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How Free Speech Died On Campus
theodp writes "The WSJ catches up with FIRE's Greg Lukianoff and his crusade to expose how universities have become the most authoritarian institutions in America. In Unlearning Liberty, Lukianoff notes that baby-boom Americans who remember the student protests of the 1960s tend to assume that U.S. colleges are still some of the freest places on earth. But that idealized university no longer exists. Today, university bureaucrats suppress debate with anti-harassment policies that function as de facto speech codes. FIRE maintains a database of such policies on its website. What they share, lifelong Democrat Lukianoff says, is a view of 'harassment' so broad and so removed from its legal definition that 'literally every student on campus is already guilty.'"
This guy is advocating racism and sexual harassment! Shall we defeat him, PC gang?
Norfolk State: "The policy broadly prohibits using any university internet technology resources "to further personal views" or "religious or political causes." It also prohibits downloading or transmitting "inappropriate messages or images," without defining "inappropriate."
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Let's see. Highly biased summary, source is the Murdoch-owned WSJ. Who wants to bet this is bellyaching about "liberals"?
LOL FIRE. I also love the "lifelong Democrat" label, as if that's supposed to insulate them from the very obvious criticism that FIRE is basically a wing of the Republican party. "I have tons of Democratic friends"
I think I'll start a talk radio program and make it a point to be as un-PC as possible. I bet I can get millions of listeners! I'll be rich and famous!
Oh wait...
I've seen a lot of bullies and hecklers upset that they don't get their way, whining that their free speech right to harass and intimidate folks is so very important that nothing else can be considered.
This makes me think this is more of a fraud perpetuated by self-professed victims who are themselves the problem than a reality.
It's all because of greed. Universities have adopted corporate tactics to become and stay "more competitive in the marketplace" and that means shielding themselves from lawsuits and making themselves more appealing to donors.
unless the school does it
University of Delaware Requires Students to Undergo Ideological Reeducation
http://thefire.org/article/8555.html
A friend of mine was arrested and trespassed for smoking up in the college library bathroom. He wasn't a student, just a former crackhead that believes in leaching off society (hi trane!). The point is, college libraries should let homeless people like him sleep there at night so they can learn stuff.
So in order to not offend ANYONE, NO ONE is allowed to say ANYTHING.
This goes right along with sports where there is no winner\ everyone gets a trophy to PC playgrounds with no jungle gyms.
I weep at what has happened to my country in the past 30 years. I think it's time to start again from scratch.
At the community college im attending to bone up on some tech skills they have a 'free speech zone' in the main quad. It is hideous that the college has institutionalized where and when free speech can occur. I understand the practicality of such a solution, but i cannot ignore its chilling effect.
Good-bye
Yes, those fascist universities are much more authoritarian than prisons or the military.
There's a joke that "Christ, what an asshole." can be fittingly substituted for the caption of any New Yorker cartoon. It works on Wall Street Journal articles just as well.
Some have more freedom (i.e. dollars) than others.
... I'm not surprised to see the carping about how the right-wing is allegedly being oppressed on college campuses. But it also makes me wonder to what extent Christian schools tolerate free speech. The Wikipedia page for Liberty U describes how the school "un-recognized" the Democratic student group for being ideologically unfit.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
Most of the examples in the article have a pro-conservative leaning. So I went to their FIRE database and tried to find some cases where I knew universities tried blocking left-wing people from speaking. Not surprisingly, I didn't find at least the ones I was aware of.
I think it's good someone is defending conservatives' right to speech. I simply feel they should be open about their partisanship.
Beetle B.
Add to the list: administrators will do anything to justify the existence of their job title and keep themselves from being pushed out, even if it means eliminating those who do the real work. Also like corporate America.
