Great article. I wonder if this polling effort could be expanded to university administrators and Board of Regents members. They are the ones that make the real decisions of what behavior will be tolerated on campus.
I saw a video yesterday of an undergrad at Columbia talking about the horrible and ridiculous restrictions they’ve had placed on their speech (people being kicked out of dorms for protesting, rules against any political signs being placed in personal locations such as next to their bed, only allowed to protest in one location from 2-6 with noise restrictions). It’s ridiculous and all I could think of was “well this is why they’re right at the bottom of FIREs list.” I’m so grateful that we get these rankings to inform which colleges I’d want to send kids to or recommend people look into for their education
I think the proportional estimates of those who would (even "rarely") support the use of violence may be higher due to the survey methodology. John Villasenior's survey of campuses in 2017 using similar questions found similar results; his study also solicited volunteer responders ( https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/views-among-college-students-regarding-the-first-amendment-results-from-a-new-survey/ ). When I used these items in 2018 in a survey that offered respondents a chance at a $50 gift card ( https://researchers.one/articles/22.11.00007v1 ), the proportion of those who would tolerate violence decreased to less than 5%. Might this be a characteristic of relying on uncompensated survey respondents? Perhaps, those who choose to respond (without reward) have more extreme attitudes that the general population. On the other hand, even one violent activist is a danger to the rest of us.
Thank you, Perry, I did not now this. There might still be a small effect based on how large the promised reward and the perceived likelihood of receiving it. I went back and rechecked our data: Of the 120 valid responses to questions about the acceptability of actions to disrupt "a very controversial speaker... known for making offensive and hurtful statements." in Spring 2018 at Berea College, the proportions who expressed any acceptance were: "loud shouting" (27%); "physically blocking the venue" (24%); "vandalism" (12%); and "using violence" (3%). I suspect the events in Gaza may have increased the acceptability of using violence.
It's also important that you're citing figures from 2018, which was quite some time ago, and FIRE's figures have been steadily increasing the last five years:
This year, 32% of surveyed students said that using violence to stop a campus speech is at least “rarely” acceptable. It was 27% last year, and 20% in 2022. And this is despite the fact that we surveyed more students every year, not less, but the numbers rose regardless.
As you go further back in time, the number would surely go down for a variety of reasons, one of which being that Greg and Rikki mark The Age of Cancel Culture as beginning around 2014 and really starting to ramp up in 2018. That, plus the fact that your survey is just from one college, makes a lot of sense of these numbers.
I think the trend toward accepting violence (on the left, the right, and even the center) is an alarming one. But we need to be careful about presuming that we understand what students mean when they answer this question. We need some individualized, in-depth interviews of students who say they support violence.
Because the FIRE question is framed as student protest, some students might think that violence (such as shoving someone away) is acceptable in self-defense and then say that violence is acceptable to use at a protest when students are being attacked. Because there were many more violent attacks on student protesters in the previous year, the rising numbers who find it acceptable is not a big surprise. Unless you know what students mean by their support for violence, it’s hard to determine how alarming it is.
If you asked students, “Is it ever acceptable to use violence against a campus speaker or audience?” I suspect that the positive answers would be much lower. But again, all of these issues require more research to answer.
A college education is learning to process ideas and subjects outside one's current views and beyond one's current experiences. It is not about agreeing or disagreeing with those ideas and subjects. In many cases, one is required to argue points of view heretofore considered antithetical to one's beliefs or understanding. Allowing protests to shut down presentations of ideas is akin to covering one's ears and repeating "nananananananana" instead of listening and learning.
Happy birthday, Greg! And thanks for calling out the (mostly) far left on their anti-free speech, censorious ways. I noticed a few years a go a deepening trend toward adopting violence as political expression on the left--and it's become much more 'acceptable' after October 7.
And yes, they very much forget that they also tacitly grant the same 'right' to political violence to their enemies as to themselves. A lesson the right has consistently forgotten, too, as they waaah-waaah-waaah and kvetch over assassination attempts on Donald Trump's life.
