Free Speech College Campuses

College campuses have always been the sites where students can express their opinions without fear. There have been many debates about the merits of allowing free speech on campus. Some students and faculties support allowing free speech on campus, while others believe that colleges should restrict free speech to make the college’s environment safer for every student. Free speeches are endangered on college campuses because of trigger warning, increasing policing of free speech, and the hypersensitivity of college students. Trigger warnings are endangering free speeches on college campuses. They prevent students from learning about and understanding others’ opinion and ideas. In his article, Jon Overton states that “They (trigger warnings)

Colleges and universities control their faculties and students’ actions by shaming and criticizing their faculties and students on social media when the faculty’s or student’s actions cause distresses to other college students. They also control their faculties’ or students’ actions by firing the faculty or suspending the student. In an article that is posted on the website Newsweek, Nina Burleigh states that “American college campuses are starting to resemble George Orwell’s Oceania with its Thought Police, or East Germany under the Stasi. College newspapers have been muzzled and trashed, and students are disciplined or suspended for “hate speech,” while exponentially more are being shamed and silenced on social media by their peers. Professors quake at the possibility of accidentally offending any student and are rethinking syllabi and restricting class discussions to only the most anodyne topics.” The idea American colleges and universities are compared to the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany, or a thought police shows how dangerous and restrictive college campuses have become. This quote also cites the fact colleges have tried to censor their own newspaper as one of the examples how dangerous campuses have become. The fact that colleges try to censor their own newspaper and to intimidate their professors is troubling because this fact indicates that American colleges and

Hypersensitive students cause professors to rewrite their syllabi to avoid teaching materials that might offend the students. In their article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt write “Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law--or in one case, even use the word violate lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politic of sexual paranoia--and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said” (87). The idea that an investigation into a professor is launched because students find her article offensive illustrates the fact that the hypersensitivity of students is infringing on the professor's right to free speech. The authors also believe that the hypersensitivity of students motivates professors to find a method that conceals their identities when they are writing an