Has the Left Flip Flopped on Free Speech?

ridski said:
I'm starting to wonder if the night already set Maggie Haberman on edge as the butt of a serenade from Our Cartoon President prior to Wolf taking the microphone.

She's done some amazing reporting, but I wasn't alone in thinking that she was a bit too defensive of Sanders. Seemed to suggest something.

one of the sources that another person had posted here a couple of years ago purported to be a full accounting of all the instances in which free speech was suppressed by "the left" on college campuses.  I think the person didn't realize that he was actually showing how minuscule the issue was.  It was a list of hundreds of so-called free speech violations.  But it was hundreds compiled over more than a decade.  It was no more than a couple dozen per year.  Among thousands of institutes of higher education, and the roughly 20 million students in college every year.  And even among the couple dozen, many of them were not perpetrated by liberals.  Some were religious groups trying to ban pro-life or pro-LGBT rights speakers.  A pretty fair number were pro-Palestinian speakers that students were trying to ban.

All in all, it was clear that even a group trying to promote the idea that free speech was "under attack" could only come up with a handful of instances each year.

author said:

tom said:
And honestly I've never heard of the "no platform movement." But I've known of the "free speech movement" since my early teenage years in the early 70s. How influential is it? I'm guessing hardly at all.

 Tom........can't agree.  The speech of Mario Savio outside of Sproul Hall at Berkely inspired a generation.........including this lonesome traveler.  We woke up from the safe but deadly dull Eisenhower years.  We confounded our parents and crated a phenomenon that moved a country.
And the the usual progression followed where the children of radicals grew up as liberals.
But my daughter passed what she saw as the better values unto my palikars....brave young warriors in Greek.  She found time to help build housing for Habitat while I cannot drive nail straight.
The Free Speech movement sure did not solve all the world's problems........but a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step

 Actually I meant, "how influential is the no-platform movement." Sorry for the ambiguity.

I have pasted below a letter from NYU psychology professor, Jonathan Haidt, which was written at the end of 2017 regarding threats to free speech and viewpoint diversity on US college campuses.  Haidt has formed the Heterodox Academy with other like minded academics.  Clearly, Haidt believes that free speech is under siege on many US campuses.

=============================================================

See https://heterodoxacademy.org/t...

Dear Members and Friends of HxA:

2017 was another astonishing year for those who care about universities, and another extraordinary year for Heterodox Academy.

First, the universities. This year we saw an increase in intimidation tactics, uncivil behavior, and actual violence on campus. Most alarmingly, students joined with local activists to use violence as a tool to stop unwanted speakers, first at UC Berkeley and then at Middlebury College. More generally, we saw a sharp rise in the use of intimidation tactics and organized shout-downs–the heckler’s veto–to stop speakers, and to dissuade students from attending lectures, as at Claremont McKenna College and Reed College. We saw an entire college descend into anarchy when HxA member Bret Weinstein started questioning Evergreen State College’s new and deceptive equity policies.

The left had no monopoly on intimidation tactics; 2017 saw a sharp rise in campaigns against left-wing professors initiated by right-wing media outlets and executed via online mobs making racist, sexist, and otherwise threatening social media posts and phone calls. I summarized this sad state of affairs in a Heterodox Academy essay titled Professors must now fear intimidation from both sides.

In the most horrific event of the year (for universities) we saw neo-Nazis and Klansmen bringing torches, guns, and racist flags to the grounds of the University of Virginia and the city of Charlottesville, where one of them killed a peaceful protester. We witnessed President Trump’s difficulties in condemning the marchers and their overt racism.

Along with the Nazis, 2017 brought the old East Block back to campus too. We saw the growing use by professors of open letters of denunciation of fellow professors for things they have written (as happened to HxA member Amy Wax), and open letters demanding that articles be retracted (as happened to HxA members Rebecca Tuvel and Bruce Gilley). Such letters are efforts to win by applying social pressure, magnified by social media, rather than using the proper method of the academy: reasoned argument. Several of our members who were raised behind the Iron Curtain pointed out to me the similarities between these tactics and those employed by the Soviets. HxA graduate student affiliate Lindsay Shepherd got a taste of those old ways during her interrogation at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Canada.

