whom the classroom has been a safe space for way too long. Now they’re apparently afraid that their “small or accidental slights”, as Lukianoff and Haidt put it, are going to get pounced on. They’d much rather students “question their own emotional reactions” than question the assumptions coming from the front of the classroom.
In this context, silencing one’s opponents is a fair tactic, because what matters is that one’s own ideas dominate the conversation.¶ Yet, education is not a zero-sum game. One person’s learning doesn’t decrease another’s. If focused on an educational mission, rather than a political one, free speech wouldn’t create winners and losers. If the goal is to educate, understand, and discover truth, an environment that encourages debate benefits everyone.¶ This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have any limits on speech. Colleges are required to enforce laws against harassment, intimidation and discrimination. This isn’t what the free speech debate is about. Advocates for free speech are not condoning illegal, threatening behaviors. Rather, they oppose limitations on constitutionally protected speech and academic freedom on campus, merely because the content offends or makes someone uncomfortable.
AT Authoritarianism The market and private influences regulate speech in the same way the government does, but the government at least is checked by the people Brison 98 Brison, Susan J. (Brison is a professor of philosophy at UChicago) "The Autonomy Defense of Free Speech." Ethics 108.2 (1998): 312-39. JSTOR. Web. 17 Dec. 2016. [Premier] In addition, we need to ask whether private pressures and market¶ constraints on speech are less violative of audience autonomy, on this¶ account, than are public, governmental restrictions.¶ 93 Those presenting¶ the autonomy argument against governmental restrictions on speech fail[s]¶ to acknowledge the ways in which the market, or the private sphere, can¶ restrict access to speech, and thus, on their own view, undermine autonomy.¶ A governmental policy of allowing this to go unchecked cannot be defended by appeal to the value of autonomy, as no argument has¶ been given for supposing the market-induced restrictions to be more respectful¶ of autonomy than a well-reasoned and carefully implemented¶ governmental policy would be. In our society, for example, the mass media [is]¶ are not only the main sources of information for most people, but¶ also the selectors of what information we receive.¶ 94 Decisions about what¶ speech to give people access to are not only based on the corporations’¶ judgments of profitability, but are also influenced by advertisers’ effective¶ veto power concerning content.¶ 95 Why should we assume that government¶ regulators would have even less pure motives in deciding what¶ speech to restrict? The exclusive concern with governmental skewing of¶ the market may arise from the view that the default position is no censorship,¶ rather than censorship of the market. The view that there is agency¶ involved in the marketplace as well as in government is noticeably absent¶ in, for example, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous reference to ‘‘the¶ power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,’’¶ and it is rarely mentioned in discussions of autonomy and free¶ speech.96 An implicit premise in the autonomy defense of free speech is¶ that only governmental regulation of speech can be autonomy undermining,¶ but no argument is given for this assumption.