“The folks at UCLA gave me a list of the topics we’re allowed to talk about tonight,” joked Dave Rubin, creator and host of The Rubin Report, and moderator of this panel on current threats to free speech on college campuses.
College used to be grounded in the inviolate principle that each of us should confront new ideas, speak our minds and learn. Has that time passed? This year alone we have seen a riot at U.C. Berkeley and violence at Middlebury College over controversial speakers. Instead of “express yourself,” a new view seems to be taking hold: “Suppress yourself — or I’ll do it for you.” What is happening to free speech on campus?
Today, college students’ attitude toward free speech ranges from ambivalence to outright hostility. They cry “microaggression” at the slightest offense. They demand “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” to protect themselves from controversial ideas. They attempt to ban speakers at public universities and support other bans on speech.
This video moment from the Ayn Rand Institute highlights novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand’s escape from Soviet Russia and why she chose to build a new life in America.
The life of a creature without free will is determined by factors outside its control, so it is not responsible for what it does or what becomes of it. But because human beings have free will, the shape our lives take is up to us. True, we are born into circumstances that are not of our own making, and there are facts of nature that we cannot change, but there are countless lives possible to each of us, and by recognizing what you cannot control and taking responsibility for what you can, you can create a life of which you can be proud and in which you will be happy.
In a wide-ranging discussion, the panelists answer questions arising from their previous presentations on free will and its implications in issues such as immigration, free speech, Objectivism and foreign policy. This Q&A was recorded at Ayn Rand Student Conference 2016.
In this keynote talk by Yaron Brook, executive chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute and co-author of Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality, examines how the arguments of today’s critics of economic inequality rest on the denial of the individual’s power of choice.
