The College Fix

They go hand-in-hand

The University of North Carolina recently passed a new free speech policy that cracks down on the “heckler’s veto,” wherein protestors effectively shut down campus events and speakers with unruly mob-like behavior. “It is not the proper role of any constituent institution,” the university stated, “to shield individuals from speech protected by the First Amendment.” That’s true—it’s not—and the policy, along with a number of other pro-speech regulations passed by major universities this year, is a welcome development.

We might ask ourselves how it got to this point at all, where institutions of higher learning must publicly and unambiguously reinforce one of the core civil rights of the American experiment. By-and-large the anti-free-speech crusade that has caused so much trouble on campuses nationwide stems from the hysterical nature of progressive politics. The liberal students and protesters who have turned so many American universities into censorship zones are doing so because they have been told, repeatedly and shrilly, that conservatism is an existential threat to their well-being—to all life on earth, in some cases—and that conservatives themselves are little more than modern-day Nazis and/or aspiring slaveholders. You can get a sense of this manic style of politics from the way that campuses respond to, say, speakers like Ben Shapiro—but only a sense. The hysterical ferment of left-wing paranoia on campuses is much deeper and more pervasive than any one incident can reveal.

You can thus, from a certain perspective, understand such behavior: if you’re told for years on end that a certain political ideology will literally cause a planted-wide extinction-level event and very possibly wipe out all life from here to the Crab Nebula—and moreover if you allow yourself to believe it—then you’re going to be primed to respond pretty forcefully to anyone who espouses that ideology. So solving the campus free speech problem ultimately is not just a matter of passing the right campus policies (though those are important); it also requires progressives, particularly those attending and/or managing our institutions of higher learning, to just relax a bit, and start engaging with opposing ideologies as mature adults instead of irrational children.

It’s a tall order, to be sure. And you have to admit that, for all its deficiencies, this politics-by-hysteria definitely sells. But if we wish to have a valuable and productive political discourse, particularly at our universities, it will have to happen. In either case, it seems that anyone who wishes to continue turning campuses into ideological dumpster fires may, as time goes on, find it harder and harder to do. Thank goodness.

MORE: Amid complaints, University of Tennessee deletes tweet supporting free speech

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