Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT
president.mit.edu
president.mit.edu
> We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious. (...) A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not extend to suppressing or restricting such speakers from expressing their views.
Reasonable stance IMO. As far as I can tell, MIT did not adopt the Chicago Statement [2], so it's nice to see a proposal like this, which seems substantially similar.
[1] https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/report...
[2] https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/r...
If anyone else was wondering what was being referenced above, I'm guessing it's this:
https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation:
> Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Department Head Robert van der Hilst canceled the department’s annual John Carlson Lecture due to controversy surrounding the invited speaker, Professor Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, and his views on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts within academia....
> In a Newsweek op-ed titled “The Diversity Problem on Campus,” published August 2021, co-authors Abbot and Stanford Professor Iván Marinovic wrote that DEI in academia seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups, violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment, compromises the university’s mission, and undermines the public's trust in universities and their graduates.
That's not to condemn (or defend) the professor. This just isn't a fair characterization of the debate.
E.g. "red is a better color than blue" is obviously a subjective opinion, where as "ʻOumuamua is made of frozen nitrogen" is obviously a falsifiable statement.
Edit: reading up a bit more it seems Galileo had a bit of a Linus T. streak, with gratuitous insults and ad hominems against authority. Makes me want to read the source documents now :-)
"Therefore, as a junior member of the Flat Earth Society, I demand MIT provide me an auditorium and a microphone to legitimize and amplify my nonconformist opinion about the shape of the Earth."
MIT is obviously only going to consider inviting speakers that would appeal to some subset of its community. The statement doesn't give anyone a right to demand an audience at MIT, it gives the MIT community license to invite controversial speakers.
MIT isn't protecting all legal speech, they're amplifying speech the MIT community wants to hear, and suppressing speech the community doesn't want to hear.
If the MIT community wants to legitimize and amplify speech about perpetuating the current hierarchy of elites, and suppress protest speech aiming to open up and overturn that hierarchy, it's up to the community.
It has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
Contrary to all the feel-good language about platforming nonconformity, the goal is not to provide an equal platform to all viewpoints, because that would be ridiculous.
Ideas are still subject to the marketplace, and the MIT community is a very discriminating market.
AIUI this was controversial, but not for the reasons you might think: people were concerned that the guy wasn't well and that encouraging him wasn't kind.
Since there are infinite crackpot ideas but only one Kresge Auditorium, the MIT community must make value judgments about what speakers and ideas are worthy, and which ones are not.
No institution should be compelled to provide a platform for all speakers and ideas. Some speakers and ideas are worthy of MIT, and many are not.
MIT faculty and leadership should embrace their fiduciary duty to make these hard judgments. They should grapple with what it means for speakers and ideas to be worthy, and what speech should not receive MIT legitimacy and amplification.
Instead this statement evades all of that by pretending to support all speech as long as it's legal.
But this is the key thing: Abbot was giving a talk on environmental studies, and confirmed affirmative action was not part of the talk he was giving. The push to exclude him was on the basis of something other the science of his talk.
Here's a better analogy: would it be appropriate to cancel musician'd concert because he's a flat earther? The argument that we have only one auditorium and we should allocate it to a better musician does not make sense unless there's a compelling reason to say that his musical performance abilities are affected by a belief in a flat earth.
Because they are not against racial discrimination.
It made me sad because I remember my fellow students, some rich, some poor, some from Philips Exeter, some like me from inner city Detroit schools, some from Asia some from Southern California. The thing was though, they weren't at all well rounded, the very trait that the president seemed so proud of in the current student body.
My classmates were eccentric, creative, nerdy, and most of all so intelligent. My math classes were full of genuses and savants. I still remember a fellow student in my second semester real analysis class (prerequisite chain was five semester long to get into the class: 1yr Calc -> 1 Semester DiffEq -> 1st semester real analysis -> 1 semester complex analysis); he was a Freshman and the best student in the class. Was he well rounded? I don't think so, but he was good at pinball and math.
Then the tragic Aaron Swartz affair.
They didn't sign the Chicago Letter [1].
I started meeting other MIT alumni that are disappointed with the direction MIT went as well.
Every year they still call me asking for more money.
Take back MIT. [2]
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/29/u-chicago-let...
I ask as I simply cannot fathom donating money to a university where the overarching aim is often to make money.
Like other charitable contributions in the US, it is tax deductible. What that means is donating $100,000 has an after tax cost of around $50,000 depending upon one's tax bracket.
Yes there is accountability, and I usually receive a nice note from a couple of the undergraduates that have their undergraduate research projects funded by my modest endowment.
These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. They often come from a non-academic background, have a party or "think-tank" background with some obvious political agenda, and their funding also comes from corresponding organizations. Some of them are even just politicians.
The problem with these kind of speakers is not that they speak at a university. The audience is smart enough not to fall for bullshit and to separate politics from science. The problem is that these people use events to give their name and their agenda some credibility and make it easier for the public to confuse their opinions with science. It's a branding problem, political talks can give a university a seriously bad reputation.
