In the spring of 2014, recordings of racist remarks by Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling dominated CNN coverage for months, inspiring public outrage that likely will result in Sterling’s losing his basketball franchise. Not long before that, the controversy of the day involved Phil Robertson, the patriarch of A&E’s popular television show Duck Dynasty, for making insulting remarks about homosexuals and African Americans. That incident was preceded by the fall of Paula Deen, whose career collapsed (perhaps temporarily) after she admitted to having used a racial epithet at some undefined time decades in the past. The list of celebrities who have made headlines for allegedly offensive statements seems to be ever expanding; high-profile offenders include Gary Oldman, Don Imus, Mel Gibson, Jerry Seinfeld, Isaiah Washington, and Alec Baldwin.

Oftentimes, the speakers are not merely vilified but even lose their jobs over their comments. Juan Williams at NPR, Rick Sanchez and Roland Martin at CNN, and Martin Bashir and (again) Alec Baldwin at MSNBC all lost their media positions because of controversial remarks. Admittedly, many of the offending comments were not particularly sympathetic, but the public’s appetite for punishing attempts at candor gone wrong, drunken rants, or even private statements made in anger or frustration seems to be growing at an alarming rate.

Even satirical comedian Stephen Colbert ran afoul of the speech police when he made a joke on his show that used racial insensitivity to mock racial insensitivity. The #CancelColbert movement quickly picked up steam but ultimately did more to produce Twitter chatter than to threaten the career of the popular comedian. It did, however, shine a light on the thought pattern of the modern American censor: there must be zero tolerance for anything that anyone might consider offensive, regardless of the context.

And then there was the case of the Mozilla Corporation’s Brendan Eich, who was pressured to resign from his brief stint as the company’s CEO after it re-emerged that he had donated $1,000 to the campaign for California’s Proposition 8, a ballot initiative opposing same-sex marriage, back in 2008. The Eich incident was troubling on many levels. Not only did it demonstrate a surprisingly short national memory – until fairly recently, the majority of Americans opposed gay marriage, including both President Obama and Hillary Clinton – but it also seemed to indicate that some religious or social conservatives would have to choose between their beliefs and their professions. Eich’s coerced resignation sent such a disquieting message that a coalition of 58 gay-rights activists, scholars, columnists, and pundits across the ideological spectrum signed a statement titled “Freedom to Marry, Freedom to Dissent: Why We Must Have Both.” The statement warned that the Eich case “signal[ed] an eagerness by some supporters of same-sex marriage to punish rather than to criticize or to persuade those who disagree.”

Some argued that the Eich incident was not about “free speech,” because free speech binds only governments and does not prevent private employers from firing employees (or encouraging them to step down) based on their beliefs. This argument is incorrect. It’s true that what happened to Eich was not an actual First Amendment violation, but that does not mean it had nothing to do with free speech.

Though often used interchangeably, the concept of freedom of speech and the First Amendment are not the same thing. While the First Amendment protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press as they relate to duties of the state and state power, freedom of speech is a far broader idea that includes additional cultural values. These values incorporate healthy intellectual habits, such as giving the other side a fair hearing, reserving judgment, tolerating opinions that offend or anger us, believing that everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, and recognizing that even people whose points of view we find repugnant might be (at least partially) right. At the heart of these values is epistemic humility – a fancy way of saying that we must always keep in mind that we could be wrong or, at least, that we can always learn something from listening to the other side. Free speech as a cultural value will be my primary concern in this Broadside, not the state of First Amendment jurisprudence. And the national obsession with punishing jokes, rants, drunken tirades, and even deeply held beliefs shows a growing hostility toward free speech as a cultural value.

Given this climate, it is unsurprising that American higher education, where unpopular speech has been restricted for decades, has earned media attention for being especially intolerant in the past year. My organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which exists to combat violations of student and faculty free speech and other constitutional rights, has been busier than ever in 2013-14. In this Broadside, I will be discussing at length recent campus incidents and trends, including “disinvitation season” (the increased push by faculty and students to disinvite guest speakers on campus) and the emergence of demands for “trigger warnings” (written and/or spoken warnings to students that books, films, or other course material might be emotionally upsetting) on campus.

But those examples are just two symptoms of an academic environment that has long been souring on robust free speech and expression. Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate extensively exposed the rise of speech codes and political correctness on campus in their 1998 book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, and I updated and built upon their work in my 2012 book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. In Unlearning Liberty, I argued:

The suppression of “offensive” speech is very common outside the U.S., and it often occurs in countries that seemingly share the classical-liberal tradition. In April 2014, a British politician was arrested for “religious/racial harassment” after delivering a speech in which he approvingly quoted a passage from a book by Winston Churchill that disparaged the Islamic faith and its adherents. Censorship in general is on the rise in the U.K., from the jailing of people caught making “grossly offensive” comments on social media to the banning of R&B singer Robin Thicke’s hit song “Blurred Lines” by student unions at more than 20 British universities. In February 2013, the interior minister of Iceland – a country that views itself as very socially progressive – crafted legislation to ban online pornography.

