Colleges teach words are violence — creating more of the real thing

We’ve been told for years offensive words are a form of “violence.”

College campuses, once dedicated to the free exchange of ideas, have installed “safe spaces” where students retreat if an opinion strikes them as threatening.

The assumption is speech itself can wound as badly as fists, and we must protect young people.

But inflating the concept of violence has had the opposite effect.

By equating emotional discomfort with physical assault, universities have desensitized students to the meaning of the real thing.

Now when an activist like Charlie Kirk is assassinated, too many of them shrug — or worse, celebrate.

Violence has been deconstructed, reframed and stretched to cover everything from being misgendered to being shot in the neck. The result is the word itself has become meaningless.

Nick Haslam, a University of Melbourne psychology professor, describes this expansion of definitions as “concept creep.”

Trauma once meant a terrifying rupture in ordinary human experience — combat, rape, catastrophic injury.

Now it can mean a breakup, a bad grade or an awkward social interaction. If trauma is everywhere, trauma is nowhere.

The same creep has infected our understanding of violence.

If refusing to use a person’s preferred pronouns is “erasing their existence,” the act of physical erasure — a bullet, a bomb, a knife — no longer shocks.

But the numbers do. Columbia and Barnard rank dead last — 256th and 257th — among American universities for free speech in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s latest college-student survey. NYU isn’t far behind, at 250.

Asked whether shouting down a campus speaker is acceptable, 74% of Columbia students and 78% at Barnard said yes.

Worse, 26% of Columbia students, 33% at Barnard and 29% at NYU said violence is acceptable — at least in some cases — to prevent someone from speaking on campus.

And some don’t stop there. Two percent of Columbia students said violence is always acceptable. One percent at Barnard. Four percent at NYU.

What this means is at least 2,100 students at Manhattan universities believe physical violence is always justified against someone whose words they find offensive.

Maybe they wouldn’t throw a punch or pull the trigger themselves, but they believe it’s fine if someone else does. That’s horrifying.

I know firsthand the atmosphere this creates.

When I was at Columbia, I self-censored constantly. I was terrified one misstep — a poorly phrased comment in class, perhaps — would make me radioactive.

I imagined being known on campus as the guy who said that thing. My name circulated on social media. My postgrad career prospects destroyed before they began.

For Columbia students today, the fear is darker. It’s not just losing internships or scholarships. It’s the fear that if you speak up, you might provoke not only reputational ruin but actual violence.

FIRE’s survey confirms more than 60% of Columbia and Barnard students self-censor at least once or twice a month.

Which brings us back to Charlie Kirk.

His assassination shocked many, not only for the brutality of the act but for the glee it inspired in some corners.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. The signs have been there for years: the rhetoric of “trans genocide,” the casual death wishes online, the growing number of students who think it’s fine to punch someone for wrongthink.

If words are violence, then violence is just words.

History has seen this playbook before. Heretics burned at the stake. Infidels beheaded. And, most tellingly, Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, when young Red Guards terrorized their teachers, denounced their parents and paraded alleged counter-revolutionaries through the streets.

Mao told them to “dare to struggle, dare to win,” and they took him at his word. Police were forbidden to intervene. Teachers suspected of capitalist sympathies were beaten to death by their own students. Hundreds, maybe thousands, killed themselves rather than face the humiliation.

Mao’s spirit lingers at Columbia. A School of Social Work student group hosted a December 2023 teach-in, “Significance of the October 7th Palestinian Counteroffensive.”

A student declared the Hamas terrorists who murdered civilians that day proved “the masses can accomplish great feats,” before quoting Mao himself.

CUAD, a coalition of more than 100 Columbia student groups, has praised not only Mao but Lenin, Stalin and Hezbollah. It’s not hidden; it’s in their flyers, chants, public statements.

The Red Guards are back, this time in Ivy League hoodies.

This ideology’s endgame is always the same: Divide the world into the righteous and the damned.

The righteous are marked by victimhood — queer, trans, people of color, the “marginalized.”

The damned are the “privileged” — the “cis,” the straight, the white, the able-bodied.

If the righteous are authorized to use violence, the incentive is obvious: Claim victimhood, cultivate fragility, declare yourself unwell. That way you’re not only righteous but safe — from criticism, from accountability, from attack.

The irony, of course, is this mentality guarantees more violence, not less.

If every disagreement is violence, every disagreement can be met with violence. If every slight is genocide, every slight requires revenge. If every critic is a fascist, every critic deserves death.

What I find most chilling is not the handful of zealots who cheer when an ideological enemy is gunned down.

It’s the thousands more who shrug, who think the victim had it coming, who’ve been trained to see physical violence as just one more form of speech.

We used to understand sticks and stones can break bones but words can never hurt. Today, it’s the opposite: Words can kill, and sticks and stones are just another way of talking.

History’s lesson is clear. Once words lose their meaning, once violence is drained of its horror and repurposed as metaphor, actual violence soon follows.

And once unleashed, it does not stay confined to the campus quad.

Ben Appel is the author of “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.“