America’s weird obsession with free speech and college campuses

There are some ovoid political footballs that are uniquely American: abortion, access to universal healthcare, and what does or doesn’t happen on college campuses. The discourse over all these is kinda bewildering, but the last is particularly strange: I mean, it’s hard to imagine a nationwide moral panic in Australia over students occupying the Menzies Building again. 

But then, the American right has never seen a relatively minor issue that it can’t frame as an existential threat to the American Way of Life™. Cue the ongoing moral panic about whether college campuses are a sort of nationwide academic fifth column, places where students are indoctrinated with “extreme leftism” while conservatives are SILENCED. Free speech! Free speech!

As anyone who’s engaged with student politics at all can attest, ideological conflict on campuses is nothing new. After all, universities are largely inhabited by people in their late teens and early 20s, who — shockingly! — can lack nuance in the way they see the world. But the narrative of American universities being overly indulgent of leftists and intolerant of conservatives is newer. An early example is the 1998 book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses by Harvey A. Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors, which starts by defending students’ rights to call each other “water buffalos” and spends the next 400+ pages railing against Kids These Days, censorship and — in a signifier of the book’s age — “political correctness”. 

Two decades later, two chancers decided it was time to write The Shadow University again. The result: The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, a depressingly influential 2018 bestseller that has both driven and ridden a full-blown conservative moral panic. The narrative has its own language and vocabulary, both of which are a) so broad as to be meaningless (“wokeness”, “cancel culture”); b) so egregiously misused that they’re shorn of their origin meaning (“critical race theory”); or c) just flat-out dog whistles (“cultural Marxism”). The discourse is so ubiquitous that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made a crusade against alleged left-wing bias in education one of the pillars of his presidential campaign, along with a Quixotic assault on the Disney corporation and a dogged insistence that he is definitely more than 165cm tall.

There are a couple of things to note here. First, the idea that college campuses are indoctrination factories, churning out little Marxists, is… well, bullshit. In 2018, David Brooks of The New York Times — the man to call when you want a piece of commentary that’s as inane as humanly possible — wrote about the heckling of a speaker at Portland’s Lewis and Clark College. In response, Vox’s Matt Yglesias — precisely no-one’s idea of a far-left firebrand — looked at actual data about invitations to speak on campuses. He found that the prevailing narrative about a stifling left-wing orthodox is false, and that in general, students across the political spectrum “seem to have become more tolerant of everyone”.

Yglesias, bless him, also noted that “the overall debate about ‘political correctness’ as a phenomenon tends to suffer from an excess of vagueness and ambiguity”, and appealed for more specificity in such discussions. This brings us to the second point, which is that the “excess of vagueness and ambiguity” is a feature, not a bug. The lack of specificity in terms like “wokeness” is no accident: it allows their meaning to shift and evolve as required, encompassing new outrage points as the news cycle generates them, and also makes refuting them all the more difficult. This slipperiness is characteristic of such moral panics, and is the result of the decades US conservatives have spent honing the technique of trying wedge issues to see if they stick.

Perhaps the more interesting question here, then, is why this narrative does seem to resonate with the American electorate.

The whole idea of “going to college” exerts a peculiarly strong cultural hold on the American public: it’s a signifier of aspiration, of success, and of upward social mobility. (As this piece puts it, “Higher education carries an almost salvific status in American society.”) Hollywood frequently presents characters who see their years at university as the best of their lives, and even in real life people use terms like alma mater with a completely straight face. (During my brief period during the 2010s as the person responsible for hiring at an NYC-based publication, I found myself bewildered by the number of resumés I received that placed the applicant’s university above their actual experience doing the job in question.)

Unlike in Australia, many young Americans go to a college that’s outside their home city, meaning that their college years are the first they spend out of home. There are of course many other countries in which going away to university is more common, but one peculiar aspect of American colleges is that they are not always in major cities — instead, they’re sometimes located in or close to relatively small cities or towns, and as such can feel like self-contained worlds of their own.

The all-encompassing nature of college existence lends resonance to scaremongering about the nature of the environment to which students are exposed. Such arguments also have the added bonus of being easier to make than addressing the specifics of a college’s curriculum: in schools, conservatives can argue about, say, the way basic American history is taught, and amuse themselves trying to “challenge” books they don’t like. It’s significantly more difficult to get middle America to care about the ins and outs of poststructuralism, or to argue that quantum physics is somehow inherently Marxist.

And sure enough, the “free speech on campus” narrative is more concerned with life outside the classroom. None of the most memorable college-related media beat-ups in recent years — Oberlin’s infamous banh mi, the identity of/reception given to various visiting speakers, etc — had anything to do with what students were being taught. Instead, they focused on “free speech”. 

If nothing else, you have to admire the audacity of moaning about cancel culture and free speech while also passing laws that ban books and/or doxxing students who support a free Palestine. More generally, if any political persuasion can be described as particularly strident, self-righteous, easily offended, intolerant of others’ ideas, prone to prioritising feelings over facts, and fundamentally terrified of The Other… well, let’s just say it ain’t the left. It’s also worth pointing out that the narrative about conservatives being “silenced” has been pushed by an endless stream of articles in major newspapers. But the right has worked out that this rhetoric resonates with Americans, and it’s milking it for all it’s worth.

In doing so, it’s essentially repackaging arguments originally made by the left — and on this point, it’s notable that the people formulating conservative strategy these days were themselves at college during what was the highpoint of the effectiveness of student activism in America: the Vietnam War. This was a high watermark for the visibility of student activism, and it was also an era in which college administrators certainly did their best to suppress free speech… from the anti-war left. And frankly, doing so wasn’t a good look.

The conservatives who grew up watching anti-war protests are now repurposing those protesters’ tactics in the service of the right. As ever, bereft of ideas beyond “obtain power, hold on to it, cut taxes for the rich … profit!!!”, conservatism serves as a hellish funhouse mirror for idealism. The Vietnam War protests saw questions of free speech and individual rights placed front and centre in the service of a fundamentally left-wing cause. A generation later, the right is reflecting twisted images of those same tactics back at America, and doing so in the service of conservatism. Same as it ever was.

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