Thread by @JeffreyASachs

Something's shifted. More and more people are acknowledging that the "Campus Free Speech Crisis" is either exaggerated or in remission. @DavidAFrench's piece at NRO is only the most recent, though given the author, especially welcome. So what's going on?

nationalreview.com/2019/06/americ…

Here's my take. While I don't think there ever was much of a crisis to begin with, the main drivers of the Crisis Narrative (deplatformings, faculty terminations, and speech codes) all either collapsed in 2018 or continued a longterm decline.

niskanencenter.org/blog/the-campu…

Now, @DavidAFrench thinks much of this is due to state laws, the so-called "Campus Free Speech Acts" (CFSA) that, in many cases, are patterned after model legislation from the Goldwater Institute.

I am much more skeptical. Let me explain why.

1) Prior to 2018, only 8 states had passed a CFSA, and some of these (e.g. Virginia's) are pretty toothless. By contrast, the drop in deplatformings, disruptive protests, and faculty firings is visible nationwide, including in blue states like Cal and NY.

aaup.org/report/campus-…

Also, for reasons that are a bit too complicated to get into here, most of these laws simply aren't designed to do anything about deplatformings. See my @NiskanenCenter piece for more.

2) The CFSAs only affect public institutions, but the improvements of 2018 took place in private colleges and universities as well. In fact, it is in private institutions where the drop in deplatformings was most dramatic, the exact opposite of what we would otherwise expect.

So if not the CFSAs, why ARE things getting better? It's an important question. I argue in the Niskanen piece that it's partly due to counter-tactics by admins/inviting groups, but fundamentally a result of a changing campus culture.

Specifically, that something dramatic happened in 2016/17 to antagonize liberal students and trigger a new, confrontational wave of activism.

I WONDER WHAT THAT COULD BE.

But now that the shock has receded somewhat, so has disruptive student activism. That doesn't mean it couldn't come back at some later date. It just means that the real story here is probably events taking place off campus, not on it.

So what's the upshot? Two things.

First, what we saw in 2016/17, during the height of the "Campus Free Speech Crisis", is much more a product of national political trends than a generational pathology. Essentially, more about Trump and less about coddling.

And second, while these laws probably won't do much good, they may well do harm. Wisconsin, Arizona, NC, and now Texas all require schools to levy certain kinds of punishment for disruptive protests. It is easy to see this infringing on protected student speech, as French notes.

There's more. Some states (e.g. Arizona, Utah) have increased the liability for schools that fail to uphold student free speech, ironically giving administrators there a strong financial incentive to err on the side of caution and quash legal student protests.

Well, guess what.

In the long run, these may be blips. I suspect most of these laws will have little impact, good or bad. But given that the "crisis" is already taking care of itself, I just don't think they're a very good idea.

Oh, as for Trump's XO: to the extent that it will do anything at all, it's a disaster.

https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/status/1111071940834443265