I graduated in 2001 from the FH Druck und Medien, now School of Media in Germany, and I remember the presentation of a student production being suppressed, by the powers to be, as it was comparing Rumsfeld with Hitler. Keep in mind that was the time of the Gulf War. I admit that particular student work was bad, but that wasn't the reason for it's suppression. :)
Apparently some of the University's funding came from US sponsors
I notice you stopped accepting those collect calls....can i bum a square?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Carlin used to tour college campuses in the 70s and 80s because they loved freedom of expression and comedy. He even recorded a special, Carlin on Campus, in 1984. In his later years he avoided colleges like the plague because they became centers of cultural intolerance. Extreme bastions for censorship and political correctness. Most of his act was off limits for performance. Campuses were trying to avoid anything that might be the slightest bit offensive or controversial.
Carlin on O&A talking a bit about free speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX5mz27PTv0
I don't agree with a lot of viewpoints people have, but Freedom of Speech is where you are free to be a racist, discriminatory sonnofabitch too.
The premise that anybody should be able to say anything on any campus is wrong, legally, philosophically, and historically. Universities are (for the most part) private institutions, and they can decide what speech is permissible on campus and as part of the educational experience. Good universities will, of course, try to present a wide range of viewpoints, but what they present and how they present it is still up to them. Nor does it seem to me that this has changed a great deal over time. Even in the 1960's, people were protesting and getting arrested because their views differed from those of the institution; if they had agreed, there wouldn't have been any need for protest. Publicly financed universities face a special problem, in that tax dollars may not be used to promote religion and that there are a few other restrictions. That's OK: if you don't like those restrictions, don't attend a public university. That's also why public universities should probably also be only a small component of the overall mix of educational institutions.
Rather than making all universities some kind of free speech compromise in which everybody can say anything except when it offends anybody, we should have a diversity of public and private institutions based on many different viewpoints and ideologies, and people pick and choose the institutions that they think meets their requirements.
I'm not surprised the Wall Street Journal allowed Mr. Lukianoff to mischaracterize the contents of Fordham's statement.
Read it for yourself and see if it really matches the tone of WSJ's article : http://www.fordham.edu/Campus_Resources/eNewsroom/topstories_2601.asp
November 9, 2012
The College Republicans, a student club at Fordham University, has invited Ann Coulter to speak on campus on November 29. The event is funded through student activity fees and is not open to the public nor the media. Student groups are allowed, and encouraged, to invite speakers who represent diverse, and sometimes unpopular, points of view, in keeping with the canons of academic freedom. Accordingly, the University will not block the College Republicans from hosting their speaker of choice on campus.
To say that I am disappointed with the judgment and maturity of the College Republicans, however, would be a tremendous understatement. There are many people who can speak to the conservative point of view with integrity and conviction, but Ms. Coulter is not among them. Her rhetoric is often hateful and needlessly provocative--more heat than light--and her message is aimed squarely at the darker side of our nature.
As members of a Jesuit institution, we are called upon to deal with one another with civility and compassion, not to sling mud and impugn the motives of those with whom we disagree or to engage in racial or social stereotyping. In the wake of several bias incidents last spring, I told the University community that I hold out great contempt for anyone who would intentionally inflict pain on another human being because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed.
"Disgust" was the word I used to sum up my feelings about those incidents. Hate speech, name-calling, and incivility are completely at odds with the Jesuit ideals that have always guided and animated Fordham.
Still, to prohibit Ms. Coulter from speaking at Fordham would be to do greater violence to the academy, and to the Jesuit tradition of fearless and robust engagement. Preventing Ms. Coulter from speaking would counter one wrong with another. The old saw goes that the answer to bad speech is more speech. This is especially true at a university, and I fully expect our students, faculty, alumni, parents, and staff to voice their opposition, civilly and respectfully, and forcefully.
The College Republicans have unwittingly provided Fordham with a test of its character: do we abandon our ideals in the face of repugnant speech and seek to stifle Ms. Coulter's (and the student organizers') opinions, or do we use her appearance as an opportunity to prove that our ideas are better and our faith in the academy--and one another--stronger? We have chosen the latter course, confident in our community, and in the power of decency and reason to overcome hatred and prejudice.
Joseph M. McShane, S.J., President
Compare and contrast with
Mr. Lukianoff says that the Fordham-Coulter affair took campus censorship to a new level:
"This was the longest, strongest condemnation of a speaker that I've ever seen in which a university president also tried to claim that he was defending freedom of speech."