Who knew guns shot *both* ways? Not just when aimed left?
Were I to use a balanced D4 die and roll to choose an answer, you would conclude that the die is anti-free speech because 75% of the time it would randomly find violence is acceptable. That’s called the fallacy of forced dichotomy, or more technically a disjunctive syllogism, or modus tollendo ponens argument. My gut is that you forcing a response towards approval of by the structure of the context you create to answer.
Were you to have two non-violent options and two violence-related options I’d find the survey more credible.
1. Peaceful protest?
2. Non-violent disruption?
3. Property destruction?
4. Personal violence?
With options being “never/rarely/sometimes/always”
This gives 16 possible responses to a given context (anti-trans speaker, anti-supremacy speaker) so that you compare the answers to random chance.
Then you could see if given populations are more or less tolerant violence in speech against random chance.
I make jokes about these survey structures in other contexts. For instance, after seeing a movie did should “everyone/many people/few people/no one” see it, random chance would indicate that “75% of respondents felt people SHOULD SEE THIS MOVIE”
Also many thanks to using “The Most Interesting Man in the World” figure, otherwise known as a super hot DILF among my set, which allows me to conclude, not to mock you but to illustrate disjunctive syllogisms are misused all over the damn place.
Or, since I’m gay and vulgar, when someone says they’re a Top, you ask “do you never/a few times/rarely/sometimes” enjoy penetration? Then you announce loudly that clearly TOPS LIKE TO GET FUCKED, whereas BOTTOMS REALLY LIKE TO GET FUCKED. It’s an old joke that gets a snicker from the few gays who still get laid, works well with boozy Texas gays.
I’ll have a Cape Cod please, none of that high-falitn’ triple sec.
The idea you articulated here with your two non-violent and two violent options would be a great one to ask, but it is distinct from and does not in any way invalidate the questions we were asking in our survey.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. The question the survey asked was “How acceptable would you say it is for students to engage in the following actions to protest a campus speaker?” with the following further specifications to narrow down the subject matter and responses:
1. Shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus
2. Blocking other students from attending a campus speech
3. Using violence to stop a campus speech
Respondents were able to answer "never," "rarely," "sometimes," and "always' for all three versions of this question. There is nothing in the way the survey is structured that "forces" anyone to answer in the affirmative for violence.
What's more, the sample is so large (nearly 59,000 students) that any potential random effects would presumably be canceled out, since "random" means it could be any answer and not just one.
Our survey also separates out the "rarely" and "never" responses, which many other surveys don't do. And the reason we do that is because, as I argue in the piece, "never" is the only acceptable answer and we want to be sure we know what these cohorts are and what exactly they're comfortable promoting. I also take a lot of time in the piece to discuss the "sometimes" and "always" groups, which are far larger than they should be (which is 0%).
I react solely to the material as presented in the article, which I could totally misinterpret.
To your four answers - totally ok - as you point out here, they relate to three questions of protest, only one of which was nonviolent IHMO. However I (I never/sometimes/often/always) find the response structure amusing as I noted. It’s biased as a 25% no and 75% yes construct.
You never propose to allow a response which is “orthogonal”, among the superior questions - non-overlapping and distinct from the three - 4. Ignore the entire thing or 5. Peaceful protest by shopping or 6. Finding the speaker’s profile on an online dating site and convincing them to meet at a local bar then standing them up.
If the distribution of actual approval of violence was _totally random_ your survey would show that (in this case) 66% of people support some violence as a baseline for comparison. That feels strange. It’s entirely due to the question framing.
If you had three different questions - 1) peaceful quiet demonstration, 2) shouting protest, sit-in or walkout and then one question for 3) physical violence - blocking entry, vandalism or altercation you’d have a quite different outcome because the framing retains the false dichotomy now in a different orientation, towards nonviolent protest.
All I have to do is shift the framing to something abstract - choose one of these answers : royal blue, sky blue, cyan or red; for three questions - squares, triangles, or circles? You’d find that people more often prefer blue shades for geometric shapes with angles.
