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The day I noticed the vibe shift at my alma mater's free speech rally | Campus Speech Wars - Free To Speak

The day I noticed the vibe shift at my alma mater's free speech rally

I went back to my old campus in Ann Arbor for a talk last month, and it was night and day compared to 2019. Back then, the free speech crowd was mostly libertarian types handing out flyers about trigger warnings. This time, the same quad had three separate tables arguing about Palestine, DEI budgets, and AI surveillance. Nobody was even shouting past each other, they were just existentially exhausted and scrolling through court rulings on their phones. The real change was the faculty, though. In 2019, professors mostly stayed out of it. Now, two of them were openly debating whether the university should cut ties with a donor over a housing protest. I think the shift happened when the school started issuing formal statements after every single campus incident, that made every spat feel like a constitutional crisis. Has anyone else gone back to their old school and seen the same weird mix of burnout and hyper-legalism in the air?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_parker1mo ago

Honestly the thing that stood out to me was how quiet everyone seemed, like the shouting matches got replaced with people just refreshing legal filings on their phones. That hyper legalism thing is real, makes sense though when every argument gets turned into a policy paper instead of an actual conversation. Maybe the exhaustion is the point, they figured out winning is just outlasting everyone else.

ivan7741mo ago

Man, that part about the faculty debating donor ties right out in the open hit me. It's like the whole place turned into a law firm that happens to serve coffee and bad sandwiches. I went back to my own school a couple years ago and saw the same thing, people weren't even mad anymore, just tired and checking their phones for the latest ruling like it was a sports score. It's sad because the actual human part of arguing with someone, the messy part where you might change your mind, that's gone. Feels like everyone's just waiting for the other side to run out of battery.