to stop the chancellor of UC Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, from blaming the tragedy on “xenophobia” and the climate of “hateful speech” in our nation. As key evidence of this climate, he cited the failure of the “DREAM Act,” a bill that would have opened up citizenship for illegal aliens who were enrolled in college or had served in the military and lived in the United States since the age of sixteen.16 While I also support the DREAM Act, there is no indication of even the slightest connection between the shooting and the failure of that legislation. Chancellor Birgeneau used his position as a respected educator to transform a tragedy perpetrated by a madman into an excuse to vilify those who disagreed with him, rather than using it as an opportunity to have meaningful discussions about a relevant topic, like our failure to effectively identify and care for the mentally ill. What was even more worrisome was how many students and politicians agreed with the chancellor.
The response to the Tucson tragedy was just another in a long line of knee-jerk reactions I have seen over the past decade. And this typical rush to judgment is an indication that, in truth, we live in certain times. I know the saying is that we live in uncertain times, but that is not the case today. America’s metaphorical culture war increasingly feels like a religious war, with too many crusaders and high priests and too few heretics on each side. And I believe that an unsung culprit in this expansion of unwarranted certainty and group polarization is thirty years of college censorship.
How, you might ask, would censorship on campus contribute to political polarization and the failure of the Golden Age of American Dialogue to blossom? It may seem like a paradox, but an environment that squelches debate and punishes the expression of opinions, in the very institution that is supposed to make us better thinkers, can lead quickly to the formation of polarized groups in which people harbor a comfortable, uncritical certainty that they are right.
The potential for this damage to open and free-flowing dialogue does not require that every citizen experience censorship personally. Even a single conspicuous case of punishing speech can have dramatic consequences. This is what we lawyers call “the chilling effect.” If people believe there is any risk of punishment for stating an opinion, most will not bother opening their mouths; and in time, the rules that create this silence become molded into the culture. While few outside the university setting know the reality and scale of campus censorship, students are quite aware of the risks. A study of 24,000 students conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2010 revealed that only around 30 percent of college seniors strongly agreed with the statement that “It is safe to have unpopular views on campus.”17 (The numbers are even worse for faculty, the people who know campus the best: only 16.7 percent of them strongly agreed with the statement.) Meanwhile, the fact that this generation of students is more reticent about sharing their opinions than previous ones has been a subject of scholarly research for over a decade now.18
So what happens when students get the message that saying the wrong thing can get you in trouble? They do what one would expect: they talk to people they already agree with, keep their mouths shut about important topics in mixed company, and often don’t bother even arguing with the angriest or loudest person in the room (which is a problem even for the loud people, as they may not recognize that the reason why others are deferring to their opinions is not because they are obviously right). The result is a group polarization that follows graduates into the real world. As the sociologist Diana C. Mutz discovered in her book Hearing the Other Side (2006), those with the highest levels of education have the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view, while those who have not graduated from high school can claim the most diverse discussion mates.19 In other words, those most likely to live in the tightest echo chambers are those with the highest level of education. It should be the opposite, shouldn’t it? A good education ought to teach citizens to actively seek out the opinions of intelligent people with whom they disagree, in order to prevent the problem of “confirmation bias.”
As students avoid being confronted with new ideas in the one place where it’s the most crucial that they do so, they develop an even greater unreflective certainty that they must be right. The work of Cass Sunstein explores this problem, highlighting decades of research indicating that isolation from diverse points of view can lead to a runaway process of group polarization, extremism, and groupthink.20 This process further robs people of the intellectual growth that comes from subjecting one’s own ideas to challenges. As the Zen maxim goes, “Great doubt, great awakening. Little doubt, little awakening. No doubt, no awakening.”
And this is decidedly not a problem that affects only liberal elites. Damage to the level, scope, and sophistication of debate and discussion harms us all, whether we are liberal, conservative, libertarian, or independent. As Professor Mark Bauerlein observed in his book The Dumbest Generation (2008), campus polarization promotes a low level of intellectual rigor on the part of campus Republicans just as it does for everyone else.21 When higher education is failing to raise the standards for discussion, the state of dialogue in the nation as a whole is bound to suffer.
The stifling of expression on campus and the resulting consolidation of self-affirming cliques are harmful to higher education and to our country for three primary reasons:
First, when you surround yourself with people you agree with and avoid debates, thought experimentation, or even provocative jokes around people you disagree with, you miss the opportunity to engage in the kind of exciting back-and-forth that sharpens your critical thinking skills. The failure of universities to cultivate critical-thinking skills was starkly brought home to the public by Professor Richard Arum of New York University and Professor Josipa Roksa from the University of Virginia in their 2011 book Academically Adrift. It features a multiyear analysis of the “critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing” skills of over two thousand students at fourteen colleges of all different sizes, regions, and rankings. The study found that most students showed very little improvement in critical-thinking skills, with 45 percent of them showing virtually no improvement in a single one of the basic competencies.22 Underscoring my concern, Arum and Roksa noted that the majority of students could not demonstrate simple debate skills, and were unable to effectively take arguments from multiple points of view or break them down. Other extensive studies, including one out of Wabash College, have shown similar results.23 I believe a college education that did a better job of encouraging people to seek out debate and discussion, both inside and outside class, would never produce such miserable results.
Second, the deadening of debate and the fostering of self-affirming cliques also promotes a shallow and incomplete understanding of important issues and other ways of thinking. As John Stuart Mill pointed out a century and a half ago, without free and open debate and discussion, people hold on to their opinions like they hold on to prejudices: believing themselves to be right, but not really understanding why or ever seriously considering the possibility that they might be wrong. The mind rebels at the thought it might be wrong, and overcoming this natural defensive resistance requires constant, rigorous practice in challenging our opinions by leaving our comfort zones. Higher education is supposed to serve this function, but omnipresent speech codes and punishment of controversial viewpoints do the opposite. They create a feedback loop that rewards unreflective ideological conformity and simple avoidance of difficult disagreements. A mind at rest tends to stay at rest. By blotting out challenging ideas or arguments, colleges are holding back their students’ intellectual development.
Collegiate censorship is, of course, not the only reason why American national discourse is suffering. There are numerous reasons why we seem to have devolved into a culture of smug certainty, partisanship, sound bites, and polarizing überpundits. There is plenty of blame to be foisted upon the right wing, left wing, and every point in between, not to mention far-reaching social and technological changes. What I am arguing is that higher education is our best hope to remedy oversimplification, mindless partisanship, and uncritical thinking, but it cannot do so if students and professors alike are threatened with punishment for doing little more than speaking their minds. Indeed, what should be the cure for calcified political discourse is likely making the problem even worse.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, campus censorship poses both an immediate and a