Maggie's Farm

Yale historian David Blight has written an op-ed for the New York Times calling for a “reckoning” on the part of universities. Academia must grapple with its blind spots, he argues, in order to understand why blue-collar workers voted for an “authoritarian in a red tie” in the recent US presidential election.

Only a couple of the students I talked to used the term “self-censor,” but it became evident from their comments that they had become unusually guarded in the way that they expressed themselves. As one second-year male undergraduate explained, “people are all too ready to savage you if you use the wrong word.” Another student confided that “sooner or later someone will object that I offended them.”
Self-Censorship Is Safer
It seems that a significant minority of students have adopted the practice of self-censorship in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. A survey, published by the Harvard Crimson indicated that a significant portion of this year’s graduating class was self-censoring their opinion and not debating in public. According to the report, around two-thirds of students who were surveyed had “at some point chosen not to express an opinion in an academic setting out of fear that it would offend others.” The survey indicated that 78 percent of registered Republicans said they ‘withheld opinions in class’ compared to 59 percent of registered Democrats and 73 percent of registered Independents.

The professor is right that elite universities have a problem, but his essay shows that he really does not understand why. Bad press about the "alleged" leftest ideological purity? How about the actual leftest ideological purity and actual intolerance of dissenting views on campus and in the classroom?

Until the professor and his colleagues are willing to come to grips with reality, the problem will not go away.