I guess in the print edition, the WSJ and Lukianoff can assume most people won't actually read the statement being attacked.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This article appears to be bitching and moaning about the fact that hate speech has been universally recognized as out of the scope of free speech. Ann Coulter is generally regarded amongst the cognoscenti as a purveyor of hate speech, not free speech. I fail to see how denying her an audience of like-minded listeners could possibly be bad in any way.
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
Anyone who supports this Islamophobic nutbag is a like-minded nutbag who is not welcome on any university campus. Her ideas practically beg to be suppressed, so why should she be surprised when it happens? Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Today's students can take back their freedom of expression, but will they have the guts to do so? Or will they continue to lament that "the man" doesn't allow them to say unpopular things?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
We have outsourced our own brains and the decisions normally made by cultural mores to ideology.
Ideology is a type of political theory that we assume is true, so we crusade toward it in the name of Progress and Utopia.
Naturally, because it is a theory, it's unstable. In fact, there is often proof against it. But its adherents cling to it even more, because it provides for them an identity separate from their real-world identity.
However, this instability leads to it having a need: as a symbol, it must prevail over other symbols. Thus it is intolerant of them, but in the name of tolerance itself.
Futurist Traditionalism
Students should learn what they will face later in the real world. Knowing how things are going, i'd say that it complies with that mission.
People, listen! In addition to blogging, you need to put your money where your mouths are. FIRE's litigation costs money. We need to fund organizations that actually try to DO something about the stuff that is killing liberty in this country.
Has slashdot really been reduced to quoting print newspapers days later?
Used to try to be "news" for nerds.
Now it's more like "yesterday's leftover articles" for nerds who don't read the press and seemingly are without enough nerdy topics to fill the space available.
To make matters worse, if someone wanted to show that being gay was a normal productive life choice, they would say it violated their religious liberties. But if they want to bring in a women who condones murder,compares liberals with murders, and has called for the assassination of the president, they say we are being intolerant and politically correct.
Really, when I was back is school it was the Christian conservatives, those fragile flowers that would faint if a poem had the word fuck in it, or if they saw a couple guys kissing, or had the leave the classroom when we discussed classic american literature because it was the devils work, these were the people who create censorship on americans campus. They would bring in the child molesting priests to cry foul. They would bring in the ministers to deny women proper care and choice because the only way they could hope to get a wife was to knock her up and make her dependent. It was sad.
And I am sure the comments are going to prove my point, because I am not hating any one here. Everyone has a right to express their opinion and try to have a life that fits with their values. But it was never the liberal groups who were trying to cut funding for the legal conservative groups. And it was never the liberal groups trying to foce everyone to pray, or waste their time listening to others pray. We held our events and if you did not want to go, then don't.
Here is how screwed up these people were. We were in a conservative state in a somewhat conservative city, but a city that was diverse so people pretty much let everyone do what they do. These wingnuts were so extreme that created their own campus newspaper because they couldn't stand to be in the same room with liberals. And I disagreed with most of the official newspaper, it was conservative. But if these people could not get thier way they did not know how to compromise, so they took their toys, found a sugar daddy, and built their own compound where they would not have to deal with anyone who was different. And evidently that is what they still do, crying when someone calls them on their hypocristy.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
for citizens in good standing. That is the definition of unalienable. Sometimes you have to fight for them though! Not to worry, you are witnessing Peak College. Bloated, wasteful, dysfunctional institutions will vaporize with the credit that pays their ridiculous prices. Goods and services purchased with credit are altered by the supply of said credit. When we stop rewarding failure with bailouts, that is. Affordable education that caters only to the needs of the student body will be a welcome change!
It's not really a protest if there isn't a rule being broken and an arrest being made!
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
It's no surprise. Students are no longer interested in higher education as a means of broadening their perceptions of life and deepening their understanding of the world. Most students today only want to acquire paper credentials for employment purposes. Universities have become largely job training institutes. In that kind of environment, freedom of expression becomes secondary if not totally irrelevant, and the disengaged student body will surely never protest over the loss of fundamental human rights.
In Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee. It's depressing that students haven't forced a change in all that time.
you insensitive clod
... just try talking about Jews in less than glowing terms on any university campus, you'll be sacked or thrown off your course immediately. And all the while the Jews are murdering Palestinian babies and children, because 'God gave us this land'.
The eternal JEW is behind this.
"The denial of free speech is the first act of tyranny."
Nothing has changed:
"The Jew
by Joseph Goebbels
Everything is discussed openly in Germany, and every German claims the right to have an opinion on any and all questions. One is Catholic, the other Protestant, one an employee, the other an employer, a capitalist, a socialist, a democrat, an aristocrat. There is nothing dishonorable about choosing one side or the other of a question. Discussions happen in public, and where matters are unclear or confused one settles it by argument and counter argument. But there is one problem that is not discussed publicly, one that it is delicate even to mention: the Jewish question. It is taboo in our republic.
The Jew is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a scoundrel, parasite, swindler, profiteer, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a Jew and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back: "I've been found out." "
TFA focuses mainly on content-based restrictions, such as prohibiting people from quoting certain passages from the Koran. But along with these restrictions, many schools now have extremely onerous "time, place, and manner" regulations. Although these are written so as to be blind to the content of the speech, they're often absurdly restrictive. I teach at a community college in Fullerton, California, where last year the police murdered a mentally ill homeless man. This resulted in murder charges being brought by the DA, and a city council recall. I wanted to set up a card table on my school's grassy quad to collect signatures for the recall petition. I went through the process of registering officially, and the restrictions were just nuts. They have two very small patches of grass, over at the corner of the quad, which are marked on the map. I was forbidden from approaching people as they walked by. A lot of colleges refer to these tiny patches, apparently without any consciousness of irony, as free speech zones.
As far as I can tell, the intention is simply to create conditions that make it absolutely impossible for students to stage anything like an actual political rally or protest. You simply wouldn't be able to fit more than about 10 human bodies into one of these free speech zones.
Find free books.
A college education costs more and more and becomes worth less and less. As it is, in many professions, a company will hire someone with a bachelors degree and three years experience before someone with a bachelor's and a master's. This makes the ROI for a master's a negative number. As technology is advancing at an exponential rate, the value of degree decreases at a corresponding rate after it is acquired. The Stanford professor who taught an AI course online and had 100,000 students quit to pursue this methodology full time. MIT is putting all of it's courses online, free. Maybe colleges will become research institutions. But in that regard, when some grad students started working on fuzzy logic, their professors told them "Pursue this and your career is over" and peer-reviewed journals refused to publish their papers. Similar stories come out of every field. Nothing has changed since Galileo. I remember the scene in "Good Will Hunting" where Matt Damon tells a Harvard student that he could have gotten his $50,000 education (back then) for the price of library card. Now it's online. By the way, the text for the AI class was $100. That has to go. Doing a google search and finding that most of the papers on Hidden Markov Models cost $15-$35 is most disconcerting. That has to go. The only people left behind should be alchemists and assholes.
Coulter got to speak. She got to spew her racist invective. You Right Wingers are completely nuts. Please list the case, the data, of all the incidents of restrictions.
- just sayin.
The Wall Street Journal has become about as responsible a news source as Glenn Beck's "the Blaze". It used to be that their hard news was spot-on but their editorial pages leaned Right. Now, their hard news leans way Right and their editorial pages are full-blown kookie wingnut.
David Horowitz and his little pantload salon have a lot of influence over at the new, improved, Rupert Murdoch Wall Street Journal. He's a shitty academic who now has a permanent hard-on for all of higher education because he was basically laughed out of the business (his bleak student evaluations were purely coincidental, he claims).
The WSJ is a big proponent of for-profit higher education. They're trying to get their Mitts on the for-profit colleges the way the Washington Post got into the higher ed biz via Kaplan. Beware of anything the Wall Street Journal has to say about education.
