The political aspect is obviously not true relative to the past.
The post WW, Cold War era was marked by the federal government, senators and intelligence agencies literally maintaining lists of “communists” that were blackballed almost entirely.
Oppenheimer was released only recently, a movie which is all about how a tenuous communist connection led to the demise of the career of among the most famous scientists in WW2.
Students were famously killed for protests in Berkeley just a few decades ago.
And it’s only been a few decades that anyone but a white man was even allowed on campus.
The idea that speech on campus is anyways more restricted than it has been in the past is ridiculous on its face.
The idea that speech on campus is censored any more than in the past is very clearly not true. What might have changed is either the groups of people whose speech is curtailed has changed slightly, but more likely, you tend to hear a lot more about it because of social media.
In the past students were not only for free speech, but actively fought for it. By contrast older individuals tended to be less supportive of such. Now those roles have largely swapped where age is, by far, the biggest predictor of somebody's position on freedom of speech (younger = less). And so the widespread censorship on college campuses is met with relatively little opposition.
If there's a protest related to speech on college campuses now a days it's more like to be calling for more censorship, or cancelling somebody who said something perceived as offensive, rather than opposition to such behaviors. Hence one of the many reasons confidence in higher education is collapsing. In my mind higher education with censorship is teetering on being an oxymoron.
The "widespread censorship" is not widespread. The number of "attempted disinvitations" (not even actual disinvitations) is not even visible on a chart of invited speakers at college campuses across time.
There's quite an excellent poll on free speech on campuses available here. [1] And by every reasonable datum students feel that free speech on campuses is dying. For instance some 65% feel that "the climate at their school or on their campus prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find it offensive." There's a million other interesting and informative datums in the survey as well. Notably it was also held after 2020, so we get the COVID impact as well.
And now it is right wing actors getting blackballed.
It is people who don't agree with gay marriage like the former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich getting ejected.
The funny thing is you had discrimination against Jews on Campus a hundred years ago, and today, on entirely different premises
The post WW, Cold War era was marked by the federal government, senators and intelligence agencies literally maintaining lists of “communists” that were blackballed almost entirely.
Oppenheimer was released only recently, a movie which is all about how a tenuous communist connection led to the demise of the career of among the most famous scientists in WW2.
Students were famously killed for protests in Berkeley just a few decades ago.
And it’s only been a few decades that anyone but a white man was even allowed on campus.
The idea that speech on campus is anyways more restricted than it has been in the past is ridiculous on its face.
The idea that speech on campus is censored any more than in the past is very clearly not true. What might have changed is either the groups of people whose speech is curtailed has changed slightly, but more likely, you tend to hear a lot more about it because of social media.