Since it would be inconvenient and undemocratic to ban all political speeches and events from universities, I think a trade-off has to be made and some cut-off points are necessary, even if that means that a few interesting talks get lost due to being identified as false positives. It's perfectly fine and reasonable to ban all political speakers from the political fringes (both far right and far left) unless an event clearly serves a scientific purpose and the speaker also has the fitting credentials in terms of actual publications.
I understand this goal is hard to reach in the US, though, since many universities there are private and lobbyism has extended its reach to them. But it's an ideal to strive for. The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them.
When we talk about these obviously bad actors, are we talking people like Socrates and Galileo? Or are we keeping to strictly political undesirables like Assange, Snowden and the whiny pacifists who nobody likes?
The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards.
I dunno, that sounds like the sort of thing that might be considered bad faith. I suppose the exact charge might not have survived translation. How do we think about heretics who corrupt people in good faith?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Trial_of_Socrates
A bad-faith heretic! Double the crimes that I initially thought. Maybe we do need to keep his dangerous ilk out of universities, he would no doubt have been harshly judged on HN at the time if they'd had HN back in the good old days.
More seriously, the academics have perfectly fine standards - to be an academic you need to have studied something deeply and make logical arguments. To speak on campus you need to be sponsored by an academic. That really is all that is needed and they're reasonably objective bars to meet. None of this "oh no he's got bad faith!" stuff that is trotted out for politics. Argue about the outcomes of policies, not the unobservable mental state of the people putting the policies.
I don't think you understand the difference in these two concepts. You can "corrupt the youth" without resorting to bad faith arguments. This quote of yours makes no sense.
To his eternal credit, Socrates does not argue very well in his defense. But this does not amount to bad faith on his part.
Edit: bad faith is additionally characterized by its intentional stance, meaning that it shouldn't be confused with a state of ego dystonicity (wherein the actor acts compulsively against their self-perceived "true" nature).
To the best of my knowledge, there is no serious interpretation of Socrates in which his recorded expressions are considered to be in bad faith. The absolute closest stretch would be arguing that the Socratic method is in some sense "faithless," which is distinct from the negative nature of bad faith.
The worst pattern off rhetoric that is absolutely dominating public discourse is "You've been accused of doing X"; "Well yeah but my opponent did something vaguely similar, ergo it's ok"
Which of course is arguably the point. There's just another type of "bad faith actor" who is lurking in the shadows with these arguments: Someone who wants to leverage censorship against disfavored viewpoints regardless of their truth value.
Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying" and "let only approved speakers speak even if the approval process may be corrupt", I'll take the former pretty much every time.
While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whatever they want and expecting the lies to be exposed/countered by the truthspeakers is destined to fail. We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your arguments (I assume) means you don't really believe lying will sway people to your perspective.
> We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
We haven't. It may be true but that data is not available to us. These could be bots, they could be new converts (with the old ones de-converting), they could be paid propagandists, or trolls. It could just be the algorithm promoting people who create engagement. These people could be incredibly rare but incredibly prominent on the platform.
When are you going to be affected by this theory? Are you swayed by lies and misinformation? Do you cling to beliefs in the face of fact and evidence? Are you undeserving of the right to speak because of it? Why should you have been allowed to leave this comment? You have not been vetted to make these statements.
> How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your arguments (I assume) means you don't really believe lying will sway people to your perspective.
I think you're making the mistake of assuming that everyone is willing to play the same ends-justify-the-means game, where they're OK with shamelessly lying if it can momentarily get someone to align with their faction. What the GP describes is only a dilemma if you have a commitment to the truth.
Also what you describe (counter cheap lies with more cheap lies), would actually play into the hand of a disinformation actor. In many cases they're not looking to persuade anyone of of anything, just increase confusion, cynicism, and disengagement; which reduce their adversary's capacity for making decisions and taking action.
That didn't come off as clever, BTW.
You want to get people to vote for your candidate. So you create social media posts saying the opponent voted against funds that would go to veterans. You don't need to look anything up, you just need to create the post. It's almost certainly true, because EVERY candidate has done this. However, it's extremely misleading...
Your opponent wants to make sure people understand the truth. The truth is that there were several bills that would fund veterans with a small amount of money, but they were all "add-ons" to other bills that did major things that the candidate did not approve of (for example, something like saying no state may provide a drivers license to anyone that is an ex-con). Now, in order make sure people understand the truth, you have to find the cases where the candidate in question voted against money for veterans, explain what the situation behind it was, and why there was "something bigger to consider" in each case.
Vs you, who only had to create a simple post.
The level of effort is in no way balanced.
But I know for a fact that people I know and care about _are_ affected by it, and on a regular basis. Plus it's used to sway people I don't know, and those people vote. And I find it concerning that they will base their vote on incorrect information.
I'm not trying to say someone is voting "wrong", because voting is a matter of opinion. But one should be able to base their opinion on actual truth, not lies. At the end of the day, if their opinion is based on lies they have been told, then it's really no different than secretly switching out the labels on the candidates in the voting machine.
Alternatively worded, something about sunlight being the best disinfectant.
> It takes less effort to uncover a public lie than to uncover a hidden truth.
> Alternatively worded, something about sunlight being the best disinfectant.
