Commentary: College Students Have Something to Say. It’s Just Not What You’d Expect.

April 06, 2023 1 min read

by Jonathan Malesic, New York Times

In the debate over free speech and social justice, commentators on the right and the “heterodox” left often claim that college students are all either stridently liberal or cowed into silence by those who are.

As someone who has spent two decades teaching at colleges large and small, public and private, I don’t recognize this description — and it’s not because I think that it’s conservative students who are dominating the discourse. In my experience, college students are all too reluctant to express strong opinions about the world at large.


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