The New Intellectuals
Political wars on college campuses aren’t really about free speech. They’re about what it means to be a student.
The political wars on today’s college campuses are being quickly reduced to a small number of unsatisfying explanations. Many of these are injurious and insulting to the students who already hold marginalized positions within the university. Diatribes against the “coddling” of students may have given way to debates over “free speech.” But both conceptual frameworks, despite notable complications to the latter, get in the way of any meaningful understanding of the situations students, faculty, staff, and administrators find themselves confronting.
Representing campus protests under the heading of free speech helps to obscure the actual struggles occurring over the allocation of resources and the revision of curricula—struggles
