TLDR SUMMARY
- Attending a large western university exposes students to at least a somewhat diverse cross-section of people. Oddly enough, when I was a student at one such university, that felt like a good thing. If anything, with hindsight, exploration of even more diverse viewpoints would have been a benefit.
- Among American universities, a growing portion of students (up to 45% as referenced below1) support the use of violence to stop a speaker with opposing views to their own.
- It’s the author’s opinion that hearing ideas outside one’s echo chamber has always been a good thing. Moreover, in a world with self-curated information sources (e.g., social media), a willingness to explore new ideas becomes more important.
In 2010, I attended a talk by Peter Thiel. No, no. Wait, keep reading. This relatively intimate talk was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Still with me? In 2014, I went to a similar talk held at Northeastern University. This one featured Noam Chomsky.
Now that I have upset all sensitive parties across the political spectrum; I did not just happen to wander into one of these lectures. I was not protesting one of the speakers while cheering on the other. I did not sit in the audience biting my tongue in anger while either one of these two renowned thinkers spoke.
I proactively sought out both of these talks.
The Thiel talk is particularly illustrative of this point — I remember leaving my office early as a junior employee, battling traffic over to Cambridge to make it on time to the beautiful Frank Gehry-designed MIT lecture hall. I even made that trek alone and paid $25 of my hard-earned money.2
Speaking generally, Thiel is a conservative libertarian. Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian socialist. In one sense, both are “libertarian” but, peeling that back, these two could not be further apart when comparing their overall bodies of political thought.
Yet, both Thiel and Chomsky are extremely accomplished in their respective fields. These accomplishments, accompanied by a plethora of public intellectual statements that provide some insight into their inner workings, meant to me that these were men worth listening to. They have ideas worth considering.
I attended these talks to do just that — listen and consider. The hope, in listening and thinking, was that I might even learn something.
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This willingness to listen must not become a lost art.
A 2021 survey suggests things are moving in the wrong direction in this regard. Sixty-six percent of college students at American’s major universities report some level of acceptance for speaker shout-downs on their campus3 — up 4 percentage points from last year; 23% consider it acceptable for people to use violence to stop a speaker — up 5 percentage points from last year.
Two rather elite colleges top the list regarding the use of violence being acceptable — at 45% and 43% respectively.4 The idea that nearly half of the relatively well-off, well-educated students at those well-known institutions think it’s good practice to not just attempt to “stop” a speaker but to specifically use “violence” to stop a speaker they disagree with is striking.
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The trend shown in this study is that, at least among college-age Americans, general tolerance is not in vogue. This is interesting because there’s often a bias towards thinking it’s the uneducated that might lack the skills to consider nuanced points of view. This study shows that, at the very least, it might be a more universal thing in 2021.
Tyler Cowen ends his (awesome) podcast by playing a lightning round of “overrated or underrated” — where he asks guests if a “concept/idea” is too richly valued or is not quite valued high enough. This game was in my mind as I penned this.
Somehow listening became an underrated skill.