It’s something many suspected already – that students demanding safe spaces and protection on campus are, in fact, pretty privileged.
And now new data has confirmed that protesters who march against controversial campus speakers are overwhelmingly scions of extreme wealth.
Data assembled by The Economist showed that the institutions most affected by the waves of campus activism sweeping America are also the ones where all the rich kids go:
The chart, compiled from publicly available data, shows a strong correlation between protest-prone campuses (red dots) and the wealth of mom and dad.
It shows a cluster of red dots at the extreme end of both the wealth axis and the SAT score axis, also reflecting the propensity of elite institutions like the Ivy League to generate protest.
The most fertile zone appears to be those schools where between 15% and 20% of their students hail from the wealthiest 1% of family backgrounds.
The findings could give pause to those entertaining claims that campus movements against controversial speakers are designed to protect the vulnerable.
As the mass of blue in the chart shows, institutions where students have humbler backgrounds are far less likely to spend their time making placards and shouting.
The Economist quoted Richard Reeves, of the Brookings Institution, on the reasons for the trend:
This could be because elite students attract controversial speakers more often. Mr Reeves, who is also a biographer of John Stuart Mill, reasons otherwise.
America’s best universities contain bubbles in which “certain left-of-centre tenets, largely around identity politics, take on the weight of an orthodoxy,” he says. Mill, who wrote that squashing freedom of expression results in “a kind of intellectual pacification” that sacrifices “the entire moral courage of the human mind,” wouldn’t have liked it very much.