College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"The function of universities is to promote liberal research and scientific and artistic scholarship, to provide the highest education based on research, and to educate students to serve their country and humanity. In carrying out their tasks, universities must provide opportunities for continuous learning, interact with the rest of society and promote the social impact of research results and artistic activities."
“Liberal research” will leave people scratching their heads.
From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education):
"Originally these subjects or skills were held by classical antiquity to be essential for a free person (liberalis, "worthy of a free person") to acquire in order to take an active part in civic life, something that included among other things participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and participating in military service."
So "liberal" was "for free people" as opposed to slaves.
If I understand correctly, the "liberal arts college" is more in contrast to a trade school - basically, teaching things that enrich your life rather than things you depend on to make a living. Universities kind of span both - they teach philosophy and literature, but they also teach things like engineering.
Also, this is 1/30 of all Australian residents, not just Australian residents of university age. It's closer to 50% of students.
On the contrary, in the 21st century I don’t think universities own this privilege nor should we pretend that they do. Radical discourse is now almost exclusively introduced, refined, and tested on the internet, then later brought to other venues (including universities). And this is for good reason - the internet is simply more efficient and with less barriers.
To that end, as someone who is not a university professor, I frankly could not give a crap about the state of universities wrt free speech. Every student carries a phone in their pocket with a cellular connection that offers all the free speech and inquiry they could want.
To be sure, that was a while ago. Maybe it's different now. If so, that's sad.
Did you go to college? Did you learn about class signals? Is that really what it's about these days?
For lower tier schools and today, the degree doesn't open enough doors, and people aren't learning enough practical skills in college so they go into massive debt just to learn how to talk like someone a corporation/firm is willing to trust with their capital, with a piece of paper to prove that they will fall in line and do what is asked.
It seems to me there's a problem any time the focus on just "the degree" as a goal, as opposed to what lies behind it. Simply getting a degree signals a certain ability to follow rules, navigate a bureaucracy, complete work on time, and demonstrate a generic ability to learn material and pass tests. For some jobs, that alone indicates potential value as an employee. This used to be indicated by obtaining a high school diploma.
All the things you found rewarding in college are still there but I believe it was oversold and a lot of kids acquired unreasonable debt loads as a result and have condemned themselves to basically indentured servitude with zero actual skills. It’s genuinely tragic.
A quick reminder that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was in the 1960s so it's not like college campuses have been some utopia of free expression until now.
The reality is that free speech is messy. There are few true absolutists and even fewer, I suspect, who are in vulnerable minority populations. If the majority keeps telling themselves that it's OK to hate the minority, the minority has very little defense. That doesn't mean censorship is A-OK, it just means that the discussion deservers more nuance than most people want to give it. Angry polemics in the media do little to encourage such nuance.
I think the issue we have is not a culture restricting free speech, I think the issue is a media landscape that spoon feeds us emotional content to manipulate us.
One thing we can all do right away is stop blaming left/right/woke/trumpers etc and be a little more critical on the news we're getting to suss out what's real vs propaganda.
This is how all new information works.
And the highest ranking member of one of the highest ranking schools being a known cheater seems like a newsworthy thing (regardless of the motivation of those publicizing the information).
It is signal rather than noise, in that it can provide a more accurate prior probability to people about the brand name of the school and people coming from it.
My argument is that (to me) I doubt a leader being corrupt is uncommon. Thus I think it's worth questioning why we are focusing so heavily on this one specific person versus a general story on corruption.
For instance, does someone have an agenda against her identity or political views? That definitely doesn't exonerate her, but it's worth sensing if we the public are having our attention focused in a certain way in service of someone's agenda.
Possibly because Claudine Gay was an academic nobody with no other significant talents?
Plenty of people knew who Lawrence Summers was.
It is a similar story to Mozilla. Many programmers know who Brendan Eich is. How many people know the name of the current Mozilla director without googling? Me neither, the only thing I know about her is that she was chosen because she offended nobody. Hardly a recipe for standing out in a crowd of other gray mice.
I have to remember this propaganda is created by people with a very good understanding on how to trigger the outrage in everyone’s brain.
People on all sides of the aisle are more alike than they want to admit right now.
Just hoping people can turn the bullshit off someday.
Symptoms of a diseased customer.
Is it as perfectly market competitive as buying retail gasoline? No. Does it contain significant elements of consumer choice? Yes.
A people of weak constitution will lead to collapse of the Constitution.
