I have followed Nate Silver, an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball, basketball, and elections. He was the founder of FiveThirtyEight (the number of electors in the United States electoral college), and held the position of editor-in-chief there, along with being a special correspondent for ABC News, until May 2023. He rose to national fame for his deadly accurate predictions of the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, and in my view, both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. I was living in Florida in 2016 and the polls were calling for Ms. Clinton to win the State by 2-4 percentage points. Silver correctly called the state a “toss-up” leaning towards Mr. Trump.

These days he blogs on his site The Silver Bulletin. Recently he published a piece: “Free Speech is in Trouble.”  As with most of his work he provides supporting statistics (but in a non-wonky way) to try to understand and collect his thoughts on the topic at hand. The opening paragraph in his blog on free speech begins:

“What Harvard students think” is a topic that invariably receives too much attention. But I don’t think that’s true for evaluating opinion among young people or college students in general — who, after all, will make up the next generation of journalists, business leaders, politicians and pretty much every other white-collar profession. And after seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don’t think concern over “cancel culture” or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left.

After reviewing the data and methodology of a recent survey of 55,000 undergraduates by College Pulse and FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a pro-free speech advocacy group, he conducted his own analysis of the results. Long story, told short, college students are not very enthusiastic about free speech. Particularly true for progressive/left wing students at elite institutions but also more broadly across all colleges. In general student support for free speech is tepid and “A significant minority of students don’t even have much tolerance for controversial speech on positions they presumably agree with…When it comes to controversial speakers, students at non-elite colleges are just as intolerant as their Ivy League counterparts.”

Why? Silver offers several possible reasons

Reason #1: “Woke” ideas are popular on campus. These ideas/ideologies are considerably less tolerant of free speech than traditional liberalism. The argument is that unrestricted speech harms people. This assumes there isn’t an equal platform to speak in the first place, so racists and other unpleasant people are able to use the norm of free speech to terrorize groups who are already categorized as oppressed – and in this ideology there are only the oppressed and the oppressors; individuals and intent are not important or to be considered.

Reason #2: Democrats are turning against free speech because of concerns over misinformation and are more supportive of governmental restrictions on misinformation.

Reason #3: The younger generation is risk-averse in general.

Reason #4: The United States may be reverting to the statistical mean of free-speech tolerance as seen in other western nations who have a more restrictive understanding of free speech.

Reason #5: The adults in the room are often hypocrites rom the view of college students. They see adults as advocating restrictions on academic freedom, congressional involvement on campus activities, and other intrusions. They also see major figures such as Elon Musk advocating strict freedom of speech and yet allowing foreign governments to censor content on his social media channel.

Silver concludes his article with offering his advice to campus leadership: “I’d use this as a teaching moment, telling students that now that they’ve found out what it’s like to stand up for a controversial, unpopular position, I’d hope they’d be more respectful of the rights of others to do the same. Because unless someone is willing to do that — to defend free speech in a principled, non-hypocritical way — the game theory says it’s just going to be a race to the bottom. And given the increasingly tenuous commitment to it in many corners of American society, free speech is going to lose out.”