I've had a number of posts based on GSS questions about whether certain kinds of people should be allowed to teach in a college or university. These questions are valuable because they have been asked over a long period, but they are pretty general and, at least for some of them, the content is not that relevant to contemporary controversies over free speech. Also, the GSS is a survey of the general population and just records the highest level of education, not where you got it. Therefore, it can't tell you about opinions at elite colleges and universities, which are of interest partly because people who attend them are more likely to reach positions of power, and partly because they may indicate the direction of future change. I recently discovered that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and College Pulse have conducted a survey at about 150 colleges. The samples from each college are fairly large (100-200) and they seemed to make reasonable efforts to ensure that they were representative. They also asked questions that represented the kind of issues that come up today. These questions started with "Student groups often invite speakers to campus to express their views on a range of topics. Regardless of your own views on the topic, would you support or oppose your school ALLOWING a speaker on campus who promotes the following idea?" Four of the ideas would usually be characterized as left-wing, and four as right-wing. The left-wing ones are "looting is a justifiable form of protest," "the police should be abolished because they are racist," "white people are collectively responsible for racism and use it to protect their privilege," and "religious liberty is used as an excuse to discriminate against gays and lesbians"; the right-wing ones are "abortion should be completely illegal," "Black Lives Matter is a hate group," "the lockdown orders issued in response to the coronavirus have infringed on our personal liberties," and "transgender people have mental disorders." Answers were on a scale of 1-4: strongly oppose, somewhat oppose, somewhat support, strongly report. You can add them together to get an index of tolerance of left-wing and right-wing groups.
Unfortunately, I couldn't download the table, so I had to enter data by hand. I started by looking at the colleges that were unusually high and low in support for allowing speakers, then adding some in the middle, then adding some others that I was interested in, and then quit when I had about half of them. There was a pattern emerging, which you can see here:
I show the indexes for both left-wing and right-wing speakers in the same figure. The report also gave the admission rate for the college--that's on the horizontal axis. Support for allowing right-wing speakers has little or no relation to selectivity; support for left-wing speakers is higher in more selective colleges. Another way to look at it is that in the least selective colleges, support for allowing left and right wing speakers was about equal; in the most selective, support for allowing left-wing speakers was much higher. This pattern could be explained by two things: students at more selective colleges are farther to the left--that is, they will find the left-wing ideas less objectionable and the right-wing ones more objectionable; and they are more committed to the general idea of free speech. These two things work together to increase support for allowing left-wing speakers, and offset each others to keep support for allowing right-wing speakers about the same. As far as why students at more selective colleges are more committed to the general idea of free speech, it could be because they are more liberal, and liberals tend to be more favorable to the principle of free speech, or because they are more intellectually sophisticated, and more intellectually sophisticated people are more favorable to the principle (or some mix of both). Both of these have historically been true, but many people say that the link to ideology has disappeared or reversed.
It's also worth noting that the overall level of support for allowing either kind of speaker is not that high. The possible values range from 4-16, so 10 is the middle value--mixed support and opposition. Only one college ranks over 10 for right-wing speakers (Hillsdale). Just about half are over 10 for the left-wing examples. This is consistent with survey evidence going back to the 1940s--general support for free speech is an "elite" position. Most people either favor free speech for their side only, or think that controversial ideas shouldn't be discussed, or should be discussed only with restrictions.
If actions directly reflected opinions, less selective colleges would have more cases of "cancellation" or "no-platforming" and at those colleges, they would affect left and right-wing speakers about equally. In reality, cases seem to be more common at elite colleges, and almost always are directed against conservative speakers.* I may talk about why that pattern exists in a future post--at this point, I just wanted to note the discrepancy.
*I mean incidents initiated by students or faculty. There are some recent attempts at legal restrictions, and those have come from the right.
No comments:
Post a Comment