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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

Dramatic is the right tone here. We are seeing the collapse of intellectual freedom and openness in the places where it was supposed to be valued most. This does not bode well for our civilization. My generation, the millennials, holds free speech in much lower regard than previous generations. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millen... . Everyone who values freedom should be very alarmed.

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Millenials didn't invent video game ratings, movie ratings, the seven 'dirty' words, the hays code, or blacklists.

If your generation targets something that's actually harmful, you're ahead of the game.

Consider a space that becasue all speech is allowed, is dominated by speech that marginalizes some subset of the population. Is that 'free'?

I think that if you want a place of intellectual exploration, excluding people is as dangerous as excluding certain ideas. And there seems to be a trade-off.

I very recently graduated from a college where these activists were very active. I can assure you, that there is not some epidemic of racism or any other kind of discrimination that this is a legitimate reaction to. It's nothing short of a political power-grab and an attempt to shut down any discussion by people that they don't agree with. They have successfully created a climate of fear. The reaction among all of the different institutions--different academic and administrative departments, student groups, greek organizations, alumni groups, etc.--is nothing short of race to capitulate the fastest.

Unfortunately I think this makes universities less hypocritical because it's more in line with the way academia works on the inside.

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