There has never been so much diversity of political points of view on college campuses in the US. Unlike the 70's, all ends of the political spectrum are represented. You can find conservatism unlike ever before. Hell, you can't walk three steps without tripping over some Right Wing or libertarian prof with a handful of his students complaining loudly about how viewpoints like his cannot be found anywhere.
In fact, it's surprising how much of an organized, concerted effort is being made not to increase the diversity of opinion, but to silence Left Wing points of view. There are a bunch of very well-funded groups (most of which involve David Horowitz at some level) who are targeting speech with which they disagree.
With guys like the WSJ, there is one rule: It's ALWAYS projection.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A great example from my state. I personally find it sickening the response the college had to this. When really all the students are doing is trying to effect positive change and honesty in how the college operates. Somehow I suspect the response wouldn't have been any different had it not been done in the form of a joke.
http://www.7dvt.com/2012why-middlebury-college-put-five-students-trial-over-dalai-lama-prank
...that so many people reject the claim just because Murdock or a supposed Republican organization is making it. Suppose for the sake of argument that Lukianoff really is just a Republican shill and ignores crimes against free speech committed by conservatives. Does that mean the crimes against free speech committed by liberals, that he highlights, are any less wrong?
Take the Fordham University event. Those on the left are quick to point out that Fordham didn't actually ban Coulter. But were McShane's strong words against her and "disappointed with the judgment and maturity" of College Republicans just that, or were they a veiled threat of consequences should the event go on?
Then theres the "condescending sex-based attitude" -- it turns out that yes, as the article says, displaying such is sexual harassment if said attitude is unwelcome.
The prohibition on "annoying" speech from Northeastern's systems is also true. (It also applies to "offensive" speech, again in the sole judgement of the administratrs).
I assume the debates that are discussed go deep into the modern conflict between rights of individuals and traditional expectations of society: It seems to me thta in one way it could be a real issue..... I assume everyone has views, and people value their views: They don't like to see them denigrated or to see aspersions cast upon them.
.. but it can't.. really.. be good...
I'm trying to see things from a Conservative viewpoint here (its not something that comes naturally to me) - if I had strong views about relationships, about the rights and duties of states and individuals, I'd probably want to talk about them. I'm pretty sure someone would find them offensive (normally it'd probably be me). BUT - if the people on one side are allowed to make a big thing of their views and values, why aren't those on the other side?
what I'm saying is that in certain circumstances we need to either have an open debate, or silence all debate. I'm a liberal. I think conservatives are WRONG at a pretty fundamental level... but if I seek to silence them from talking about things that matter to them we arent having the debate, nobody wins, we just increase divides that already exist. That would make for a peaceful life: I wouldnt have to worry about people who already have a bad time (immigrants, gays) hearing stuff that will offend them
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
In my college most fear the at will employment situation we are in . The union feels powerless as they fight to keep our pay cuts labeled as pay freezes-- as if we were as stupid as the general public; realizing pay freezes are pay cuts.
Tenured profs will do what they want; but there are so few of them - nobody gets that status anymore except a few near retirement. They've taken away job security so most of us are at just as much risk as you people are - except we work in a place of free exchange of ideas... it used to be. The protections are gone. We are job training corporations in the view of many people; out of date vs online training - that also undermines the whole thing; if not more so as we become a business instead of an intellectual institution for thinking people--- we are becoming a business; a walmart education for worker drones.
I'm so upset I can't talk straight about this anymore.
Doesn't matter what you see
Or into it what you read
You can do it your own way
If it's done just how I say
Independence limited
Freedom of choice is made for you, my friend
Freedom of speech is words that they will bend
Freedom with their exception
Humans suck; religious groups who exploit conflation race and religion create more problems. Combine that with religious beliefs of a god-chosen master race (jews) and you create a group that others will develop strong feelings about!
The Jews were never completely innocent victims but they love to act like it. It is understandable why they are a target for hate, as they help provoke it. They don't deserve all they get but they are not innocent victims either. Obviously, I'm being broad but they are broad in their "why do people hate us" BS.
