The right wing created a bogus ‘campus free speech crisis’ (with help from the Koch brothers)
We direct your attention to Sarah Burris’s latest at Raw Story:
[P]rotests that broke out [in connection with virulent racist Milo Yiannopoulos’s appearance at the University of California Berkeley] caused millions of dollars in damage to the university and the town. Other universities, facing an education funding crisis, are fearful of similar costly rallies with safety concerns. Berkeley spent a shocking $4 million on security for three “free speech” events over the course of one month.
But Jeffrey Adam Sachs, writing for the Niskanen Center, argued that the so-called war on free speech is a manufactured crisis created by the right wing — and liberals are falling for it.
His article for the Niskanen Center states:
Last month I made the case (first in a Twitter thread and then again at the Washington Post’s The Monkey Cage) that there is no campus free speech crisis. Around the same time, similar arguments were made by Matt Yglesias (at Vox), Aaron Hanlon (at NBC), and Mari Uyehara (at GQ). The gist of our collective argument was that young people and university students are generally supportive of free speech, that university enrollment is associated with an increase in tolerance for offensive speech, and that a small number of anecdotes have been permitted to set the terms of public debate.
…
[Critics Sean] Stevens and [Jonathan] Haidt [of Heterodox Academy] Stevens and Haidt place special weight on the results of a 2017 Cato/YouGov survey of Americans’ attitudes about various speech-related issues.[2] In particular, they focus on a set of questions asking whether respondents would support a ban on speech offensive to ten different kinds of groups (e.g. white people, Muslims, the police).
As Sarah Burris points out, Cato is heavily funded by — that’s right — the Koch Brothers. Burris also summarizes the survey questions’ actual conclusion:
[They] actually show that millennials are more supportive of free speech than their elderly counterparts (over 65). In fact, youth are more tolerant of free speech than other older generations.
Nice fail ya got tere, Charles & David!
