Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Absolutely -- but the rhetoric of the righteous on this thread and elsewhere tends to miss that nuance completely, and that isn't good at all.

They don't so much miss it as rail against it in a manner that suggests the onus is on people that don't appear to be as angry about it as they are to know the answers.

I said that it wasn't solely a legal issue, and was ridiculed for that as well. Am I now also guilty of thinking it is too much a legal issue?

As soon as your ("one's" -- I don't want to pick on you) extralegal solutions formalize into quasi-legal systems, you bring all the problems of legalistic proof and fairness with you. No dodging legal problems if you have a person punished at the end of a group process.

Strict liability for most crimes would be fine if the criminal law system were anonymous and fair and did see punishment as a goal in itself. I would be a happier man if I owned a magical unicorn.

did not see

Here's today's discussion subject: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid

lol @ at the url

vox-reader-afraid

I'm expecting a bunch of Class of 1984 type quasi-horror movies about students chasing professors down with Title IX complaints clutched in their hands

At the very least, there's debate to be had in these areas. Ideally, pro-choice students would be comfortable enough in the strength of their arguments to subject them to discussion, and a conversation about a band's supposed cultural appropriation could take place alongside a performance. But these cancellations and disinvitations are framed in terms of feelings, not issues. The abortion debate was canceled because it would have imperiled the "welfare and safety of our students." The Afrofunk band's presence would not have been "safe and healthy." No one can rebut feelings, and so the only thing left to do is shut down the things that cause distress — no argument, no discussion, just hit the mute button and pretend eliminating discomfort is the same as effecting actual change.

https://theflaneursturtle.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/epictetus.jpg

no one?????!

i don't know why exactly but that URL made me think of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWwOJlOI1nU

is it really that it's about feelings and therefore even having the event is a threat to students, or is it more just about a broader cultural trend towards totality - not dissimilar to republicans taking a hard opposition stance to every initiative of POTUS? it's like that negotiating trap where the more you indicate that you're unwilling to compromise, the more concessions you can hopefully extract from your interlocutor, but at a certain point no one trusts that you can make any concessions no matter what and the negotiations are over.

like it's not enough to debate someone who is pro-life and demonstrate through argument that they are wrong. even that gives the impression that a pro-life stance has any place in society and therefore the stronger move is to entirely excise it from all discourse. the big problem w/ that is that you can't just exile everyone from the body politic - they're still around, still voting and organizing, etc, you just can't hear them bc your fingers are in your ears.

i think the issue of job precarity and casual labor is key to that article, and cannot be overemphasized. when you don't know if you have a job a few months from now, it really effects the way you work as an instructor. that can mean avoiding controversial subjects, or it can just mean giving out too high grades for fear that lower grades will lead to lower evaluations, etc. that said, there are other things that can trump all this. i know adjuncts who keep getting work despite either not pandering to students or, sometimes, just being crappy teachers because of their chumminess with the people making the hiring decisions -- i.e. cronyism.

anyway, i think that like a lot of high-profile think pieces on this subject, that Vox article is hyperbolic and doesn't seem to have a good handle on how contradictory trends can coexist. (this is also true w/r/t to the rape-on-campus situation, where you can have institutions that simultaneously deal with victims poorly /and/ don't provide a measure of justice to the accused.)

speaking as someone who teaches at the university level, i've never felt quite as afraid as that article would make one think. i've taught controversial stuff before, including stuff that might conceivably "trigger" some students (films depicting sexual violence, for example). but i've never worried about it because i've always taken care to contextualize the material carefully, to justify it in terms of the broader pedagogical goals of the course... and i always explain what they're about to watch (and i allow people who might be upset to opt out, as long as they watch something else of relevance and write about it; nobody has ever taken this option btw). part of it is just that the truly hyper-sensitive students are probably a tiny little percent of students overall.

just my thoughts. tl;dr: VOX writer is sort of right, but exaggerates and lacks nuance.

btw i;m glad that the VOX author brought up adolph reed. that guy is amazing; i've learned so much from him. his arguments are always bracing, because he forces you to shift your frame of reference. a lot of that comes from his marxism, i think. people like david horowitz get a lot of mileage claiming that academia is a hotbed of marxists/communists. but i think the reigning liberal/"social justice" orthodoxy in the humanities has actually mostly forgotten marx.

As an adjunct, I too haven't recoiled from presenting graphic material. The burden's on me, as I see it, to explain why the material is important to the course. The only questions I fear are political ones, like last semester when after showing bits of "Collateral Murder" a student insisted on asking what I thought about the Iraq War and I had to firmly remind her that my opinions were of no account and had no relation to the material I'd asked them to watch.