Among the most dangerous trends, I believe, is the rising popularity of the idea that speech is sometimes violence – not metaphorical violence but actual, real violence, which can justify physical violence in response. (See these letters from UC Berkeley students, and this Op-Ed by a professor of psychology in the New York Times. Greg Lukianoff and I responded in The Atlantic).

I have focused on events in the United States, but in 2017 it became undeniable that rising illiberalism is a problem at universities in many other countries as well, particularly Canada and the UK.

With so many alarming events and trends on campus, it should not be surprising that polls by both Pew and Gallup showed rapidly declining support for universities by Americans who identify as Conservative or Republican. This declining support cannot be written off, as some have tried to do, as evidence of a sudden wave of anti-intellectualism on the right. It is what any group would do if a major social institution suddenly turned against the group, attacking its members physically and banishing its ideas with ever-increasing ferocity. It is “potentially devastating for higher education,” as Gallup’s head of polling for education recently stated.

The intensifying politicization of college campuses since the fall of 2015 is morally wrong, intellectually unjustifiable, and financially unsustainable.  Professors and administrators from across the political spectrum are coming to the shared realization that the two core academic missions of universities–research and education–are under threat.  If you love universities and want them to earn the respect of the public and the support of the taxpayers, you should support Heterodox Academy.  

Our mission at HxA is to improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing viewpoint diversity, mutual understanding, and constructive disagreement. That mission seemed pretty important to us when we founded the organization, in September of 2015. Today, it’s critical.

The worse things get on campus, the more support we receive from professors, students, and administrators. 2017 was a year of extraordinary growth and success for us. Here are a few stats and achievements for the year:

• Membership has risen nearly 300%, from 363 last December to 1,427 today.
• We opened membership to graduate students enrolled in PhD programs in April, and now have 157 graduate student affiliates.
• Our social media presence grew more than 160% on Twitter and 100% on Facebook, while our website traffic increased by more than 60% since last year.
• We launched a podcast series, Half Hour of Heterodoxy, which now features 16 interviews with prominent academics conducted by HxA’s Chris Martin.
• We launched the OpenMind App, which is now being used (or about to be used next semester) on more than 45 campuses to prepare students to benefit from exposure to viewpoint diversity.
• We created the Campus Expression Survey and are making it freely available to professors and administrators who would like to know which groups of students are fearful to speak up about which issues and why.
• We improved our Guide to Colleges, which is now consulted by many high school students, parents, and guidance counselors to help students locate the schools most likely to expose them to a diversity of viewpoints.
• We launched a partnership with a promising organization of undergraduates called BridgeUSA.
• We received great press coverage, including in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CSPAN, The Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and The Atlantic.
• We incorporated in October, and have applied to the IRS for designation as a tax exempt charitable organization. (In the meantime, if you’d like to support us financially, please contact edevito@stern.nyu.edu)

And the most important news of all: We have hired our first Executive Director. We’ll announce her name in January when she takes over the leadership of HxA. For now, I can tell you that she’s a full professor of psychology with extensive experience in university administration. She was already an HxA member when we posted the job advertisement last July.

Under the guidance of our new Executive Director, we will complete a strategic planning process in early January. While our exact activities in 2018 will depend on the outcomes of that process, we have already identified three priorities: 

1. Deepen the engagement of our members.
2. Create and disseminate more empirically-backed tools for use by our various campus constituencies.
3. Engage more fully in the broader societal discourse about the importance of viewpoint diversity in research and education.  

