Campus Activists Believe They May Limit the Rights of Their Political Opponents If They Frame Their Intolerance in Terms of Protecting Others from Hate

When people talk about universities pursuing truth, what they usually have in mind, Williams notes, is “not a search for an ultimate truth for all time, but a contestable truth … [to] be countered and superseded when new and better knowledge” comes along. Campus activists, though, may believe they possess the full truth already. Unlike others they are aware, conscious, or in the know—or to use a more recent term, woke. Or they may see all truth claims as exercises of power. In any case, for them the university’s mission is social justice rather than truth. The university is not to be a place where people hash out ideas and where even error is tolerated because others are free to contest it. It is to be set apart from the larger society not as a haven of free expression, but instead as a safe space where students are protected from oppression. As they see it, those defending the permissibility of speech that causes harm are defending oppression. Some activists even mock free speech advocates as defenders of what they call freeze peach. 

Obviously censorship is not new, but the rationale for it now tends to arise from the ideals of victimhood culture. Political scientist April Kelly-Woessner finds that today’s young people are actually less politically tolerant than the previous generation, a reversal of a 60-year-old trend. And among the younger generation (those under 40), those who are most concerned about social justice are the most intolerant. That this is not the case for those who are older suggests that the idea of a conflict between social justice and free speech is new. One likely source of this idea, Kelly-Woessner says, is the New Left theorist Herbert Marcuse, who argued that a “liberating tolerance … would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” Whatever the source, though, campus activists have come to believe they may “limit the rights of their political opponents, so long as they frame their intolerance in terms of protecting others from hate.”

--Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 223-224.