The contrast between the 2020 and 2021 FIRE reports are striking. And they show how much worse our campuses are becoming.
Students at Ivy League schools were slightly more in favor of using violence to stop a campus speech: a total of 21% expressed some level of acceptance for violence in these cases, with 1% saying it was “always” acceptable, 3% saying “sometimes” and 17% saying “rarely,” compared with 18% overall and 15% among students in the Southeastern Conference. One quarter of atheist students and black students expressed some level of acceptance for violence, as did 27% of LGBT students. Similarly, liberal students expressed a higher acceptance of violence.
The 2021 numbers are worse.
Almost one in four (23%) say it is acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech, sharply up 5 percentage points from last year’s 18%
What used to be the Ivy League numbers are becoming normative across the campus spectrum. That’s how radicalization works.
As we’ve seen tolerance for violence is highest among lefties which also indicates the growing transformation of moderate and liberal students into lefties, and lefties into hard lefties, it also aligns with identity politics which is taking hold more firmly on campuses.
All of this is happening with the active encouragement and promotion of university administrators. The violence is coming from the system.
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