Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

I feel colleges today are at an extreme beyond those in the past. For example consider that UC Berkeley once had a movement to uphold free speech (https://www.dailycal.org/2020/01/26/free-speech-movement-caf...). Today supporting free speech would have you labeled as a far right fringe reactionary, and it’s not a position students can take freely. And of course there have been numerous events that were cancelled or disrupted by rioting mobs of students that do not want their adversaries to be heard. At a very fundamental level, colleges today are illiberal compared to the decades past.

View on HN

Students at UC Berkeley have been accusing people of being far-right reactionaries for longer than I’ve been alive. They’ve always been seen as extremist. Maybe it’s just the student protests in the 1960s succeeded in completely changing the political landscape.

But the idea that 1960s UC Berkeley was not “extreme” is ahistorical. Hell, UC Berkeley protests have their own Wikipedia page, just for the 1960s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960s_Berkeley_protests

I was a student at UC Berkeley in 1980s. We woke-rolled one another mercilessly on a daily basis.

Also there was Naked Man:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Martinez

that's such an odd story; at the time, I attended UCSC (not far from UC Berkeley) and public nudity was a regular feature and totally accepted in classes (my RA spent the entire day nude, including cafeteria, class, and studying on the quad, and nobody batted an eye). We also had co-ed bathrooms and pot smoking was not disallowed (amusingly, the leadership went out of its way to reduce drinking, but not smoking, based on the history of abuse they had seen).

We had the co-ed dorms, which seemed to work out. If you were too offensive, you were Spoken To.

I had friends who were members of fraternities or sororities, and they were far more strict on a daily basis. That structure also seemed to work for people who were more accustomed to family as a public persona. The scope of their mistakes were perhaps more broad.

And then... there were the co-operatives. The communes. More rules and work duty, usually better living conditions than the dorms.

Finally, perhaps, there were the Streets, which at the time were very densely packed with people in urgent need of psychiatric care. De-fund the hospitals! 1980s.

For all that, nudity was a real stretch. It was rough, and it was weird.

I think a non trivial percentage of this is some people refusing to admit that they’re now the very adults that they once pilloried and hated. It can’t possibly be just that they’re now the adults rolling their eyes at the annoying college students they once were, no the children must be wrong (insert Simpsons meme here).

Nah, they were pretty crazy in the 1960s and 1970s too. Some students went as far as promising to take up NVA arms in protest of the Vietnam war, an obvious farce.

These things come and go in waves, and people have short memories.

Great points. I mentioned this in another comment but it’s worth adding that the Right does this too. Like adults in the 70’s and 80’s trying to cancel heavy metal bands and get dungeons and dragons banned because it was “satanic” and would corrupt the youth. Ridiculous stuff, but similar behavior from a different political faction.

Yup! And some of the other things involved actual state action, which is obviously way more problematic than people whining on twitter.

Honestly, I’d go further. First, college students are and have always been extreme. Getting too riled up about it is frankly blasé. Second, contrary to the pearl clutching we live in a golden age of free speech. You can say all kinds of shit online now that would’ve gotten you literally lynched a few decades ago in some places. On the right and the left there has been an absolute flourishing of the kind of speech that “respectable” society chilled out even during my childhood, the idea that free speech is in trouble is utterly unfounded. Never mind how much easier it is to speak your mind anonymously, something that was reserved only to the kind of people who could get op-eds in the past.

What I think is actually happening here is that the kind of cultural and economic elites used to speaking at the people are suddenly finding them speaking with the people, and they’re not enjoying finding out what the people really think. In fact the only threat to free speech I can see is the very people whining about the “woke mob”, who are trying to connect online criticism with actual violence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com