On college campuses today, students are punished for everything from mild satire, to writing politically incorrect short stories, to having the “wrong” opinion on virtually every hot button issue …. this problem will only get worse as university-educated people assume leadership in society without any firm grasp of the fact that good ideas survive challenge and dissent. They will increasingly adopt the view that giving offense is a much bigger problem for society than suppressing ideas.

At one time, university campuses were considered bastions of intellectual liberty. No more. In Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate liberal atheist Greg Lukianoff, a founder and the current president of the influential Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), says those days are over. The new reality is:

On college campuses today, students are punished for everything from mild satire, to writing politically incorrect short stories, to having the “wrong” opinion on virtually every hot button issue, and, increasingly, simply for criticizing the college administration, just as Hayden Barnes was. In the coming pages, you will see a student punished for publicly reading a book; a professor labeled a deadly threat to campus for posting a pop-culture quote on his door; students required to lobby the government for political causes they disagreed with in order to graduate; a student government that passed a “Sedition Act” empowering them to bring legal action against students who criticized them; and students across the country being forced to limit their “free speech activities” to tiny, isolated corners of campus creepily dubbed “free speech zones.” (pp. 4-5)

In his view, this problem will only get worse as university-educated people assume leadership in society without any firm grasp of the fact that good ideas survive challenge and dissent. They will increasingly adopt the view that giving offense is a much bigger problem for society than suppressing ideas.

One problem he identifies is the subtle way in which claims about equality can become an instrument of tyranny. For example, in one of his classes, intelligent students were unable to agree that female genital mutilation was wrong. Their notion of respect for other cultures had simply overwhelmed their sense of natural justice. Others have noted the same thing: Respect for other cultures means that one cannot have a debate about the most basic justice issues for fear of offending someone.

One of the key causes of the growth of censorship at universities may be the growth of administration. Lukianoff argues (pp. 70–75) that there is likely a relationship because bureaucracy greatly increases the cost of education.

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