Racism in the USA has become meaningless, the public doesn't know what it is. It has become a slogan, a brand, like everything else. You merely have to be branded and you are screwed - it doesn't take any rationality to label somebody with it either. It is not as severe but still similar to being labeled a pedophile. Jews exploit this to the extreme; one can't criticize their theocracy without being labeled racist-- even jews are labeled self-hating racists for not going with the theocracy!
The students who hated all authority in the Sixties were RIGHT, but they sold out for the most part.
Kids, the Man is fucking YOU even harder than he did your predecessors.
Unless you get pissed off enough to act, "prepare your anus".
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Yeah, and if you want to say those things on the lawn of the university they need to be stopped too.
This can't say x on public this or that is just bullshit. Limiting speech in public areas is limiting speech. We shouldn't be required to buy our own private areas to exercise free speech. Universities should understand and be ardent supporters of this.
Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, by Dinesh D'Souza, discussed this issue almost 15 years ago. It's nothing new—it's perhaps just that others are beginning to catch on.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I recently visited a community college that actually had a free speech zone way out on the corner of the quad. There was also a policy of not allowing religious or political discussions.
How do they expect the philosophy, theology and political science majors to do their assignments?
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
The College Republicans regret the controversy surrounding our planned lecture featuring Ann Coulter. The size and severity of opposition to this event have caught us by surprise, and caused us to question our decision to welcome her to Rose Hill. Looking at the concerns raised about Ms. Coulter, many of them reasonable, we have determined that some of her comments do not represent the ideals of the College Republicans and are inconsistent with both our organization's mission, and the University's. We regret that we failed to thoroughly research her before announcing, that is our error and we do not excuse ourselves for it. Consistent with our strong disagreement with certain comments by Ms. Coulter we have chosen to cancel the event and rescind Ms. Coulterâ(TM)s invitation to speak at Fordham. We made this choice freely, before Father McShaneâ(TM)s email was sent out and we became aware of his feelings --- had the President simply reached out to us before releasing his statement he would have learned that the event was being cancelled. We hope the University community will forgive the College Republicans for our error, and continue to allow us to serve as its main voice of the sensible, compassionate, and conservative political movement that we strive to be. We fell short of that standard this time, and we offer our sincere apologies.
Ted Conrad, President
UPDATED: McShane Responds to College Republicans' Cancellation of Ann Coulter Event
The Republican Club tried to get the Student Association to spring for George Will, but was capped at $10,000. Fordham College Republicans withdraw Coulter invite
The Speaker's Bureau:
Campus Speaker & Board of Advisors Member - Ann Coulter
Click here to host an event with Ann on your campus!
Fun times:
The incident followed a Monday night lecture at the University of Western Ontario, where Coulter told a Muslim student to "take a camel" as an alternative to flying.
Coulter made the comment as she responded to a question from student Fatima Al-Dhaher, who asked about previous comments in which Coulter said Muslims shouldn't be allowed on airplanes and should take "flying carpets" instead. Al-Dhaher noted she did not own a flying carpet and asked what she should take as an alternative transportation. Coulter did not deny making the flying carpet comment and replied to the university student, "What mode of transportation? Take a camel," to jeers and cheers. It was a decidedly pro-Coulter audience. One man, who identified himself as a U.S. citizen, described U.S. President Barack Obama as a "Marxist."
She is well-known for her vehement views against Muslims. In a post-September 11 column, she wrote that the U.S. should invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
Coulter, who often comments on Fox News, once said Canada is "lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent" after the Canadian government did not join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Coulter speech cancelled over fears of violence
While I have no objection to what you stated, I don't understand why you felt the need to state it. It implies that people are trying to prohibit this "whining". Generally, they aren't doing any such thing. They're just calling it out *as* whining. There's absolutely no conflict of free speech there. Individual sites and the WSJ are allowed to publish whatever whining they want, just as others are allowed to point it out as whining. In fact, people are even allowed to call something whining when it isn't! It's not terribly polite of them, but it's permitted.