There is no reason to allow a response which is "orthogonal," because again, the question was about when violence is acceptable to counter speech, the correct answer is "never," and our purpose here is to show how many people did not choose the correct answer.
We also asked about student attitudes towards things like obstruction and shout downs/heckling separately, and showed those results too.
Asking it your way would have yielded different results because it's a totally different question—something like "What sorts of responses would you prefer to speech you don't like on campus?" with a variety of options students can choose. But that's a question about student's preferred methods of protest, not their attitudes towards violence in response to speech.
Anyone who prefers nonviolent protest, or who is not in favor of violence in response to speech, would have simply responded "never" to the question we asked.
The nuance I'd add to this is the distinction between events/situations where it's about the speech of one or a few people (where the above applies) and events/situations where there isn't such a devoted purpose. For campus/street preachers who are just out there somewhere, I don't see it as a problem if people heckle or argue with them; there's no reasonable expectation in such a circumstance that they "have the floor".
Sure, campus preachers come to campus, and there are events or situations where the rules are slightly different in terms of "audience participation." But violence is still unacceptable in those cases. And again, violence is the focus of this particular piece. Heckler's vetoes and other ostensibly nonviolent but still anti-free speech behavior is beside this point.
By my original reply, "I don't see it as a problem if people heckle or argue with them". I was not suggesting violence is okay against campus preachers, just handling the fuller range of "block, talk over, violence" for this particular case.
Great article. I wonder if this polling effort could be expanded to university administrators and Board of Regents members. They are the ones that make the real decisions of what behavior will be tolerated on campus.
Yes, but they're savvy enough to not incriminate themselves.
I saw a video yesterday of an undergrad at Columbia talking about the horrible and ridiculous restrictions they’ve had placed on their speech (people being kicked out of dorms for protesting, rules against any political signs being placed in personal locations such as next to their bed, only allowed to protest in one location from 2-6 with noise restrictions). It’s ridiculous and all I could think of was “well this is why they’re right at the bottom of FIREs list.” I’m so grateful that we get these rankings to inform which colleges I’d want to send kids to or recommend people look into for their education
I think the proportional estimates of those who would (even "rarely") support the use of violence may be higher due to the survey methodology. John Villasenior's survey of campuses in 2017 using similar questions found similar results; his study also solicited volunteer responders ( https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/views-among-college-students-regarding-the-first-amendment-results-from-a-new-survey/ ). When I used these items in 2018 in a survey that offered respondents a chance at a $50 gift card ( https://researchers.one/articles/22.11.00007v1 ), the proportion of those who would tolerate violence decreased to less than 5%. Might this be a characteristic of relying on uncompensated survey respondents? Perhaps, those who choose to respond (without reward) have more extreme attitudes that the general population. On the other hand, even one violent activist is a danger to the rest of us.
College Pulse which administers the survey for FIRE does compensate survey respondents with rewards including gift cards.
Thank you, Perry, I did not now this. There might still be a small effect based on how large the promised reward and the perceived likelihood of receiving it. I went back and rechecked our data: Of the 120 valid responses to questions about the acceptability of actions to disrupt "a very controversial speaker... known for making offensive and hurtful statements." in Spring 2018 at Berea College, the proportions who expressed any acceptance were: "loud shouting" (27%); "physically blocking the venue" (24%); "vandalism" (12%); and "using violence" (3%). I suspect the events in Gaza may have increased the acceptability of using violence.
It's also important that you're citing figures from 2018, which was quite some time ago, and FIRE's figures have been steadily increasing the last five years:
This year, 32% of surveyed students said that using violence to stop a campus speech is at least “rarely” acceptable. It was 27% last year, and 20% in 2022. And this is despite the fact that we surveyed more students every year, not less, but the numbers rose regardless.
As you go further back in time, the number would surely go down for a variety of reasons, one of which being that Greg and Rikki mark The Age of Cancel Culture as beginning around 2014 and really starting to ramp up in 2018. That, plus the fact that your survey is just from one college, makes a lot of sense of these numbers.
