The Campus Debate Has Discovered an Exception to Debate
A survey about acceptable responses to speech leaves the syllabus on disagreement in need of attention.
The story
Fox News reports that 45% of respondents in a Buckley Institute survey said violence could be justified to stop what they regard as hate speech. Cornerstone University president Gerson Moreno-Riaño criticised the findings. The online survey covered 803 full-time undergraduates under 25; expressed attitudes are not recorded acts of violence.
Source: www.foxnews.com
Our reading
The awkward feature of defending an idea through force is that the argument becomes rather difficult to grade. A well-supported claim and a well-aimed punch use different assessment criteria, even if both participants feel strongly about the subject.
A university ought to be unusually well equipped for disagreement. It has books, rooms, scheduled opportunities to speak and a longstanding interest in making people explain their answers. Treating conversation as something to be stopped by force is an extravagant way to avoid using the facilities.
The survey does not show that every respondent with an alarming answer has attacked anybody. Nor does one set of responses turn an entire generation into a single angry person. The useful target is the logic of the permission slip: my objection is sufficiently important to end your ability to object.
That principle makes an exceptionally poor seminar rule. It allows everybody to arrive certain that the exception applies to them, then replaces discussion with a contest over who gets to declare it. The reading list could become very short. The room would remain full of people who had not persuaded each other.