Here are just a few of the initiatives we will roll out in 2018 to support these priorities:

• Launch a fully redesigned website that will better connect visitors with the information and tools they need to create change on their campuses;
• Create networks and procedures to support those who find themselves being punished or attacked for good faith teaching and scholarship;
• Provide mentoring for graduate students and junior faculty members, for whom standing on the side of heterodoxy can be especially risky;
• Distribute a beautifully illustrated edition of Chapter 2 of John Stuart Mill’s classic text, On Liberty,which we have created to spur campus conversations about the value of constructive disagreement;
• Expand the number of campus adoptions of the OpenMind app, its accompanying workshop, and its extensive library in order to equip more students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to engage constructively with others;
• Create a Best Practices Guide for professors and administrators who wish to develop campuses and classrooms that support viewpoint diversity. The guide will include sample syllabi, guidelines for the prevention of crises on campus, and suggested language for academic job ads to signal that viewpoint diversity is valued;
• Create a team of staff writers who can respond to the fast-paced news cycle and draw from their own scholarship to illuminate trends in higher ed. In addition, our team will draw on the wealth of knowledge among our members to encourage more frequent postings and to help members get published more often in high profile outlets;
• Synthesize and make accessible all available research on complex and politically controversial topics, such as what the existing polling data really say about student attitudes toward free speech;
• Conduct our own original empirical research about campuses and viewpoint diversity, while facilitating the empirical endeavors of our members.

In short, we have a big year planned — our biggest by far. These nine initiatives, in tandem, will fundamentally change the intellectual landscape on campus. Ideas matter in the academy. So does data, so does leadership. These initiatives will foster the production of essential research, the creation of networks of engaged scholars, and more vibrant classroom experiences for students. They will also make it easier for leaders to stand up for academic principles and guide their schools through perilous times, when so many off-campus actors are seeking to find and publicize the next on-campus scandal or blowup.

We think that 2018 will be the year things begin to turn around and many more university leaders stand up and assert the value of viewpoint diversity. Things may continue to get worse on many campuses, but I predict that we’ll begin to see a growing number of universities breaking from the pack and following the lead of the University of Chicago–taking active steps to create cultures of vibrant inquiry and debate, implementing programs to bring diverse and high-quality speakers to campus, and otherwise welcoming viewpoint diversity. Once a few more universities commit to viewpoint diversity, market pressures are likely to boost their applications, donations, and rankings, encouraging others to follow suit.

We think the stars are aligned and there is a widespread desire to change course. Our initiatives are designed to help campus leaders turn those desires into action. We are finding allies and supporters wherever we go. But change will require the persistent, patient, and collaborative engagement of many constituencies on and off campus–people like you. We are so grateful to each of you for supporting us in 2017. Whether you became a member, adopted one of our tools, contributed a blog post, or made a philanthropic donation, you made our successes in 2017 possible. We welcome your continued engagement in 2018.

I close with a quote from John Stuart Mill, my new favorite philosopher. In On Liberty, Mill notes that despite the severe flaws of individual minds, humankind makes progress in its understanding, and he credits our progress to:

a quality of the human mind, the source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning.

Has there ever been a clearer plea for the importance of epistemological humility, and the need for an institution that fosters such humility and then hosts such discussions and experiences? Mill goes on to note that viewpoint diversity is essential for such discussions to have any salutary effects:

the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.

May 2018 be a year of increasing wisdom at our universities, and of peace and joy for you.

Jon Haidt

do you actually expect anyone to read all of that that? it's what tl;dr was made for.

It's so long, I don't think he realized he posted it in duplicate.

we're supposed to care about one NYU professor's opinion when there are actual studies of the issue that have come to the opposite conclusion?

ml1 said:
we're supposed to care about one NYU professor's opinion when there are actual studies of the issue that have come to the opposite conclusion?

 Heterdox academy, formed by Jonathan Haidt, has more than 1000 tenured professors as members.  Clearly, at least a 1000 other professors support Haidt's view on free speech and viewpoint diversity.  I would suggest to you that when one professor is supported by at least a 1000 other tenured professors, then you might want to read and understand what Haidt's viewpoint is.

============================================================

Link:  https://heterodoxacademy.org/h...

Heterodox Academy Membership Surpasses 1,000 Professors:
Viewpoint diversity is a vital issue among faculty

New York, NY – Heterodox Academy, an academic collaborative with a mission to advance viewpoint diversity in the academy, now counts more than 1,000 professors, along with 87 PhD-level graduate students, as members in our organization.

