There was a time, not that long ago, when First Amendment rights were relatively stable and well-understood in America. Those days are long gone. Consider our country’s college campuses, where free speech is dying the most brutal of deaths.
Why is this occurring? Who is to blame? From looking at recent data on this question, it seems that women are the main culprits.
According to a recent report by researchers at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), as the number of women entering higher education continues to climb, levels of free speech on college campuses experience an apparently commensurate decline. On the issue of balancing free speech and hate speech, striking demographic differences emerge, with significantly more female than male faculty favoring protections against hate speech, “even if this restricts speech not intended to be hateful (19 percent of females, 8 percent of males), as well as restricting speech only where words are intended to be hateful (38 percent of females, 29 percent of males).” It is interesting to note that “significantly more male than female faculty supported restricting speech only where words are certain to incite violence (62 percent of males, 42 percent of females).”
Women, we’re assured, are more rational than men. They’re also more tolerant. On college campuses, however, this doesn’t appear to be the case. Rationality and tolerance are in short supply, and this scarcity is harming free speech.
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