Yes, very well said. I'm currently on a very activist college campus and also have many friends (and follow many people on Twitter) who side with this movement. To an extent, I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of actually being heard. There was an open letter recently from one student activism group that said that they would not protest "respectfully" because they feel that that is just another way for their voices to be suppressed, or some such.
That's a hard problem. It does seem like there has been a lot of talk and not a lot of walk from the people/institutions that hold power, and if I were on the activism side, I'd also be extremely frustrated. Not related to that open letter, but this article gives a view into some of that frustration: https://medium.com/@aaronzlewis/what-s-really-going-on-at-ya...
What's interesting is that the closest case I can find that relates to how some of these student protestors, who seem to be mostly liberal, perceive the situation, are conservatives. In reaction to social science studies that show that, say, African-Americans are systematically disenfranchised in the country, some conservatives attack social science itself, saying that it is inherently leftist, or biased in some way, the methodology is wrong, it's not a real science, etc. Similarly, some activists, like you said, would respond to the appeals to free inquiry and free expression by attacking the 'holiness' of free inquiry and free expression. Certainly possible that that's all a fraud to elevate those in power, but they seem pretty self-evident to me, not the least because free expression and inquiry, on the whole, seem to benefit the minority rather than those in power IMO.
That's a hard problem. It does seem like there has been a lot of talk and not a lot of walk from the people/institutions that hold power, and if I were on the activism side, I'd also be extremely frustrated. Not related to that open letter, but this article gives a view into some of that frustration: https://medium.com/@aaronzlewis/what-s-really-going-on-at-ya...
What's interesting is that the closest case I can find that relates to how some of these student protestors, who seem to be mostly liberal, perceive the situation, are conservatives. In reaction to social science studies that show that, say, African-Americans are systematically disenfranchised in the country, some conservatives attack social science itself, saying that it is inherently leftist, or biased in some way, the methodology is wrong, it's not a real science, etc. Similarly, some activists, like you said, would respond to the appeals to free inquiry and free expression by attacking the 'holiness' of free inquiry and free expression. Certainly possible that that's all a fraud to elevate those in power, but they seem pretty self-evident to me, not the least because free expression and inquiry, on the whole, seem to benefit the minority rather than those in power IMO.