There’s no space for that kind of behaviour in a university debate. The individual in question wasn’t a celebrity or politician knowingly stepping into the lions den, but just a student asking an honest and fair question.
Setting the present question aside, I think this is a very time-bound point of view. There used to be riots in Harvard Yard over theological questions. Now we're so cowed that a little booing and a walkout is national news. I think we could use to be a little ruder to each other.
However if you’re someone attending a spoken debate, and you’re asking a reasonable question backed by lived experience (as opposed to a deliberately provocative question based on the assumed experiences of others), then you shouldn’t be subjected to direct personal attacks.
Attacking someone because their lived experiences run counter to your preferred world view is just intellectual cowardice. You’re neither trying to learn from the speaker, or provide a valuable counter-experience. You’re running from knowledge that might force you re-assess your world view.
That would remove a significant portion of campus leftists.
Because it sounds like you are trying to turn it into whataboutism.
Are you asking for my personal opinion, the opinion of college administration, the opinion of student bodies, etc.?
>Because it sounds like you are trying to turn it into whataboutism.
It's not whataboutism because campus leftists have been doing exactly what the OP described:
"But jeering, booing and taunting, that’s a step too far. That no longer protesting a speaker as part of a free debate, but instead attacking them as an individual in the hopes of cowing them into submission."
That's the MO for campus "cancel culture".
> It's not whataboutism because campus leftists
Thank you for confirming that you are unable to have discourse without blaming people uninvolved in the situation via whataboutism.
Students should be cordial and have spirited debate free of jeering and taunting. That used to be the standard.
>because you are trying to distract from unacceptable behaviour by saying "but the left..."
This is a non sequitur. I am not trying to distract anyone, I'm pointing out that if the standard is to exclude those who jeer, taunt, and attack the individual in the hopes of cowing them into submission, then this would lead to large portions of campus leftist being punished.
>Thank you for confirming
That wasn't a confirmation, you literally proved my point for me.
>unable to have discourse without blaming people uninvolved in the situation via whataboutism.
This is by definition not whataboutism because I am not attempting to discredit the OPs position.
QED.
Thank you for confirming that you are incapable of having discourse because you are incapable of understanding basic concepts like whataboutism and are T R I G G E R E D because someone called out leftists as those partaking in unacceptable behavior.
To be fair, it would also remove most Proud Boys and other right-aligned extremists one reads about in the recent news. It would allow well-behaved Nazi sympathizers and other Alt-Right folks, like Bannon and Milo and many right-wing newsfolks, to be able to speak at forums unless the universities recognize that giving a platform to people driven by pseudo-racial nationalism or other incoherent worldviews advocating for violence is a not part of their charter.
So, in other words, its a tradeoff.
Mind showing your research?
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/there-are-two-americas-a...