I think the trend toward accepting violence (on the left, the right, and even the center) is an alarming one. But we need to be careful about presuming that we understand what students mean when they answer this question. We need some individualized, in-depth interviews of students who say they support violence.
Because the FIRE question is framed as student protest, some students might think that violence (such as shoving someone away) is acceptable in self-defense and then say that violence is acceptable to use at a protest when students are being attacked. Because there were many more violent attacks on student protesters in the previous year, the rising numbers who find it acceptable is not a big surprise. Unless you know what students mean by their support for violence, it’s hard to determine how alarming it is.
If you asked students, “Is it ever acceptable to use violence against a campus speaker or audience?” I suspect that the positive answers would be much lower. But again, all of these issues require more research to answer.
The question in the survey was “How acceptable would you say it is for students to engage in the following actions to protest a campus speaker?”
With respect to "Using violence to stop a campus speech," 1 in 3 students answered that it was "rarely," "sometimes," or "always" acceptable.
That is very specific. It's not about self-defense. It's about using violence to stop a campus speech.
A college education is learning to process ideas and subjects outside one's current views and beyond one's current experiences. It is not about agreeing or disagreeing with those ideas and subjects. In many cases, one is required to argue points of view heretofore considered antithetical to one's beliefs or understanding. Allowing protests to shut down presentations of ideas is akin to covering one's ears and repeating "nananananananana" instead of listening and learning.
Happy birthday, Greg! And thanks for calling out the (mostly) far left on their anti-free speech, censorious ways. I noticed a few years a go a deepening trend toward adopting violence as political expression on the left--and it's become much more 'acceptable' after October 7.
And yes, they very much forget that they also tacitly grant the same 'right' to political violence to their enemies as to themselves. A lesson the right has consistently forgotten, too, as they waaah-waaah-waaah and kvetch over assassination attempts on Donald Trump's life.
Who knew guns shot *both* ways? Not just when aimed left?
You know
Were I to use a balanced D4 die and roll to choose an answer, you would conclude that the die is anti-free speech because 75% of the time it would randomly find violence is acceptable. That’s called the fallacy of forced dichotomy, or more technically a disjunctive syllogism, or modus tollendo ponens argument. My gut is that you forcing a response towards approval of by the structure of the context you create to answer.
Were you to have two non-violent options and two violence-related options I’d find the survey more credible.
1. Peaceful protest?
2. Non-violent disruption?
3. Property destruction?
4. Personal violence?
With options being “never/rarely/sometimes/always”
This gives 16 possible responses to a given context (anti-trans speaker, anti-supremacy speaker) so that you compare the answers to random chance.
Then you could see if given populations are more or less tolerant violence in speech against random chance.
I make jokes about these survey structures in other contexts. For instance, after seeing a movie did should “everyone/many people/few people/no one” see it, random chance would indicate that “75% of respondents felt people SHOULD SEE THIS MOVIE”
Also many thanks to using “The Most Interesting Man in the World” figure, otherwise known as a super hot DILF among my set, which allows me to conclude, not to mock you but to illustrate disjunctive syllogisms are misused all over the damn place.
Or, since I’m gay and vulgar, when someone says they’re a Top, you ask “do you never/a few times/rarely/sometimes” enjoy penetration? Then you announce loudly that clearly TOPS LIKE TO GET FUCKED, whereas BOTTOMS REALLY LIKE TO GET FUCKED. It’s an old joke that gets a snicker from the few gays who still get laid, works well with boozy Texas gays.
I’ll have a Cape Cod please, none of that high-falitn’ triple sec.
The idea you articulated here with your two non-violent and two violent options would be a great one to ask, but it is distinct from and does not in any way invalidate the questions we were asking in our survey.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. The question the survey asked was “How acceptable would you say it is for students to engage in the following actions to protest a campus speaker?” with the following further specifications to narrow down the subject matter and responses:
1. Shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus
2. Blocking other students from attending a campus speech
3. Using violence to stop a campus speech
Respondents were able to answer "never," "rarely," "sometimes," and "always' for all three versions of this question. There is nothing in the way the survey is structured that "forces" anyone to answer in the affirmative for violence.
