>Kids also become overprotected in other ways, such as not hearing other views or not being able to handle opposing views. No wonder academia is nowadays the exact opposite of free speech and the scientific method.
I wonder how much the scientific method went into coming to that conclusion.
Also if anything we are way too exposed to other people's views. Before you could speak to someone random and there was a much higher chance that their opinions were unique because they weren't the next person who binges on r/all. We had many more forums and less recommendation algorithms driving what we consume. Now you overhear people talking about something you just saw the other day online in public all the time.
It is similar to how globalisation is making everywhere feel the same whereas in the past people had completely distinct cultures from one country to the next.
> It is similar to how globalisation is making everywhere feel the same whereas in the past people had completely distinct cultures from one country to the next.
Huhu. Yet US Tik-Tokers travelling in Europe for holidays are losing their collective marbles about how coffee shops aren't opened 24/7
Agreed that the argument "overprotection leads to lack of free speech in academia" is tenuous.
That said, I do wonder if we all _are_ being protected from opposing views these days. Like, we come across the opposing views but usually in a filtered / characature form on Social Media/Fox News/MSNBC. It's actually kinda hard to find stuff without spin in my experience.
EDIT
My hypothesis is that's it's just cheaper to create speculative / opinion based journalism rather than real investigation. Since the former gets enough clicks, there's not a strong financial reason to create good journalism.
It's always been hard to find things without spin. The only difference now is the range of different spin styles available. Every niche worldview has an online community.
Among liberal faculty 35 and under, only 23% indicated that shouting down a speaker is never acceptable, 43% said the same for blocking entry, and 64% for using violence to stop a campus speech.
Look at Figure 3, which covers all faculty (liberal and conservative). The shift towards illiberalism and less tolerance towards speech is absolutely visible in generational cohorts, and the under-35 cohort is the most supportive of illiberal measures. Students are even more supportive of illiberal measures than young faculty.
Are we assuming that older academics are more tolerant to being shouted down because older academia tolerated shouting more? It may just be that younger academics have always been less ok with dramatics on campus. We need to compare this to the same survey done generations ago.
I think you may have read the parent's statistics backwards. Their point (correct or incorrect) was that younger academics are more accepting of the suppression of speech.
This data does not indicate a “shift”, since it’s a point in time and we’d need historical data to claim there’s a shift. If the argument is about a “generational shift” then you’d need data going back decades at least.
Have you followed some of the scandals at Harvard and Yale lately? Or do do you think they are just aberrations? Are you aware that college students are claiming they are being "assaulted" by hearing different views?
I wonder how much the scientific method went into coming to that conclusion.
Also if anything we are way too exposed to other people's views. Before you could speak to someone random and there was a much higher chance that their opinions were unique because they weren't the next person who binges on r/all. We had many more forums and less recommendation algorithms driving what we consume. Now you overhear people talking about something you just saw the other day online in public all the time.
It is similar to how globalisation is making everywhere feel the same whereas in the past people had completely distinct cultures from one country to the next.