Calm The Shit Down About Free Speech on College Campuses

The furore around “free speech on college campuses” is the dullest, most inconsequential political topic of the last five years and I would rather put kebab skewers in my eyes than listen to another discussion about it.

Young students – people who have just come out of school, are still discovering politics and their place in the world, and whose brains are still not even fully developed yet – sometimes do politics in a way that is counterproductive, or overzealous, or crude. This is not new. This has been the stereotype of students since students have existed. If anything, the ‘overreaching’ activism seen on today’s campuses is utterly mild compared to previous decades – go look at how much bombing, rioting and property damage happened on college campuses in the early 70s. In the 1920s, the Klan tried to hold a rally in a mainly Catholic college town and the students responded by beating the crap out of them en masse and ripping the clothes off them. In comparison, inventing a couple of new pronouns and yelling at the occasional demagogue is really nothing to be shocked about.

Even if you don’t agree with every decision made by every young political group, this is the normal process of becoming politically aware; you are pretty much guaranteed not to get it right first time. This is the double-edged sword of youth radicalism; it has its ups and downs, its good ideas (which stick around) and its bad ideas (which fall out of favour)…and twenty years down the line it generally turns out they were ahead of the curve and right on 90% of whatever they were on about, even if they were ridiculed by the ‘sensible’ media of their day. To act as though the students of today are some new threat – and not just a new threat, but the hot topic that we apparently have to discuss over and over again – suggests an ignorance of history and a cheap intellectual laziness. The more I think about it, the more I become convinced it's nothing more than the regularly scheduled moral panic about young people we are required to have every generation. 'Kids these days' dressed in the language of Sensible Discourse.

Honestly, I just wish certain media outlets could find another hobby horse and talk about one of the fifty other issues that matters more at the moment. Even for those whose pet issue is free speech, there are so many other free speech issues – prisoners’ voting rights, anti-protest laws, restrictions on the speech of non-citizens, libel laws, kettling, anti-union measures, protection for whistleblowers, government clampdowns on criticisms, elevation of marginalised voices – that never get a look-in, because people would rather talk about the 19-year-old pink-haired boogeyman. I am very, very bored of it and would like to move on to the new Thing, please.