What is not permitted is actual hate speech, behavior intended to incite violence toward a group, or intentionally cause emotional harm (arguably another form of violence, simply a non-physical one). The "crybaby Republicans" that you and the GP mention are welcome to cry all they like about this policy, and that is their right.
Why are you implying that people think otherwise?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The "free thinking" radicals of the 60's counter culture movement, are today's 50 & 60 year old "professors" in most major institutions. Couple that with the ideology they have pushed in primary & secondary schools over the last 25 years, and they have melded the minds of today's 20-30 year old adults into believing that free speech is only free as long as you believe what they believe. If not, you are to be told you are a __________(insert favorite PC term), and need to be silenced. Until THAT ideology is removed, and the so called political correctness "movement" is contained, nothing will change it.
A hideout for the incompetent. A form of welfare for academics. What we need is a system of exams. Minimal human intervention. Build this circuit in X amount of time. Program this algorithm in x amount of time. Name this many muscles, bones and nerves. While we'll still need internships and hands on experience for some things, much of the old style brick and mortar and a professor nonsense can be replaced with books and on-line learning.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
He recently guest-blogged on Volokh Conspiracy, which is popular blog by prestigious law professors. The series of articles posted by him is well worth a read. http://www.volokh.com/author/greglukianoff/
-- obligatory (but true) caveat: my comments my own, and don't reflect my employer or colleagues' positions.
Fuck these fascist scum.
They once had a near monopoly on the dissemination of knowledge.
Now they do not.
So their actions are relevant only to idiots.
I work for an IT shop in a university and am one of the people who respond to complaints about speech in any campus system. While our university has what some may see as a draconian policy, we have never actually enforced the policy since it was written in 1994.
The reason many campuses have these kind of policies is not de-facto censorship, but instead de-facto legal ass-covering. We also have policies that you can't ride bikes on campus, even though we offer bike racks everywhere; or say you can't use campus computers for illegal file sharing even though unless you're sucking up a crazy amount of bandwidth, we won't really do anything about it. These policies are purely legal risk management and in most campuses solely exist so if a student says something bad, we can't be sued about it.
"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution" - Emma Goldman
You many want to visit the following website and think X times about your decision to enroll:
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/
New Economic Perspectives
And, in fact, the greatest damage moderates and right-wing could do to the left wing extremists is to invite them to freely speak their minds. The resulting spew of sexist, anti-Semitic, elitist, racist, and hate filled non-sequiturs would likely shift most people just a bit to the right.
Of varying degrees. It's simply a matter of what you call them.
Just as for centuries it has been the policy of the Roman Catholic church to promote free speech when they are not in power and to oppose free speech when it rules, it was the policy of the left to promote free speech in the 1960s when they did not yet quite control most universities and to oppose free speech now that they have an iron grip on most schools.
If the freedom to make non-intrusive political speech is not absolute, it does not exist.
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http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/free-expression-peaceful-dissent-and-demonstrations
The origins of speech codes on campus made some amount of sense, in that they were based in restricting harassment. It is not acceptable to follow people around calling them racial slurs, just like it's not acceptable to follow people around doing the chicken dance.
It is perfectly permissible for the government to restrict harassment even if said harassment is done via speech. In fact, it does restrict that. There are actual legal remedies to harassment in the real world, and it's entirely reasonable for a university to make rules duplicating those laws so they can punish students there or kick them out of the school, instead of requiring a restraining order and the legal system.
Incidentally, if you ever seen anyone defending the speech codes on campus, they seem to be defending the original intent. They run around defending the idea it is not acceptable for students to go around harassing people.
The problem with speech codes is that everyone seemed to have immediately forgotten the original premise, and decided that speech codes weren't to stop to the problem of people being harassed, it was to stop people being offended.
AND THOSE TWO THINGS ARE NOT THE SAME.
Harassment is when someone makes repeated legal-but-annoying actions directed non-consensually at a specific other person, with none of it individually doing any real harm, but cumulatively it causing enough that it rises to something we've decided to stop. And indeed, the government, and government institutions, can stop that.