I wonder if David Brin has read this piece because his, for lack of a better term and not to dismiss, rants read like an amped-up version of this paper.
https://www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/franks.pdf
FTA: The key to understanding the current legal and cultural landscape of free speech is not some enduring constitutional value or method of interpretation, but rather the ascendance of a very specific political ideology that is best described as neo-Confederate. Neo-Confederate ideology is a constellation of values that includes investment in racial hierarchy, attachment to traditional gender roles and gender conformity, idealization of the pre-Civil War South, belief that the U.S. is a Christian nation, and hostility to democracy.
The neo-Confederate agenda renders coherent what otherwise appear to be chaotic free speech positions: the condemnation of “cancel culture” by promoters of censorship; the conflation of speech reactions with speech restrictions; the equation of the right to speak with the right to an audience; alternating invocations and dismissals of the state action doctrine. While these positions are malleable enough to occasionally serve progressive interests, they are most consistently and powerfully deployed to protect the interests of white male supremacy.
The truth is that every lofty ideal attracts opportunistic charlatans and grifters who hold up the ideal and claim to be fighting for it, while being utterly hypocritical when adherence to the ideal would actually cost them. And as a libertarian myself I'd say Libertarians are quite at risk of being drawn in by this, tending to hold views axiomatically rather than qualitatively (ie assuming correctness by construction rather than judging constructive effect). But being a political patsy is most certainly not limited to libertarianism, and the right answer is to call out both those who arbitrage ideals into cynical action and those who cast aspersions on lofty ideals by association.
Some degree programs are really entirely politically aligned with the Democratic party. It's basically impossible for these to "allow free speech". You can't expect a group of people who strongly believe in Democratic party politics, who tie that into their everyday work, to be open and fair when hiring people who equally strongly believe in Republican party politics. You are never going to have the Harvard Women's Studies department be half Republicans.
What I think would be interesting and might actually happen is if there were more "alternative universities" that had different viewpoints. Maybe the University of Austin could be something like this.
[0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1978/2/17/womens-studies-...
[1] https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=1108872&p=8085578
However, what happens when those "ugly positions" are algorithmically amplified and spread far and wide through social media to people who are not prepared to question them critically, and instead appeal to their basest desires and inner fears? Is that still free speech or is it now brain power-washing... or even a brain water-cannon?
Are you going to set up a committee of "specialists" who decide what speech is okay for wider distribution and what speech is perfectly in its rights to be freely said, so long as its passed by non-digital means? Considering how much garbage came wrapped as firm truth even from mainstream sources of information during the pandemic, I'd like to laugh at the idea of anyone being able to concretely say they can judge "correct" speech from "ugly" speech well.
Your entire text above tacitly implies that a large majority are nearly brainless sheep who need to somehow be protected from supposed harmful ideas by their betters, by some sort of betters. Perhaps such as yourself?
Really? Not even during Vietnam war? Not even during Occupy? I don't buy this. I think what is happening is that those in power are getting pushback and now they are complaining about the loss of free speech. The reality is speech was suppressed for a long long time at Universities, but since the people who lost the speech didn't have any power (think communists, anarchists, people promoting black rights, women's rights, etc) it seemed all was well in University land.
These groups still have absolutely no power.
Just because you don't think they have much power, or as much as they should, doesn't mean they have "absolutely no power". I know I'm being pedantic, but if you actually believe your statement then it's an example of a mentality that forever holds us back.
And it's pretty clear the author isn't against "pushback", but would rather see that in the form of refutation. You can agree or disagree with that and discus that, which is all fine, but your reply doesn't connect with that at all, and is just a generic tangent.
I was in university during occupy, and i was a participant in occupy. The movement hardly impacted campus life, especially compared to the way that open antisemitism is affecting it.
I’m all for free speech on campus, from all sides, but these articles today are coming from the so far dominant side, who has been pushing a line the world outside their ivory towers will not toe.
The power of democracy has always been proportional to that of the people to backstop their source of power which is violence.
For a brief period of time weapons and force was accessible to the common man. As overwhelming complex weapons of nation-state cost dominate government the wheel turns in their favor until the next technological change like the firearm shifts violence back towards egalitarian access to violence.
you see, everyone outside of those places know how infected by socialism and communism ideas those wokr morons are. and the real world outside of their little "safe spaces", this shit won't fly. in the corporate world, playing the woke card will get you out of a job faster than a pervert would by touching in front of everyone a women's tits.
let them get out of those universities. please. let them get into the corporate and real world.
they have no idea how they're going to be burned. but my pop-corn is ready.
I think a lot of the anger over free speech is not that people can't freely spout their silly old views, but that people won't respect their silly old views.