As this book notes a few times, it is easy to cherry pick survey data on college students – are they really hostile to free speech? Do they have distinctive values from their elders? There is some evidence out there (see in particular David Hopkins’ recent work on the subject) that the gap in political attitudes between young and old (or older) is greater today than at any other point in recent history. But we need to keep in mind that most college students’ primary concern is getting a job, or getting into the right graduate program. Most nineteen-year-olds don’t have fully formed views on these matters, and most aren’t looking to consciously develop their views on such things. While this book is pretty evenhanded in its presentation of data on student attitudes toward speech, diversity, etc., the larger question is how much weight we should put on these sorts of attitudes.

I think the strongest point in this book is its recognition that different types of schools will have, and should have, different sorts of speech policies. Private schools should differ from public schools, religious schools from secular schools, etc. And yes, students to implicitly consent to certain norms of speech and behavior by choosing to go to different places.

I think it is a worthy goal for private schools, in particular, to develop speech policies that involve a clear articulation of the school’s mission, and perhaps of the history of how the school has handled controversial speech in the past.

One caveat, though –in the case of public schools, many of the restrictions on speech in recent years have been the result of actions by state legislators – in Arizona and Wisconsin, to give just a couple of examples, legislators have provided or withheld funding for particular programs in an effort to influence what gets talked about on campus. This seems like an entirely different animal – in this case, schools themselves are less able to decide what the mission of the school is. Perhaps this is as it should be for public schools – that they shouldn’t have as much latitude to define their purpose as private schools. It suggests, however, that the default assumption here –that public schools should have robust free speech policies primarily because they are public institutions – needs a stronger defense.

This chapter points to what I think is the most essential problem in contemporary campus politics – that the call for diversity has been framed as being in opposition to the call for more open and free debate on campus. This is an unfortunate but understandable means of framing things. When people talk about ideological diversity on campus today, they are almost always talking about allowing conservative voices to be heard. It is natural for conservatives, then, to start seeing themselves as a minority of sorts, and to frame ideological diversity as a sort of affirmative action policy – this is something grappled with in Shields and Dunn’s book Passing on the Right. It’s a difficult intellectual task, however, to talk about conservatives as being a minority deserving of some sort of special treatment, however, and most conservatives would reject this claim. We still have a long way to go before we can find a way to reframe matters, but one way to think about this would simply be to emphasize the contribution diversity makes to open and free speech – that the goal is not numerical diversity for its own sake, but a diverse, and potentially cacophonous range of voices on campus. The more we can talk about this in terms of just providing a lot of speech, the less we get caught up in measuring who has spoken, who has not spoken, and to equate robust and open speech with a sort of bureaucratic effort to ensure that everyone from various measurable groups gets their allotted chance to hold forth.

Part of the problem in academia over the past few years, it seems to me, is the introduction of a distinctive language about harm. Three of the flashpoints laid out here – trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions – are new terms used to label phenomena and institutional remedies that have existed for some time. In my experience, virtually all faculty would be willing to excuse students from a class if some personal trauma they experience makes it difficult for them to discuss a particular topic. Similarly, it is hardly novel to contend that certain types of discussions are okay in the classroom but out of bounds in, for instance, a campus gathering place for minority students. Even during the wave of multicultural activism on college campuses in the 1990s, however, these sorts of things weren’t labeled.

This is, as this chapter notes in a few places, problematic. Faculty may be completely willing to let students know that some course content will be disturbing may bridle at the use of the term “trigger warnings.” The concept of “safe spaces” is easy to lampoon, as this chapter notes. And talking about “microaggressions” can have very different results than talking about inadvertent or careless remarks, offensive behavior, and the like. The University of Chicago example here shows this – it is not that uncommon for schools or academics to denounce “safe spaces” while simultaneously providing them.

There are a couple of more serious matters raised by these terms, however. First, the use of this sort of language can serve to polarize or to mark out different sorts of camps. This echoes a point made by Michael Oakeshott in The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism: we often change the words we use to mark certain concepts as “ours.” So saying one is for or against “trigger warnings” says little about what practices one actually pursues in class. It says a lot, however, about one’s politics and the side one is taking in contemporary campus conflicts.

Second, language such as this presumes that one can measure certain behaviors. To take the example of microaggressions – to talk about minor snubs, casually offensive behavior, insensitivity, and the like is to talk in an imprecise way about a sort of feeling one gets. To talk about microaggressions presumes that these are discrete violations – such and such person has committed x microaggressions during the past week. To measure and label things this way seems to invite some sort of disciplinary response or sanction.

These two matters are not necessarily bad – but they presume, I think, some sort of call for a response by college administrators, and they presume that our discussion shifts from talking about campus climate or campus culture to talking about individuals’ violations or rules or norms.