But the government has absolutely no ability to stop being from being offended, or the right to punish people who do offend other people. Offending people is a constitutional right.
And while it might have possibly been understandable confusion between 'harassing someone' and 'deliberately offending someone' (Hint: Harassment has to happen more than once, at the very least.), at this point speech codes have clearly slipped off the deep end and are now attempting to ban stuff that is just sorta vaguely offensive to some random person, somewhere.
It is not possible to accidentally harass someone. Nor is not possible to say something to someone and harass someone else. Nor is it possible to be giving a speech and have someone walk up and be harassed. Reading a book near someone else cannot be harassment.
Nothing without a specific person that is not specifically impacted, on purpose, can be harassment.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
In fact, the greatest damage moderates and left-wing could do to the right wing extremists is to invite them to freely speak their minds. The resulting spew of homophobic, sexist, and racist non-sequiturs would likely shift most people just a bit to the left.
1. There is no such thing as "homophobia". Most people who oppose homosexuality do so not because of some irrational fear, but rather from the moral conviction that it is wrong, and/or the rational view that it serves no legitimate biological purpose and is, in fact, a dysfunction. You may disagree and think it's ok... but the truly dishonest act is to label any position your political opponents have as a "phobia". I guess if the people who oppose homosexuality start calling you a "heterophobe" and then declare that you must be stupid and must be silenced because you are just a "heterophobe", demanded that you could not speak in public forums, etc. you'd be fine with that, right??? I guess in the 60's, all the protesters should have been labelled "vietnamophobics" and been banned from speaking on college campuses...
2. The term "sexist" has lost it's meaning, thanks to the left; it used to mean people who made negative assumptions about others due simply to their gender... like all the Democrats who, for decades, fought to keep women from being able to vote. Now, however, if you are a liberal who hates Sarah Palin and calls her a "cunt", you are just fine, but if you do not want to pay for some lady's birth control or you think women should be free to do what they want with their own bodies (but think it's wrong for them to murder their own children) you are a "sexist" who is "waging a war on women"
2. As for the non-sequitur... just paste-in pictures of Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, etc. The left is brimming with over-the-top irrationality...
Oh for a return of the young lefty hippies of the sixties... they at least pretended to support "free speech" and the "free exchange of ideas" in between the ROTC building occupations and the bombings etc ... after they grew-up however, they, and the generation of morons they taught, who now run our universities decided that any speech they disagreed with had to be stopped...
My how the mighty have fallen... the energetic "open-minded" young people who used to claim they'd "fight to the death" to protect the free speech rights of their opponents... turned into the bitter old people who haunt the ivory towers and have given us "speech codes".
When the only speech you want to defend is one whose only point is to demean, bully, frighten and cow someone or some group?
Why do you insist on two groups doing the same thing?
You don't see the NRA talking about protecting the first amendment, do you?
Why is it that gun nuts and libertards keep whining on about how the ACLU don't support the second ammentment as if that is leaving the second all alone and unloved?
It's a common meme in redressing ills done to others.
Pay back MORE THAN YOU OWE.
But you don't like that because you want a reason for your failure other than your own incompetence.
If you post something that slashdotters disagree with, you get modded out of readability. I give this message about 15 minutes.
Do not tolerate censorship in any form.
Universities have moved from teaching students how to think to teaching them what to think. An no dissent is allowed. Politically Correct is a millstone around the necks of all of us.
never gets noted
FIRE are totally biased right wing scum; let some single solitary person say something about a Christian,they are all over it
Let a corporation pull funding cause of a gay person, hey, its freedom of property, right ??
A good discussion, but my position continues to be that free speech is not something you are granted, it's something you take. By definition.
Example: The students in this area staged a "hug out" a couple years ago to protest the banning of public displays of affection at school. Students would greet by hugging, hold hands going to class, and so forth. Three local high schools participated. The students were in danger of getting suspended or expelled, but continued anyway. And, eventually, got the rules changed.
And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how freedom works. If you're waiting to get permission to be free, you've already lost. Yes, it's hazardous. Anything worthwhile usually is.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.