Heterodox Academy (HxA) started in September 2015 as a blog and research collaborative for 25 social scientists who studied the effects of political orthodoxy and diversity on academic research. As threats to free speech and free inquiry mounted during that academic year, many other professors wanted to join and express their support for viewpoint diversity. In response, HxA opened up membership to any tenured or tenure-track professor, and by January 2017 it had 400 members, including dozens from other countries, particularly the UK.

After several widely reported incidents where invited guests were shouted down and violently interrupted at UC-Berkeley, Middlebury, Claremont-McKenna and other universities, membership quickly increased. More and more professors saw the need for greater diversity of thought on campus and recognized the dangers posed by political orthodoxy to high-quality scholarship and teaching.

In May 2017, HxA opened membership to adjunct professors and to post-docs.  It also created a new membership category for PhD level graduate students. On July 17, the thousandth professor joined. The distribution of members across the major political categories is among the most even to be found anywhere in the American university system:

No matter their background or political ideology, all new member endorse this statement when they join:

“I believe that university life requires that people with diverse viewpoints and perspectives encounter each other in an environment where they feel free to speak up and challenge each other. I am concerned that many academic fields and universities currently lack sufficient viewpoint diversity—particularly political diversity. I will support viewpoint diversity in my academic field, my university, my department, and my classroom.”

HxA has produced a variety of tools that can help universities to measure the state of discourse on campus and to improve their student’s appreciation of viewpoint diversity. The organization offers a Fearless Speech Index to help measure and analyze who in a classroom- or campus- might feel intimidated around airing their political perspectives. We have also developed ourViewpoint Diversity Experience to help universities teach their students about viewpoint diversity and have conversations with those with whom they disagree politically. And, for high school students who are searching for a school that will expose them to political diversity, we offer our recently revised Guide to Colleges that provides the only ranked list of schools throughout the US based on their openness to viewpoint diversity and free speech.

“We initially projected that we would reach the thousand-member mark in late 2017. We’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that a growing number of professors are concerned about the state of discourse on campus regarding political topics. We all know that America is terribly divided by politics. We want our universities to be part of the solution, not part of the problem,” said Jonathan Haidt, co-founder of Heterodox Academy and professor at NYU-Stern School of Business.

Visit our online member portal and apply to join.

Our Mission: Heterodox Academy works to increase viewpoint diversity in the academy.

# # #

If you would like more information, please contact Jeremy Willinger at 212-992-6815 or email at willinger@heterodoxacademy.org.

drummerboy said:
do you actually expect anyone to read all of that that? it's what tl;dr was made for.

 Would you apply the same moniker (namely, "tl.dr") to a study posted by ml1?  It appears to me that you are making a procedural argument and do not want to deal with the substance of Haidt's viewpoint.

there are roughly 1.6 million higher education faculty in the U.S. 

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/...

One thousand is 0.06% of the total U.S. faculty members.  

sprout said:
It's so long, I don't think he realized he posted it in duplicate.

 Thanks on your posting regarding my duplicate posting of Haidt.  Fixed now.

RealityForAll said:

drummerboy said:
do you actually expect anyone to read all of that that? it's what tl;dr was made for.

 Would you apply the same moniker (namely, "tl.dr") to a study posted by ml1?  It appears to me that you are making a procedural argument and do not want to deal with the substance of Haidt's viewpoint.

I would never post anything that long on a message board.  A short excerpt of the main point and a link would be sufficient.

RealityForAll said:

ml1 said:
we're supposed to care about one NYU professor's opinion when there are actual studies of the issue that have come to the opposite conclusion?

