Comments on Bret Stepehens’s Speech:
One thing I would disagree with is the emphasis on American universities as sources of prevalent ideas. Sadly, I think that age has come and gone. Campuses just don’t have the influence that they did when the baby boomers were coming of age. For evidence of that, read some of the excellent local reporting on the “free speech” controversy in Berkeley. It is startlingly clear that the students have almost no involvement in these events. None. On both sides, the players are all from outside the student body. Many of the protesters come from as far away as Canada. Certainly the speakers are not people who have any thing to do with the student body. Yet this fact is seldom mentioned in the national media.
.. What is happening on campuses with young people is that they are currently sensitive to not offending others. There is really nothing more to it than that, so anything, even a mild harmless joke gets chastised. When we are talking about fascism, for example, if you went to school even for a few grades, you should come away with the knowledge that these people did a lot of harm to others and w
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ere in the throws of committing genocide, when they were stopped
.. These values, however, which include a consensus on the worth of the individual, can foster a sense of insecurity in many people who yearn for clearer guidelines on moral issues than can be supplied by a freewheeling debate.
This attitude, I think, helps explain the hostility of both Trump supporters and many college students to the intellectually libertarian environment championed by Stephens. Gay students and members of ethnic minorities, who have faced often brutal prejudice much of their lives, may have great difficulty treating a debate which could affect their lives as a legitimate exercise of freedom of speech.