Can Facebook Be Contained?
Readers respond to stories in our October and November 2021 issues.
The New Puritans
A growing illiberalism, fueled by social media, is trampling democratic discourse, Anne Applebaum argued in October. The result is a chilling atmosphere in which mob justice has replaced due process and forgiveness is impossible.
The paramount value of the university has always been academic freedom, the freedom of university departments and professors to decide what to teach and how. But academic freedom cannot survive in an atmosphere of academic cowardice, where its beneficiaries—those who were assumed to have the courage to protect it from destruction by either governmental or ideological interference—are willing to sacrifice it to pacify their students.
The “new Puritans” can