 Heterdox academy, formed by Jonathan Haidt, has more than 1000 tenured professors as members.  Clearly, at least a 1000 other professors support Haidt's view on free speech and viewpoint diversity.  I would suggest to you that one professor is supported by at least a 1000 other tenured professors, then you might want to read and understand what Haidt's viewpoint is.
============================================================
Link:  https://heterodoxacademy.org/h...
Heterodox Academy Membership Surpasses 1,000 Professors:
Viewpoint diversity is a vital issue among faculty
New York, NY – Heterodox Academy, an academic collaborative with a mission to advance viewpoint diversity in the academy, now counts more than 1,000 professors, along with 87 PhD-level graduate students, as members in our organization.
Heterodox Academy (HxA) started in September 2015 as a blog and research collaborative for 25 social scientists who studied the effects of political orthodoxy and diversity on academic research. As threats to free speech and free inquiry mounted during that academic year, many other professors wanted to join and express their support for viewpoint diversity. In response, HxA opened up membership to any tenured or tenure-track professor, and by January 2017 it had 400 members, including dozens from other countries, particularly the UK.
After several widely reported incidents where invited guests were shouted down and violently interrupted at UC-Berkeley, Middlebury, Claremont-McKenna and other universities, membership quickly increased. More and more professors saw the need for greater diversity of thought on campus and recognized the dangers posed by political orthodoxy to high-quality scholarship and teaching.
In May 2017, HxA opened membership to adjunct professors and to post-docs.  It also created a new membership category for PhD level graduate students. On July 17, the thousandth professor joined. The distribution of members across the major political categories is among the most even to be found anywhere in the American university system:

 I couldn't tell if the "thousand professor" number included all the membership categories, including adjuncts, etc.

Also, for context, "According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 1.7 million post-secondary teachers in the US, of whom all are college or university faculty except for 159,700 graduate teaching assistants. Excluding graduate TAs, the number of faculty in the US is therefore 1.54 million. "

https://www.quora.com/How-many...

there are probably more than 1,000 professors who believe Bigfoot is real.

"Heterodox Academy" is an amusing contradiction, but I agree that diversity should be better integrated into academics. And it's refreshing to see the right finally seeing the value of diversity not as just a politically correct balm to past sins, but an essential part of sharing ideas and experiences.

and for context, I've read the studies on free speech on campuses.  So my mind is open to the research.  And the research indicates free speech is not under attack.

To be fair the researchers did conclude that people need to be vigilant to continue to protect free speech.  In that aspect, Heterodox Academy and the research are not in opposition.  

Though it can be hard to take the right's complaints too seriously when they offer up Milo Y and Ann Coulter as paragons of free speech virtue.

dave23 said:
Though it can be hard to take the right's complaints too seriously when they offer up Milo Y and Ann Coulter as paragons of free speech virtue.

 You speak of the right as if it is some giant coordinated machine moving in lock-step.  Milo and Coulter are outliers (just like Trump) and their words should be taken for what they are: hot air from provocateurs.

ml1 said:
there are probably more than 1,000 professors who believe Bigfoot is real.

 Please provide authority for your position (only kidding).

RealityForAll said:

dave23 said:
Though it can be hard to take the right's complaints too seriously when they offer up Milo Y and Ann Coulter as paragons of free speech virtue.

 You speak of the right as if it is some giant coordinated machine moving in lock-step.  Milo and Coulter are outliers (just like Trump) and their words should be taken for what they are: hot air from provocateurs.

Anecdotes about protests against speakers is small-time stuff.

The really big money goes into hand-picking faculty.

Virginia’s largest public university granted the conservative Charles Koch Foundation a say in the hiring and firing of professors in exchange for millions of dollars in donations, according to newly released documents.

The release of donor agreements between George Mason University and the foundation follows years of denials by university administrators that Koch foundation donations inhibit academic freedom.

https://apnews.com/0c87e4318bc...

RealityForAll said:

 You speak of the right as if it is some giant coordinated machine moving in lock-step.  Milo and Coulter are outliers (just like Trump) and their words should be taken for what they are: hot air from provocateurs.

Trump won 60 million votes and his support among Republicans remains over 80%. Donald Trump is the heart and mind of modern conservatism. Complain about "the left" all you want, but you can't escape that fact.

Drive-by trolling is really unbecoming Terp. 

I read enough of the posted article to discover what seems to me to be a contradiction. He writes:

"In the most horrific event of the year (for universities) we saw neo-Nazis and Klansmen bringing torches, guns, and racist flags to the grounds of the University of Virginia and the city of Charlottesville, where one of them killed a peaceful protester".

Weren't those people (not the murderer) exercising their right to Freedom of Speech?

jimmurphy said:
Drive-by trolling is really unbecoming Terp. 

