Then there’s what we could call clubs, support centers - identity based or based on social categories or political interests. What do you see as being responsible? Campuses are complicated spaces, because they aren’t just one kind of space: There’s the classroom, the dorm, the public space that is the campus. Which to me seems like a simplistic understanding of what might be causing changes in discourse on campuses.
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When people talk about free speech problems in colleges, it’s often in the context of woke ideology run amok. That confusion happens in part because boundaries are so blurred everywhere.” “We’ve lost track of what’s personal and public and what’s acceptable speech where. “We’re confused today about what campuses are,” says Brown, who is 66 and is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. But why does it look that way? And what are the real causes? The influential political theorist Wendy Brown has spent her career studying the very ideas - those of identity, freedom and tolerance - that are central to current debates about what’s happening on college campuses across the country, as well as to the attacks they’re undergoing from within and without.
The halls of academia may appear to be overrun by battles over academic freedom, free speech, identity politics, cancel culture and overreaching wokeness.