The suppression of free speech on college campuses isn’t a new thing, says Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business and author of The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. In the past, however, it was usually done by professors and administrators rather than students.
Haidt says student-driven speech suppression is a relatively new phenomenon. “It was after the Yale protests that everything really spread, and that was only 13 or 14 months ago,” says Haidt, referring to an incident in which students protested potentially offensive Halloween costumes.
For Haidt, students calling for speech codes, trigger warnings, and the like is a reversal of what we had come to expect on college campuses in the wake of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. “The thing people were not expecting was that the students are the ones who are demanding [political correctness] now,” he explains. “Before, it was typically the students who were demanding more freedom.”
This can have a chilling effect on speech even as it pushes students to opposite ends of the political spectrum. “At schools,” says Haidt, “men feel they can’t speak and then they go and vote for Trump.”
Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Haidt at the International Students for Liberty Conference to discuss the rise of political correctness and its cultural implications. They also talk about Heterodox Academy, a website that Haidt helped start that discusses the need for viewpoint diversity within the university system.
Produced by Mark McDaniel. Cameras by McDaniel, Joshua Swain, and Todd Krainin. Graphics by Meredith Bragg.
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