 Sorry.  I was travelling on business. This thread got much more traffic than I had anticipated :-|

dave said: No. From Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies:

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

 Interesting.  Though, I think Popper thought of this as a last resort.   I think he advocated for rational discussion until it becomes untenable.  I think I agree on this. 

DaveSchmidt said: The Brookings study: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/views-among-college-students-regarding-the-first-amendment-results-from-a-new-survey/ The New Yorker summarizes one of its findings this way: “One out of two students believes that colleges should prohibit ‘certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people.’” The question, however, was not about what colleges should do. It told students they had to choose the more important priority between two options, saying Option 1 “would create a positive learning experience for all students” and Option 2 “would create an open learning environment.” Loaded descriptions, and a required choice. Is it any surprise that responses were evenly divided? (What’s a little surprising is the methodology of the survey: no sign that it was randomized, with only a guesstimate of the margin of error.)

 I think there's a lot to be concerned about in that study.  A majority of students think its ok to shout down speakers.  Almost 20% think its ok to use violence to shut down a speaker.  I don't think that is particularly encouraging.

I'm sure I missed a bunch, and I hope what I write is accurate.  It's been a long day...

terp said:
...
I think there's a lot to be concerned about in that study.  A majority of students think its ok to shout down speakers.  Almost 20% think its ok to use violence to shut down a speaker.  I don't think that is particularly encouraging.
I'm sure I missed a bunch, and I hope what I write is accurate.  It's been a long day...

Why is it discouraging? Do you know what these numbers were five, ten, twenty years ago? Maybe it's getting "better". You really don't have any idea. No one does.

doesn't it also depend on what the speaker is saying. If you're listening to a Neo-Nazi exhorting a crowd to go out and start beating up black people, wouldn't violence be justified in shutting that down?

Free speech isn't, and never has been absolute.  You can't incite a riot.  You can't libel or slander someone.  Closed ended survey questions with absolute responses can't address all the nuances of free speech rights.

terp said:

I think there's a lot to be concerned about in that study.  A majority of students think its ok to shout down speakers.  Almost 20% think its ok to use violence to shut down a speaker.  I don't think that is particularly encouraging.

More accurately, 50 percent of the students who were surveyed said it was acceptable to shout down speakers, and 16 percent said violence was acceptable. Those results were then weighted because while 57 percent of college students are female, 70 percent of the students in the survey were female. A survey with that original imbalance suggests the pool of respondents wasn’t randomized, which would call the study’s estimates of sampling error into question.

None of that matters if, like the author of the study, you believe that any affirmative answers to those questions, especially the one about violence, are too many. Either way, I’d caution against applying those percentages to college students over all.

(I’m also mulling the possible difference between things that students say “are acceptable” and what they condone.)

DaveSchmidt said:

terp said:

I think there's a lot to be concerned about in that study.  A majority of students think its ok to shout down speakers.  Almost 20% think its ok to use violence to shut down a speaker.  I don't think that is particularly encouraging.

More accurately, 50 percent of the students who were surveyed said it was acceptable to shout down speakers, and 16 percent said violence was acceptable. Those results were then weighted because while 57 percent of college students are female, 70 percent of the students in the survey were female. A survey with that original imbalance suggests the pool of respondents wasn’t randomized, which would call the study’s estimates of sampling error into question.
None of that matters if, like the author of the study, you believe that any affirmative answers to those questions, especially the one about violence, are too many. Either way, I’d caution against applying those percentages to college students over all.
(I’m also mulling the possible difference between things that students say “are acceptable” and what they condone.)

 Good points.  There's also this text down the page:  "the margin of error is between approximately 2 percent and 6 percent—the margin of error is smaller for the categories with larger numbers of respondents (such as 'All' category in the tables, which has 1,500 respondents), and larger for the categories with smaller numbers of respondents (such as 'Republicans')."

So, while the survey does provide some food for thought on the free speech views of a percentage of total respondents, it's not useful for comparing the views of different subgroups. [Edited to add:  For example, what "the left" thinks vs. the population as a whole.]

In the meantime the self-proclaimed guardians of Freedom of Expression seem to think it should be limited by politeness.

https://www.thenation.com/arti...