Not accepting incivility from people is hardly what I'd call a "backlash". We don't operate our universities on the heckler's veto.
I've seen a few videos from various Universities where invited speakers are shouted down because of supposed wrong views. But then it isn't the heckler's veto if their views are wrong or what?
The videos you haven't seen are the ones that were never made because the wrong-view person was stopped from even giving their scheduled talk via "de-platforming".
These ideas long predate the internet and the Libertarian political party and to box them in as such and dismiss them carelessly is extremely intellectually dishonest and bordering on flamebait.
Additionally, if your best evidence against freedom of speech is Reddit, I suggest you retool your arguments from scratch.
Literacy rates in late colonial America were 85-90% north of Virginia and around 60% in Virginia and south of it. If large numbers of people were disagreeing, they surely weren't writing about it.
Not everyone can go and speak at a University, there is not enough time and space for that to be viable, just as not everyone can demand to be broadcast on TV.
If you can't get enough support at a University to speak, the public square and the soapbox are always at your disposal. The government can't arrest you. That is the freedom of expression that is protected.
You are talking about enforced speech, where private individuals must listen to a speaker, and/or use their platform to amplify the speaker's words. It is a violation of their freedom of expression to tell them they cannot refuse or protest against what someone else wishes to say.
The University should absolutely be providing speakers that challenge the student's views and offer ideas they may not agree with, but that's an educational decision, not a free speech one.
If the student body wants to lobby the University not to accept you as a speaker, that's their freedom of the speech, and it is up to the University to weigh that against the potential educational value.
For example, to start somewhere obvious, someone coming in to talk about how your friends are subhuman doesn't provide a lot of educational value, and students rightly don't want their tuition spent enabling it.
Don't like it, use your freedom of speech to demonstrate enough value to your ideas the University and student body are willing to listen. Students are at University for an education, and they have a right to say what they find valuable and demand value from the University. Denying them that is limiting their freedom of expression.
The university should only allow speakers that the students agree with? That’s sort of ridiculous and an abdication of the university’s responsibility to expose their students to challenging and possibly hurtful intellectual thought. I listened to no shortage of intellectuals that criticized white men in western society in many ways for example. And that’s Ok if it’s thoughtful and with a point, however idiotic I might think it is.
The university has the job of determining what this level is. This speaker wasn’t claiming anyone was subhuman. And you don’t have to attend - it’s simple.
I was very clear that was not what I was saying, I said literally the opposite, so it seems like you didn't even bother reading my post.
> The university has the job of determining what this level is.
Exactly, and they decided that it wasn't valuable enough. I think they were right, you may well disagree. Either way, it isn't "academic freedom" under attack—as this is framed.
There will always be people pissed they don't get that platform for their idea—more people want a platform than there is time and budget to offer. It is a decision about the value of exposing students to the idea weighed against the cost of doing so.
If other students feel they are being denied value, they are free to go to the University and push back. Of course, we all know where this is going, just as with the reactionary response to homosexuality, it will become increasingly unpopular because the cat is out of the bag: people have trans loved ones and don't want them to be discriminated against.
This is a problem akin to letting a spoiled child instructing their parent just what’s for dinner. An abdication of duty.
There’s a difference from wanting discrimination against people and having a forum on very real issues regarding an ideology that claims a special access to a certain Knowledge. In a scientific liberal institution, no one is irrefutable and no one has the final say pending new evidence.
Of course the current motif is to dismiss scientific liberalism as racist and suspicious. You only have to read critical theory literature (race, queer, colonial, etc) , which oddly is not receptive to criticism itself.
I've also seen a few videos from various Universities. _Remarkably few_, given how much attention this topic gets.
It's like saying "bigot" is a slur, or being more afraid of being labelled a racist than actually being racist...
So yes, it certainly is an offensive slur - those who use it invariably mean it an offensive way.