Forty percent of millennials are OK with limiting speech that is offensive to minority groups, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center.

The report — using data on free speech and media around the world — found that American millennials are more likely than older generations to say the government should be able to censor people from using offensive language about minority groups, according to the report.

“I’m not particularly surprised at the findings, especially with the millennial generation,” said Roy Gutterman, professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and the director of the Tully Center for Free Speech.

Gutterman said the millennial generation has grown up being coddled and made to believe that hazardous and insensitive speech is something that they need to be shielded from.

The survey asked whether people believe citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Forty percent of millennials said the government should be able to prevent this language in public — 58 percent said such language was OK, according to the report.

“(This) shows both an ignorance of the First Amendment and a very disturbing willingness to permit government to decide what sort of speech is appropriate and what isn’t, and that sort of attitude does not belong in a democratic system,” said David Rubin, dean emeritus of Newhouse.

Although a larger portion of millennials favor allowing offensive speech against minorities, the 40 percent statistic is significant given that only 27 percent of Generation Xers, 28 percent of baby boomers and 12 percent of silents — people born from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s — say the government should prevent such speech, according to the report.

Rubin said he is not sure whether these views will last as millennials mature and understand more.

Compared to dozens of other nations surveyed, people in the United States are more opposed to the government being able to prevent any kind of speech, according to the report.

The report comes as college campuses have seen fierce debate about political correctness and “PC culture.” Increasingly, university campuses have become environments of political correctness, according to an article in the U.S. News and World Report.

“The way people start to appreciate free speech is when they themselves become censored or when their view points become sanctioned or punished,” Gutterman said.

Can Aslan, a third-year PhD candidate in the bioengineering program and president of the Graduate Student Organization, is working on free speech issues with SU’s computer and electronic policy.

“We cannot separate electronic policies from free speech so we’re going to look into free speech overall,” Aslan said.

The goal of this work is to redefine free speech policy on the SU campus, especially because SU is currently a red-light school, Aslan said. SU received the red-light rating because of a policy that gives the university ownership of all electronic communication transmitted on the SU system.

The red-light rating was given by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The foundation’s website defines a red light university as having at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.

Rubin, who is leading the group, said there is no way to know what people will find offensive and added that there is no knowledge of what kinds of speech will have certain reactions.

“Colleges exist to upset preconceptions, force students to debate what they know and change what they think they do in the face of new information,” Rubin said.

Published on December 6, 2015 at 9:00 pm

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