Conservative students can’t speak freely, and that’s bad for everyone

At Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., 162 miles from Philadelphia, alumni launched the Open Discourse Coalition in 2021. Their goal? To bring diverse viewpoints to campus after their alma mater was ranked last in the state for freedom of speech.

Today, the Open Discourse Coalition is thriving, with national thought leaders — including Edward Snowden, Jennifer Yuengling, and Jordan Peterson — headlining events. And, most importantly, Bucknell students from the left and right actively seeking out diverse perspectives come to the Open Discourse Coalition and appreciate its commitment to civil discourse.

It’s a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dismal censorship landscape on American college campuses.

Conservative students cannot speak freely in the way their liberal counterparts can. According to a new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, just 20% of adults believe that conservatives have “a lot” of freedom to express their views on college campuses, while 47% of those polled believe left-leaning students have such freedoms.

These findings are no surprise to advocates at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the nation’s preeminent civil liberties organization dedicated to free speech on college campuses. The foundation’s national headquarters have been located in Philadelphia since its founding in 1999.

Each year, along with suing on behalf of students whose free speech rights have been suppressed on campus, FIRE also highlights the “Dumpster Fires” — universities that are the worst of the worst in practicing censorship. This year, two Pennsylvania colleges, the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania State University, were included on this ignominious list.

Penn State made the list for canceling a conservative student group’s event for fear of backlash, claiming that it could be a “safety risk.” Penn Law made the list for relentlessly trying to oust tenured professor Amy Wax for her controversial views on race and immigration.

Of the attacks on Wax, Penn Law dean Theodore W. Ruger said, “Wax has caused profound harm to our students and faculty, and her escalating pattern of behavior raises risks of increased harm and escalating damage going forward.”

To be sure, Wax has views that reasonable people can agree are offensive. But Ruger’s conflation of words with physical “harm” or violence repudiates the long-held democratic norm that disputes are best settled through discourse, not violence. It’s much stronger to refute Wax’s claims on their truthfulness and merit, not on feelings of offense.

Worse, a growing body of social science is proving this approach is having a deleterious effect not just on student discourse, but also on the students themselves.

As censorship of conservative ideas has grown, so has the college mental health crisis. The most recent assessment of health at colleges by the American College Health Association in 2021 found nearly 50% of college students experience moderate or serious psychological distress. In the Healthy Minds Study, which collects data from 373 campuses nationwide, in 2020-21 more than 60% of college students met the criteria for a mental health problem. That’s a nearly 50% jump from 2013.

Correlation is not causation, and certainly, the impacts of the pandemic are partly to blame for this rapid decline in students’ mental health. But in a now famous 2015 article in the Atlantic, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and free speech legal expert Greg Lukianoff, the CEO of FIRE, argued there is a growing body of evidence that censorship-driven academic elites can mentally damage the people they seek to help.

In their 2018 best-selling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Haidt repudiate the idea of trigger warnings and safe spaces. They debunk the three concepts that have become sacred amongst America’s academic elites: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings, and life is a battle between good people and evil people. The insistence on these ideas, they argue, is making college kids more fragile and more likely to suffer from catastrophizing and black-and-white thinking that, they say, can lead to greater instances of anxiety and depression.

Lukianoff and Haidt’s work is amongst the most powerful rebukes of what they call the left’s “vindictive protectiveness,” which seeks to marginalize and denigrate those they ideologically oppose, under the guise of “protection” for vulnerable students.

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Chloe Carmichael, clinical psychologist and author of the book Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety, told me that censorship and the pervasiveness of safe spaces make it harder for students to feel social trust.

“Your social support network is strongest when your social relationships are authentic,” Carmichael said. “We can’t have truly authentic relationships that are built on trust when everybody’s hiding their true viewpoint for fear of being canceled.”

Without social trust, it’s hard for people to move from fragility to strength, leaving students even more vulnerable to poor mental health outcomes.

Rather than practicing censorship, leaders on college campuses should refocus their energy on teaching students the art of rhetoric and debate. This, in turn, will strengthen their students’ minds and ideas.