Thread by @BVivian14

1. Op-eds aren’t data.

2. Only a short time ago, within many Americans’ lifetimes, #highereducation was badly segregated and reserved mainly for elites.

#Collegecampuses have never been as intellectually diverse and democratic, open to numerous #viewpoints, as they are now.

https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1652639577247555584

3. The idea that students are “censorious”--let alone "mad"--is a false narrative that pundits, propagandists, and mainstream media have aggressively promoted.

4. College-aged young people consistently express stronger support for #freespeech and tolerance for #viewpointdiversity than other age groups in credible survey research--not only in individual studies, but also across time.

5. #Universities are free to accommodate even non-university speakers who engage in hate speech according to relevant law and university policies. But #FirstAmendment liberties are never one-directional.

6. University communities are just as free to protest ideas, arguments, or speakers. Both are equally legitimate expression of the First Amendment. Disruptions of decorum are not censorship.

7. As a class of institutions, universities protect free speech and provide for open spaces of debate much more effectively than many other parts of society (not ideally so, but much more effectively).

8. Disruptive or #controversialspeakers are a very small part of the forums for free speech, open debate, and intellectual diversity that universities offer.

9. For every disruptive speaker, on a given day, universities hold thousands of classes, meetings, performances, and other events where people freely express their views, discuss them with others, and contribute to generating new ideas—across thousands of institutions.

10. The specious idea that college faculty and students are hostile to opinions different from their own has been a prime motivation behind a historically significant rise in state #censorship across the U.S. of late.

11. Hyper-partisan state legislatures have adopted the falsehood that universities are hostile to diverse ideas as a pretext for using the state to survey the political opinions of faculty and students.

12. Those legislatures use the same manufactured pretext to interfere with teaching or research for political purposes and censor educational materials in both K-12 and higher education.

13. Many #collegestudents also understand the First Amendment quite well—often more insightfully than many public figures appear to understand it. (They study and use it in multiple standard college classes every day--something to celebrate!)

14. Let’s seek out and listen to a wide range of student as well as faculty voices on this topic from multiple informed perspectives.