Recognizing that your social media feed provides a distorted sense of reality, you might be inclined to dismiss all those stories you’ve seen about “trigger warnings” and college speech codes as extreme isolated cases from the most liberal of institutions. You would be wrong.
A new poll reported by The Wall Street Journal indicates that the approaching wave of college graduates opposes free speech in mass. Worse, many don’t know about the First Amendment. To the extent that students do know of the First Amendment, they seek strict limits to its protections. From the Journal:
Some 800 students at a variety of colleges across the country were surveyed. The results, though not surprising, are nevertheless alarming. By a margin of 51 percent to 36 percent, students favor their school having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty. Sixty-three percent favor requiring professors to employ “trigger warnings” to alert students to material that might be discomfiting. One-third of the students polled could not identify the First Amendment as the part of the Constitution that dealt with free speech. Thirty-five percent said that the First Amendment does not protect “hate speech,” while 30 percent of self-identified liberal students say the First Amendment is outdated.
School was once thought of as a place to expand one’s horizons by gaining exposure to new and challenging perspectives. It has morphed into a badgering thought gestapo which demands conformity and punishes critical thought. School has, with some irony given widespread rejection of God, become an oppressive religious regime.
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