On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, RealClearEducation’s Nathan Harden joins Federalist Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to break down how the newly released College Free Speech Rankings can provide more insight into the problems in higher education and current campus cultures.
“What we’re finding is that students, kind of as a default, come in somewhat uncomfortable disagreeing, and it’s really on the administration and on the professors,” Harden said, noting that the age of cancel culture has created an “anxiety” in students preventing them from speaking out for fear of being ostracized. “You have to do work.”
“Politics is downstream from culture and maybe culture is downstream from our universities,” Harden said. “I think we’re seeing the mainstreaming of ideas that were sort of birthed in sort of fringe departments and academies in the ’70s — theories on gender, theories on race, and more so on the weaponization of language,” he continued.
“And now we’re seeing it, as you mentioned, in some of our biggest sort of legacy journalism organizations. We’re seeing that there really isn’t a respect for viewpoint diversity and maybe not even for free speech.”
You can read more about RealClearEducation’s college free speech ranking survey here.
