrics regarding this surge nationwide and finds sadly predictable patterns identifying where this attack on free speech is coming from.
Students did in fact target conservative expression more often over the past decade than they did in the preceding 16 years.
Deplatforming attempts involving students are increasing — and primarily come from the left
As of March 15, FIRE has recorded 668 deplatforming attempts involving students and/or student groups since 1998. Invited speakers are most commonly targeted for deplatforming by students.
The number of substantial event disruptions that occurred in 2016 and 2017 dwarfed those that occurred in any of the prior years in FIRE’s Campus Disinvitation Database — and almost all of these disruptions came from the left.
The change we saw happen in 2014 was not simply that students were suddenly not as good on free speech. It was also that students who weren’t good on free speech were entering campuses that already had administrators hostile to free speech. It is that collaboration that has created the disaster we have seen on campus — perfectly illustrated by events like the shouting down of U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan at Stanford University, which was the result of students and administrators working together to silence disfavored speech and deplatform speakers they didn’t like.
Over the past decade, 86 substantial event disruptions have occurred — almost four times the 22 that occurred from 1998-2013. Nearly all of these (83, or 98%) have come from the left, including students disrupting a talk by Art Laffer in 2019 at Binghamton University only minutes after it began. Two protesters were arrested and Laffer was escorted out of the room by police after the rest of the event was canceled.
Only three substantial event disruptions (2%) have come from the right over the past decade.
It’s important to recognize that a single shoutdown or violent response to disfavored speech is enough to make students think twice about inviting a controversial speaker to campus. Given the unprecedented tidal wave of such incidents in the last decade, there is certainly going to be a massive chilling effect — with students opting not to invite speakers that might be unpopular on their campus. And this has the terrible effect of hermetically sealing some campuses from divergent points of view.
Read the whole thing here.
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