That's a slogan, not a truth. For instance: what is "best"? The fastest? The most thorough? Something guaranteed to work, if given enough time?
Even if "best" means it's the "fastest" disinfectant, that doesn't mean it's fast enough to keep up with the infections the op describes.
There's also the question: if you prove something is a lie, will enough people pay attention? A 140 character lie could take pages to debunk. Given enough lies, that page count is going to build up to the point where no one has time for it. And the actual audience of the debunking is unlikely to be a superset of the audience of the lie.
As for Assange, Snowden, or "whiny pacifists" -- yes please keep them out of universities, and also don't forget to exclude any Trumpists, Steve Bannons, nationalists, individual anarchists, and members of communist parties, unless they're reporting about their actual scientific research if they conduct some. I see no reason whatsoever why such people should give political speeches at universities.
That said, the person must be able and willing to discuss a bigger picture than just their personal politics, which is why I specifically picked Snowden but excluded Assange, Trump, and Bannon in the above. That's basically your good faith distinction.
Indeed, they seem to be promoting the continuation of the insipid “elitist only” culture. The fact that the most politically divisive of the university cancelled the speaker (which resulted in MIT making this statement) seems to escape the OP
Excellent. So let them say what they want and demolish them with reason instead of suppression.
> it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whatever they want and expecting the lies to be exposed/countered by the truthspeakers is destined to fail. We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
Nor does compelling people to promote bad faith actors seem to me anything other than another method of suppression. Compelled speech is not free speech.
Let individuals and individual institutions apply some judgement, as if they were living, breathing human beings able to make choices.
If a university demonstrates consistently poor judgement, that problem will not be solved by having event organisers who believe they are unable to make their own choices.
That wasn't an assertion, and there was nothing requiring evidence.
Strong disagree. The problem with "freedom of speech in academia" is that it's a polite fiction.
What happens when an MIT professor puts out a press release saying that the US deserved 9-11 and that more attacks are justified? Or that the Charlottesville protestors didn't go far enough, and more lefties need to be run down in the street like dogs? Will MIT be hiring Holocaust denier history professors? Does anyone truly believe that, if a professor publicly expresses views well outside of mainstream acceptability, there will be no professional consequences?
"Free expression" at a place like MIT still means you need to keep well within the standards of acceptability, just that we want to make sure that the standards include certain things that are now considered beyond the pale.
As a life long atheist I have suffered from this misconception. The idea of a god seems so absurd to me that I honestly don't understand how people can have faith in one. Never the less it is true, they do, and in good faith. I've had enough deep conversations with believers to establish that. And it's true no matter how many instances of their hypocrisy you collect.
The same is true of political opponents.
This is a good summation of what makes a bad actor but requires information only the bad actor has access to (motive).
I agree with you though.
A good faith actor should be as open minded as they expect their audience to be. A good faith actor asks probing questions and cedes when shown to be incorrect? Has the ability to admit when incorrect?
Bad actors tend to lack the openness that they expect others to have.
Then this is a failure of public education and science journalism. Science journalism has indeed been failing the public for decades now, and have arguably been a big factor in the public's distrust of scientific institutions, so that's not surprising.
You don't solve this problem by banning speakers or restricting speech, you solve it by improving journalism and public education.
The full message could be: free expression, with intimate surveillance.
I'm not saying that's a bad message, and it's happening in practice, in some forms. Maybe people should explore whether that means everyone should take responsibility for their speech. And if so, whether that means responsibility before the audience, the public, or some authority.
Some alt-right people organized a big so-called "Free Speech Rally" in Boston, perhaps as a Trump-emboldened show of force, or publicity effort.
But a massive number of counter-demonstrators turned out (including many students and staff from MIT), dwarfing the alt-right people by orders of magnitude, and basically told them "no", in so many accents.
"The answer to offensive speech is more speech" doesn't always work that well, nor that literally. And some kinds of speech in a university environment will sometimes call for listening and dialogue, unlike that one demonstration.
But that one day, the alt-right people didn't seem to have genuine dialogue in mind, and it was the free speech that they called for (perhaps cynically and disingenuously) that corrected their particular argument.
Way too often, free speech debates are hijacked to normalize a fascistic movement in American politics. The left is feckless because they don't think like Peter Thiel or Steve Bannon.
Certainly there are days when the mass of normal opinion outweighs the straussian tactics of the right because the position of the right has gone ridiculously too far and it is obvious that it isn't normal. But it is difficult to count on that happening reliably.
And there seems to be a widespread anti-intellectualism movement, from multiple directions, that's turning all of us into bickering reactionaries.
Someone has to start bringing us back to aspiring to sophistication of intellect and character, to both engage in genuine dialogue, and to recognize when someone else isn't.
MIT, as one vanguard, doesn't have the last word on this (it has its own biases), but IMHO not surprising to see them taking a confident stand for a kind of intellectualism that's in a relatively good direction. We need the influence of others, to address concerns/perspectives that are not as much on the radar of MIT.
The fun thing about this statement is that it's just as true, but much more clear, if you consider "fascistic" to be "anything to the right of Angela Davis".