May 21, 2019
By Jonathan Butcher
Ryan Wolfe
doesn’t consider himself a victim. But as a junior at Wake Forest, when he
walked off of the stage after speaking on the future of conservative politics and
someone handed him a box of crackers, he took it as an insult.
Someone had
already superimposed a picture of his face on a cracker and posted it to social
media. The students who opposed his ideas “were trying to intimidate me and the
other students on the panel,” Wolfe said in an interview.
“We could
have hashed out these differences one-on-one,” he says, explaining that he
would be willing to talk about the issues even with those he disagreed with.
Intimidation,
shoutdowns, and violence are altogether too common on campuses today. And surveys
show increasing numbers of students are okay with it, as long as they are the
ones doing the intimidating.
A new Knight
Foundation survey of college students finds more than half of
respondents—51 percent—say it is “always” or “sometimes” appropriate to shout
down a speaker or “prevent them from talking.” Another 16 percent find it is
“always” or “sometimes” acceptable to use violence to “stop a speech protest or
rally.”
The report’s
authors describe the findings by saying “college students are generally
unlikely to believe that shouting down speakers is acceptable,” but that anyone
would think it is acceptable to silence someone else is troubling.
What if we were
in the dark about censorship on campus? Nearly half of respondents said it is
sometimes acceptable to deny the “news media access to cover protests or
rallies on campus” (49 percent), and another 9 percent say the media should
never be allowed to report on these events.
This is part
of a disturbing trend. In a survey released last year by Knight, Gallup, and
the American Council on Education (ACE), 10 percent of students approved of the
use of violence
to prevent someone from speaking “sometimes.”
In a survey
of college
presidents released in April 2018, ACE found that 15 percent of respondents
said it was acceptable for college students to shout down speakers, though none
approved of violence.
While this
year’s Knight survey seems to underestimate the significance of the polling
figures on shoutdowns and violence, the report says “college students generally
believe that people are too sensitive about the use of particular words and
language. Students also widely agree that fear over offending their classmates
prevents some students from expressing their views honestly.”
No surprise,
then, that 68 percent of respondents said “their
campus climate precludes students from expressing their true opinions because
their classmates might find them offensive”—another response that showed an
increase over last year’s survey.
These are not
conditions that promote the pursuit of truth and the asking of difficult
questions—the very things colleges should be promoting. President Trump has highlighted
campus speech with an executive order, but such a directive opens the way
for federal agencies to overstep their bounds and cannot be considered a final
solution.
State
lawmakers should consider proposals to abolish free-speech zones and other
speech codes and be prepared to issue consequences for students who violate
someone else’s right to be heard. As noted on this blog
and elsewhere,
officials in Arizona, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Georgia have done so, and
legislators in Alabama
and Texas
are considering promising proposals this year.
The
conclusion to Ryan Wolfe’s episode at Wake Forest is largely unsatisfying,
though Ryan’s case attracted the attention of the Drudge Report and Tucker
Carlson Tonight. But campus officials held a meeting with the students who
opposed Ryan’s views and did not invite Ryan. The students who committed the
racist actions were not sanctioned for their behavior.
“I would
have been open to a conversation with them, but that was never an option that
was presented for me,” Ryan said. “It speaks to the speech climate on
campuses.” And if the Knight survey is any indication, more state lawmakers
should act because student perspectives are following a troubling path.
Jonathan Butcher
is a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute.
