UNC Tries to Create a “Free-Speech Culture”
Is elite higher education failing in its duty to students? The Wall Street Journal editorial page writer Barton Swaim weighs in on this timely question and how UNC is attempting to address it on their Chapel Hill campus. What can we glean for UVA?
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EXCERPT
Why American politics in the 21st century is marred by incivility and mistrust is the subject of more books and essays than any normal person would wish to read. The premise underlying most of them is that it’s a left-right problem: The right hates the left and the left hates the right, only the reasons for the hatred vary according to the author.
But what if it isn’t a left-right problem at all? What if the acrimony and loathing that animate our politics have more to do with class than ideology, more to do with educational status than any set of views on culture and policy? The assumption that the nastiness of our politics is chiefly a matter of our ideologies wouldn’t explain, for one thing, the mindless rage currently evident on elite campuses.
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Ordinary Americans don’t behave this way. A not-insignificant number of students and faculty at the country’s finest universities do.
The conclusion would seem to be unavoidable that elite higher education is failing in its duty to convey to students a sense of the world’s moral and political complexity and the necessity of humility in trying to interpret it.
Barton Swaim is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal. Barton has written for the Journal as a regular book reviewer since 2012 and began a column on political books in 2017. He came to the Journal as an editorial-page writer in 2018. Before that he was opinion editor at the Weekly Standard. He is the author of The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics.