> I've seen a few videos from various Universities

I've also seen a few videos from various Universities. _Remarkably few_, given how much attention this topic gets.

What's weird is that not long ago is popular to say "I disagree with everything you have to say, but I'd die for your right to say it". It's amazing how times have changed from that shared belief.

The videos you haven't seen are the ones that were never made because the wrong-view person was stopped from even giving their scheduled talk via "de-platforming".

Among a certain sect of internet libertarians, maybe. And we saw that the result of that was the proliferation of communities on popular websites dedicated to legal but sexually suggestive pictures of girls (ex. /r/jailbait on Reddit), communities dedicated to voyeuristic photography, vitriolic hate against people who are overweight, etc.

I'm sorry but Evelyn Beatrice Hall first wrote those words in 1906, as a description of the beliefs of Voltaire, who died in 1778 and whose ideas were extremely mainstream at the time the US was founded.

These ideas long predate the internet and the Libertarian political party and to box them in as such and dismiss them carelessly is extremely intellectually dishonest and bordering on flamebait.

Additionally, if your best evidence against freedom of speech is Reddit, I suggest you retool your arguments from scratch.

I'm not convinced the US considered these values mainstream, as exclusion of most people from voting, and from slaves their natural rights shows

Following on nemo44x's response, we also don't really have much written evidence to the contrary.

Literacy rates in late colonial America were 85-90% north of Virginia and around 60% in Virginia and south of it. If large numbers of people were disagreeing, they surely weren't writing about it.

Western Liberalism is a self correcting, evolving system of ideas and rigorous analysis of what is considered knowledge. So yes, per the people that were considered "the people" during those times, this belief was very strongly held indeed.

It was popular to say, but I challenge the idea that people have somehow become less tolerant of speech they disagree with than, say, Christians in the 1980s or the US government during the Red Scare.

They were wrong then, and these people are wrong now. Unfortunately, they also have an indelible record of the internet to hunt down those they don't like for words uttered back to their pubescent years.

Someone having a right to say something doesn't mean they are entitled to every platform to broadcast it.

Not everyone can go and speak at a University, there is not enough time and space for that to be viable, just as not everyone can demand to be broadcast on TV.

If you can't get enough support at a University to speak, the public square and the soapbox are always at your disposal. The government can't arrest you. That is the freedom of expression that is protected.

You are talking about enforced speech, where private individuals must listen to a speaker, and/or use their platform to amplify the speaker's words. It is a violation of their freedom of expression to tell them they cannot refuse or protest against what someone else wishes to say.

The person in the article was invited by the university. This isn't a random person demanding to be heard. This is the university succumbing to pressure from a small group to ban a guest from sharing their ideas with the student body that choose to attend.

The students have a right to freedom of expression in protest.

The University should absolutely be providing speakers that challenge the student's views and offer ideas they may not agree with, but that's an educational decision, not a free speech one.

If the student body wants to lobby the University not to accept you as a speaker, that's their freedom of the speech, and it is up to the University to weigh that against the potential educational value.

For example, to start somewhere obvious, someone coming in to talk about how your friends are subhuman doesn't provide a lot of educational value, and students rightly don't want their tuition spent enabling it.

Don't like it, use your freedom of speech to demonstrate enough value to your ideas the University and student body are willing to listen. Students are at University for an education, and they have a right to say what they find valuable and demand value from the University. Denying them that is limiting their freedom of expression.

I think another point of the article is the masses of silent people are starting become less silent. Their politeness has been mistaken for agreement.

The university should only allow speakers that the students agree with? That’s sort of ridiculous and an abdication of the university’s responsibility to expose their students to challenging and possibly hurtful intellectual thought. I listened to no shortage of intellectuals that criticized white men in western society in many ways for example. And that’s Ok if it’s thoughtful and with a point, however idiotic I might think it is.

The university has the job of determining what this level is. This speaker wasn’t claiming anyone was subhuman. And you don’t have to attend - it’s simple.

> The university should only allow speakers that the students agree with?

I was very clear that was not what I was saying, I said literally the opposite, so it seems like you didn't even bother reading my post.

> The university has the job of determining what this level is.

Exactly, and they decided that it wasn't valuable enough. I think they were right, you may well disagree. Either way, it isn't "academic freedom" under attack—as this is framed.

There will always be people pissed they don't get that platform for their idea—more people want a platform than there is time and budget to offer. It is a decision about the value of exposing students to the idea weighed against the cost of doing so.

If other students feel they are being denied value, they are free to go to the University and push back. Of course, we all know where this is going, just as with the reactionary response to homosexuality, it will become increasingly unpopular because the cat is out of the bag: people have trans loved ones and don't want them to be discriminated against.

You have cognitive dissonance in your thoughts then. On one hand you claim the students should be able to protest the speakers that the administration invites and on the other hand you suggest the administration should decide which intellectuals are educationally valuable. But yet, after the administration picked a speaker a minority of students protested and that same administration revoked the invitation under pressure. This suggests the minority of students, not the administration, decided what was of value.

This is a problem akin to letting a spoiled child instructing their parent just what’s for dinner. An abdication of duty.

There’s a difference from wanting discrimination against people and having a forum on very real issues regarding an ideology that claims a special access to a certain Knowledge. In a scientific liberal institution, no one is irrefutable and no one has the final say pending new evidence.

Of course the current motif is to dismiss scientific liberalism as racist and suspicious. You only have to read critical theory literature (race, queer, colonial, etc) , which oddly is not receptive to criticism itself.

That was my perception of that person's posts as well.