College students in the United States are involved in political activism now more than any other time in the last 50 years.According to a recent survey conducted by UCLA, more students are committed to social justice now than since the height of the Civil Rights Movement. There’s a growing sense among undergraduates that they have a responsibility to contribute, to leave their mark upon something during their brief undergraduate years, to call attention to some wrong, to raise their voice for those who cannot speak up for themselves.
At times, students are so eager to contribute that they forget that their primary responsibility at the university is not to speak out, but to listen, to learn and to prepare for a life of work and service.
Universities love to brag about high student-faculty ratio and discussion-based learning, but these emphasize the student’s role in displaying learning rather than receiving knowledge. They rest on the assumption that if a bunch of undergraduates who have skipped lecture andskimmed their sociology readings come together and try to impress the preceptor with their knowledge, they will end up more educated than if those same undergraduates closed their mouths and opened their ears to at least consider the ideas of a professor who has spent his life studying the material.
This tension is manifest in the fact that despite drastic increases in student activism, the UCLA study found that college freshmen today are more likely to support certain forms of restriction on free speech for potentially offensive speech and content. 43% of freshmen also supported colleges banning radical speakers, which is up from 25% in 1971. Political progressivism on college campuses often coincides with polarization and an unwillingness to entertain or even allow for the vocalization of opposing views, liberal or conservative.
At the heart of the debate about free speech lies the relationship between defending one point of view and respecting the validity and possible veracity of an alternate point of view. Almost 100 years ago, British journalist G.K. Chesterton summarized the timeless difficulty surrounding free speech, “The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory.”
Chesterton reminds us of the importance of allowing other points of view and of having an appreciation for the subtlety of complex and sensitive issues. College activists are notorious for the passion and dedication they put into their causes. Not everyone takes part, but those who are involved are often fully invested. But in a university setting, often there is not a lack of voices, let alone of speakerphones, but a lack of ears. We arrive at our opinions too quickly and proceed to spend our time advocating for that point of view, never stopping to reconsider or fully listen to an opposing position.
Malcolm Gladwell, among others, has written about how often people make character judgments about others based off of initial impressions, but I wonder if the same isn’t true for many of our most vociferously advocated beliefs. I wonder if we could look back at how we initially came to a certain point of view, how many of our opinions would we realize we really decided in the first 30 seconds? Have we really considered the other side of the arguments we are so passionate about?
If Chesterton is right about the largeness, complexity and subtleness of truth, then it’s not only important that we are free to express our views and beliefs, but that in our inquiries we really listen to opposing views and do our due diligence in grasping why a person thinks and believes what they do. Rather than cowering from or silencing differing opinions, we engage with them, looking for what is right and valid.
In political activism this means that we aren’t at war with the opposition. The goal is to advocate, to call attention to an overlooked group or minority, not to stifle voices. In private debate, we can take it for granted that the other party has also done their fair share of reading and reflecting on the issue, and that more likely than not, their argument also makes lot of sense. In public, this means we don’t let our tolerance become intolerance.
We live in a pluralistic society with many different views and points of opinion. Unless we make a habit of taking other points of view seriously, all progress will be stifled. We’ll soon be embodying George Saunders’ harrowing vision of brain-dead megaphones, shouting louder and listening less. We’ll stop advocating and we’ll start advertising. If we don’t start listening, we will contribute less to the conversation.
Luke Gamble is a sophomore from Eagle, Idaho. He can be reached at ljgamble@princeton.edu.
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