Censorship is Primarily a Problem of Institutional Selection

In “The Discourse” there is a widespread implicit (and sometimes explicit) narrative that young people enter colleges and universities as bright, optimistic, open-minded and freedom-loving people with beliefs and dispositions that are broadly representative of most others in society. But then, colleges and universities – armchair ‘radical’ academics acting in concert with overbearing ‘woke’ administrators – get their hands on these innocent youths and warp their souls, leading them to emerge from college as far-left, intolerant and illiberal scolds who look down on everyone else in society, and try to micromanage, shame or coerce others into the “correct” views and behaviors.

This was, roughly, the assumption that my mentor Jon Haidt was working from when he started the research for his bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind. However, as he and co-author Greg Lukianoff dug into the evidence, it became increasingly obvious and undeniable that young people were arriving to colleges and universities (especially elite colleges and universities) having already internalized niche moral and political views, already mobilizing “woke” discourses,1 and already disposed towards looking down on “others.” Students arrived on campus already oriented towards safetyism and censorship.2 Their sense of entitlement was already quite strong: they expected staff and faculty to cater to their personal preferences and expectations and readily “called the manager” when institutions didn’t automatically and rapidly bend to their will.

Universities may be too quick to indulge these impulses. They may exacerbate and reinforce many of these patterns of thinking and behavior rather than pushing students to think and behave differently. However, college education was clearly not the core driver of many unfortunate tendencies that dominate elite culture. Instead, they argued, the primary issue seemed to be antecedent enculturation that children receive from the families, institutions and communities that most typically feed young people into universities.3

While granting Haidt and Lukianoff’s basic premise, I’ll argue here that universities do, in fact, play a big role in driving unfortunate dynamics within the symbolic professions. This is not because they successfully “indoctrinate” students en masse but, rather, because they serve an important gatekeeping role for deciding who gets to become a symbolic capitalist (and who does not) — and the attributes and dispositions higher ed institutions select for and cultivate, I will argue, are broadly incompatible with risk taking, dissent and pluralism.

But before getting into that, let’s start by putting the