THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

What ever happened to the Campus Free Speech Crisis? A year ago, universities were bracing for a new wave of Charlottesvilles. Administrators were predicting more protests, more deplatformings, and more out-of-control student activism. Indeed, the crisis was thought to be so acute that the White House convened a forum to address it, while state legislatures across the country scrambled to pass new laws and regulations.

What a difference a year makes. Rather than collapsing into chaos, 2018 was a year of relative quiet on college campuses. There were fewer deplatformings, fewer fired professors, and less violence compared to 2017. There was also more dialogue, greater respect for faculty free speech rights, and increased tolerance on both the right and the left. All of which raises the question: what went right? [...]

Finally, there are hopeful signs that a new culture of tolerance is taking hold on campus.

In colleges and universities across the country, students are forming new clubs and networks dedicated to respectful dialogue. Campus leaders are following suit, explicitly affirming the value of free speech and establishing protocols for its protection. Among conservatives in particular, there is a renewed emphasis on inviting speakers of substance, as opposed to those who seek merely to provoke.

For faculty, there are encouraging signs as well. Despite powerful campaigns to pressure universities into firing controversial professors, the vast majority of administrators held firm to principles of academic freedom. Indeed, a survey carried out by the conservative American Enterprise Institute found overwhelming support for academic freedom throughout the professoriate. While threats to faculty persist (including, ironically, to the survey's author), universities appear much less willing to placate their outraged critics than they did in 2017.

Why the new culture of tolerance? Some of it, I suspect, is due to the efforts of groups like PEN America, FIRE, and Heterodox Academy, which have been working tirelessly all year to promote dialogue and protect free speech. Fear of litigation is also likely to have made a difference. But I suspect the broader national political climate may be an even more important factor. Few observers truly appreciate how deeply the culture on campus is shaped by events taking place off it, which is why I suspect there is too little recognition that many of the events of 2016 and 2017, when concern about the "Free Speech Crisis" was at its height, were tied to the presidential election.

Trump's campaign and victory generated enormous consternation among many students and faculty, leading some to embrace confrontational forms of activism. In this, they were no different from activists off campus. But as that initial surge of panic has receded, so has the combative sense of urgency and alarm that drove campus activists when it was vivid and fresh. In other words, it is probably not that students are suddenly being won over by Mill's On Liberty. Nor is it that they now see the value of what Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro bring to campus. Rather, it is just that they are beginning to find them boring.

This might not sound like tolerance, but it is

Few people saw the improvements of 2018 coming. Interestingly, one of the few who did was social psychologist and Heterodox Academy co-founder Jonathan Haidt, who predicted in late 2017 that conditions on campus were poised to improve. Haidt got some of the details wrong. For example, he thought that there would be more free speech controversies in spring 2018, but there turned out to be fewer. But he was nevertheless on to something. The culture, tactics, and networks on campus have begun to change, and for the better.

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