Furthermore, Europe has recently seen the spread of the doctrine of the “right to be forgotten.” The European Court of Justice ruled in May 2014 that search engines like Google are required to remove links from their search results at the request of private parties to whom the information pertains unless the companies can present a public-interest justification for leaving the links active. Both this vague standard and the odd incentive structure it creates (relying on Yahoo and Google to spend money to defend individual articles and links) threaten the freedom of the press and the public’s freedom to access information. In July 2014, for example, Google deleted from its search results three articles from the Guardian about a retired Scottish soccer referee who once “lied about his reasons for granting a penalty kick.” Complying with the European Court’s ruling, Google decided that because the referee had since retired, he was no longer a public figure and thus his right to privacy now trumped the public’s right to know about his involvement in the incident. It is hard to understand why the public’s right to access information about a scandal should expire once the responsible party retires from public life.

Elsewhere, India – the world’s largest democracy – has asked Google and Facebook to screen user content for “disparaging” or “inflammatory” postings, thereby taking yet another step in a national movement to suppress speech that author Salman Rushdie has called a “cultural emergency.” Meanwhile, Turkey has overachieved in the censorship realm, with its law forbidding criticism of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the founder of modern Turkey), its law forbidding insults to the Turkish nation, its temporary implementation of a nationwide block on access to Twitter and YouTube, and its prime minister’s practice of warning the news media not to publish “insults” against him.

The “It’s all academia’s fault” argument cannot explain these developments, nor can it explain why higher education, which is an institution that relies on being a “marketplace of ideas,” would turn against free speech in the first place. I believe we are facing a long-term threat to freedom of speech that is much more substantial than the expansion of “liberal groupthink” or “political correctness” from campus.

The increased calls for sensitivity-based censorship represent the dark side of what are otherwise several positive developments for human civilization. As I will explain in the next section, I believe that we are not passing through some temporary phase in which an out-of-touch and hypersensitive elite attempts – and often fails – to impose its speech-restrictive norms on society. It’s worse than that: people all over the globe are coming to expect emotional and intellectual comfort as though it were a right. This is precisely what you would expect when you train a generation to believe that they have a right not to be offended. Eventually, they stop demanding freedom of speech and start demanding freedom from speech.

To be crystal clear, I am in no way absolving higher education of its culpability in exacerbating the movement against free speech. Higher education deserves profound criticism for maintaining and promoting illiberal and unconstitutional speech codes and punishing students and faculty for what they say. However, I believe the even greater failure of higher education is neglecting to teach the intellectual habits that promote debate and discussion, tolerance for views we hate, epistemic humility, and genuine pluralism. I will spend most of the following pages discussing how the rise of “disinvitation season” on campus and the mounting calls for “trigger warnings” represent an increasingly suffocating environment for speech on campus.

If, as I suspect, this push for freedom from speech is something like a predictable and natural (if pernicious) force, the single institution that could be doing the most to combat it is higher education, both within and outside the United States. Unfortunately, far from teaching the intellectual discipline that welcomes a free and robust exchange of ideas, campuses are actively accelerating the push for freedom from speech.

Meanwhile, more medications than ever are available for the treatment of physical pain, illness, and psychological ailments. The daily presence of disease, discomfort, backbreaking labor, and violence that existed long before the advent of aspirin or antibiotics is hard for us to imagine, but that reality shaped the way previous generations of individuals, religious leaders, and philosophers thought about life.

We also have a greater ability to move from neighborhood to neighborhood, from state to state, or even from country to country than any previous generation. One might imagine that this freedom would lead to the widespread dissemination of different viewpoints. However, as books like Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (2008) and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012) have demonstrated, we are increasingly using our mobility to congregate within counties, towns, and even neighborhoods populated by politically like-minded people.

Wanting to live in communities that reflect our values is an understandable and very human impulse. However, since it decreases the likelihood – and the accompanying discomfort – of communicating across deep philosophical, religious, or political divides, such self-sorting comes with serious downsides. The social science of what happens when like-minded people talk only among themselves is quite striking: those who are broken up into groups with similar beliefs tend to become more extreme in their opinions and less able to understand the views of those who disagree with them. And psychologists and social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt have found that this polarization is a growing part of the American culture. Many of the resources available to us in the Internet age are further exacerbating the problem. We can now obtain the majority of our information from niche media sources that are specifically tailored to reinforce our existing worldviews, and we can easily converse with those who share our opinions while avoiding or even ganging up on those who do not.

There’s no doubt that having an abundance of options and greater physical comfort than we have ever enjoyed as a species is a good thing, but it comes with consequences. These are what I call problems of comfort: the kinds of challenges that get more severe not only while other things are getting better but in large part because other things are getting better. Obesity is the paradigmatic example of a problem of comfort. This epidemic, with its many negative health effects, is a predictable result of an overabundance of fatty and sugar-rich food. Today’s technology, pharmaceuticals, advanced medical care, and limitless sources of cheap calories would be considered unimaginably wonderful by, say, Stone Age human beings. Yet I sincerely doubt that our ancestors would envy our self-obsession, our fearfulness, or our lack of preparedness for adversity...