Glenn Reynolds: Disrespect for 1st Amendment doesn't belong to under-25 set I stand corrected. At Mizzou, Yale, over-25 administrators and faculty more culpable than immature students.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USA TODAY

So in a column last week, reflecting on the bullying and nastiness on various college campuses, I suggested that the lack of maturity involved was an argument that lowering the voting age to 18 had been a mistake. Perhaps, I suggested, we should raise it — to 25.

That produced an email from reader Rachel Lawing, who wrote: “I read your opinion piece in USA Today, and while I mostly agree with you (although, as a 23-year-old, I would prefer not to see the voting age raised to 25), I was struck by how much of what you wrote applies not only to college students, but also to many of our politicians. ... Unfortunately it seems to me that acting like spoiled children continues well after the age of 25 and is often rewarded with elected office.”

Since, unlike many of our campus activists, I don’t mind being exposed to counterarguments, I actually thought about this. (“When someone persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind,” John Maynard Keynes reportedly once said. “What do you do?”) And, you know, Rachel Lawing is right. Raising the voting age is a dumb idea. Though there has been a lot of bad behavior on college campuses, it hasn’t all come from the under-25 set. In fact, you could make a good argument that there has been worse behavior from the over-25s. .

So while at Yale it was students who launched tirades against professors and tried to chase them out of their homes and positions (a Harvard Law Record op-ed called their behavior ”fascism”), it was Yale’s President, Peter Salovey, who rather than demanding that students show respect for free expression and behave with civility, apologized to the students.

Likewise, at the University of Missouri, the worst actors weren’t the students, but faculty and staff members who blocked a student photographer (one of them may face assault charges). The student photographer himself, Tim Tai, conducted himself with grace under pressure, drawing praise from journalists. Another student, Mark Schierbecker, who captured the whole thing on video, also conducted himself calmly and professionally, which is more than you can say for the faculty and staff involved, who included not only a media professor, but also a professor of religious studies, and a student life administrator.

Meanwhile, and this is what really convinced me that Lawing was right, at Claremont McKenna College, the editors of the Claremont Independent, a student paper, published an editorial that was more of a manifesto, entitled ”We Dissent.” In it, they called out a dean, and the president of Claremont McKenna, Hiram Chodosh, for cowardice:

“We are disappointed that you and President Chodosh put up with students yelling and swearing at you for an hour. You could have made this a productive dialogue, but instead you humored the students and allowed them to get caught up in the furor.

"Above all, we are disappointed that you and President Chodosh weren’t brave enough to come to the defense of a student who was told she was ‘derailing’ because her opinions regarding racism didn’t align with those of the mob around her. [The student was an Asian woman who said that black people can be racist] Nor were you brave enough to point out that these protesters were perfectly happy to use this student to further their own agenda, but turned on her as soon as they realized she wasn’t supporting their narrative. These protesters were asking you to protect your students, but you didn’t even defend the one who needed to be protected right in front of you.”

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The editors then continued, with a degree of self-criticism that has largely been missing from today’s campus debates: “Lastly, we are disappointed in students like ourselves, who were scared into silence. We are not racist for having different opinions. We are not immoral because we don’t buy the flawed rhetoric of a spiteful movement. We are not evil because we don’t want this movement to tear across our campuses completely unchecked. We are no longer afraid to be voices of dissent.”

Good for them. No one on campus should be afraid to dissent. In the words of President Obama, whom I quoted in an earlier column on PC nonsense: “It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem. Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, 'You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say.' That’s not the way we learn either."

Good advice for people of all ages.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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