What's more, the sample is so large (nearly 59,000 students) that any potential random effects would presumably be canceled out, since "random" means it could be any answer and not just one.
Our survey also separates out the "rarely" and "never" responses, which many other surveys don't do. And the reason we do that is because, as I argue in the piece, "never" is the only acceptable answer and we want to be sure we know what these cohorts are and what exactly they're comfortable promoting. I also take a lot of time in the piece to discuss the "sometimes" and "always" groups, which are far larger than they should be (which is 0%).
I react solely to the material as presented in the article, which I could totally misinterpret.
To your four answers - totally ok - as you point out here, they relate to three questions of protest, only one of which was nonviolent IHMO. However I (I never/sometimes/often/always) find the response structure amusing as I noted. It’s biased as a 25% no and 75% yes construct.
You never propose to allow a response which is “orthogonal”, among the superior questions - non-overlapping and distinct from the three - 4. Ignore the entire thing or 5. Peaceful protest by shopping or 6. Finding the speaker’s profile on an online dating site and convincing them to meet at a local bar then standing them up.
If the distribution of actual approval of violence was _totally random_ your survey would show that (in this case) 66% of people support some violence as a baseline for comparison. That feels strange. It’s entirely due to the question framing.
If you had three different questions - 1) peaceful quiet demonstration, 2) shouting protest, sit-in or walkout and then one question for 3) physical violence - blocking entry, vandalism or altercation you’d have a quite different outcome because the framing retains the false dichotomy now in a different orientation, towards nonviolent protest.
All I have to do is shift the framing to something abstract - choose one of these answers : royal blue, sky blue, cyan or red; for three questions - squares, triangles, or circles? You’d find that people more often prefer blue shades for geometric shapes with angles.
It doesn’t feel right.
There is no reason to allow a response which is "orthogonal," because again, the question was about when violence is acceptable to counter speech, the correct answer is "never," and our purpose here is to show how many people did not choose the correct answer.
We also asked about student attitudes towards things like obstruction and shout downs/heckling separately, and showed those results too.
Asking it your way would have yielded different results because it's a totally different question—something like "What sorts of responses would you prefer to speech you don't like on campus?" with a variety of options students can choose. But that's a question about student's preferred methods of protest, not their attitudes towards violence in response to speech.
Anyone who prefers nonviolent protest, or who is not in favor of violence in response to speech, would have simply responded "never" to the question we asked.
Wrong. Punch back.
"That bears repeating: 1 in 3 students believe that there are times when violence is justified to stop someone on campus from speaking."
Do these (well) morons not understand when you punch someone they Will Punch back...Hard.
If 10 commandments also applied to online behavior, this world would be a better place.
Meh.
https://youtu.be/sk81tUUhRig?feature=shared
The nuance I'd add to this is the distinction between events/situations where it's about the speech of one or a few people (where the above applies) and events/situations where there isn't such a devoted purpose. For campus/street preachers who are just out there somewhere, I don't see it as a problem if people heckle or argue with them; there's no reasonable expectation in such a circumstance that they "have the floor".
Sure. But this post is specifically about student attitudes toward the use of violence to counter disfavored speech on campus.
Right, but campus preachers come to campus, and it also talks about things short of violence.
Sure, campus preachers come to campus, and there are events or situations where the rules are slightly different in terms of "audience participation." But violence is still unacceptable in those cases. And again, violence is the focus of this particular piece. Heckler's vetoes and other ostensibly nonviolent but still anti-free speech behavior is beside this point.
By my original reply, "I don't see it as a problem if people heckle or argue with them". I was not suggesting violence is okay against campus preachers, just handling the fuller range of "block, talk over, violence" for this particular case.
Adding an asterisk, as it were.