^more or less the line i take. this is less because im afraid of repercussions than because i feel that any "political" debates that happens in my class are gonna devolve pretty quickly into the media talking points on both sides, which just strikes me as a waste of time pedagogically. better to put them on ground where those ideological positions are less immediately relevant and they are forced to think from scratch.

Most of the time those questions are asked by rabble rousers.

as when Hamsphire College disinvited an Afrobeat band because their lineup had too many white people in it.

i was wondering if i should be outraged over this but then i realized
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1433225/images/n-AFROBEAT-BAND-TOO-WHITE-large570.jpg

i'm sure they then went and booked a band from nigeria, right?

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid

have fun with this one

That's the one I posted

gonna fire Title IX grievance alleging HOOS was mocking the ILE posting process

who is the ideal audience for that vox essay

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

lol

wth is "VOX" anyhow? i never know what all these websites are, they seem nearly interchangeable.

just imagine "Ezra Klein reconstituted as a web page."

apparently this is that vox's writer's tumblr:

http://whitehotharlots.tumblr.com/

it is sfw

ffs these whiny professors. u kno what i think the histrionic students and their deathly afraid professors deserve each other.

yeah

that guy seems like a troll

the VOX thing is a good example of a piece that while part of it rings true, it adds nothing to the conversation. it has no new observations, no new knowledge. it isn't well-supported, it's just a screed.

there's a ready-made audience for that kind of screed though, just as there is a ready-made audience for the kind of identity-politics orthodoxy that the writer laments. they def. deserve each other.

interesting post in crooked timber:
http://crookedtimber.org/2015/06/03/the-counter-enlightenment-as-gotcha/

I said that it wasn't solely a legal issue, and was ridiculed for that as well. Am I now also guilty of thinking it is too much a legal issue?

― Frederik B, Wednesday, 3 June 2015 12:08 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fredb i got no issue with you or anything but you need to start discerning between "ridiculed" and "disagreed" imo

xpost

mordy, you have this habit of posting "interesting" blog posts that are not interesting in the slightest.

really? i think the tension for conservatives that want to affirm enlightenment values while simultaneously distrusting their foundation is a really sharp one!

i dunno, you just have a tendency of posting all these thinkpieces that just seem like they are written in an echo chamber.

i don't get echo chamber from that post

fredb i got no issue with you or anything but you need to start discerning between "ridiculed" and "disagreed" imo

― thoughts you made second posts about (darraghmac),

Laura Kipnis should help.

i don't get echo chamber from that post

― Mordy, Wednesday, June 3, 2015 11:19 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dunno, it's like one blog post responding to a thinkpiece responding to a block post responding to a think piece responding to....

gets very tiresome to me

fair enough, i mean that is kinda a trademark of this whole thing right? an op-ed about an article about a title XII investigation about an op-ed about another investigation... it's the internet! everyone needs to have a take.

trust no one

https://itself.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/kids-these-days/

One almost begins to think that administrators are opportunistically deploying student complaints as weapons in their ongoing war against faculty job security, while taking an equally opportunistic approach to more serious accusations that could significantly damage the institution’s reputations.

that does seem to be an often unspoken aspect of all this--there's not much discussion about how larger institutional changes can be driving some of this stuff.

some background on vox if you were curious Important Corrections of Record

re above talk of alice goffman:

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/faculty/docs/goffman/A%20Reply%20to%20Professor%20Lubet.pdf

her response

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/faculty/docs/goffman/Alice%20Goffman%20Statement.pdf

and a statement of full support from her university re allegations of misconduct

First, let me say as plainly as possible: At no time did I intend to engage in any criminal conduct in the wake of Chuck's death.

i only drove around a guy who had a gun and the express purpose of killing another person, a person whom i also "wanted to die." i didn't intend anything criminal!

there should probably be a chilling effect on professors conspiring to commit murder

nah i think her statement is pretty good overall. i think there's some element of "ppl don't actually know what ethnography is" at work.

would also kinda not be surprised if someone in her situation consulted with a lawyer to make sure she was on solid ground claiming not to have any criminal intent! or we could just yknow do the usual

i mean Lubet is a Northwestern Law professor and longtime criminal defender himself; you're not going to do much better than him for an accurate analysis of law. but it's pretty irrelevant in this case because a first-year law student can tell you that driving a car with an attempted murderer with the purpose of helping him find his target is felony conspiracy.

I sent the relevant paragraphs from On the Run to four current or former prosecutors with experience in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. Their unanimous opinion was that Goffman had committed a felony. A former prosecutor from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office was typical of the group. “She's flat out confessed to conspiring to commit murder and could be charged and convicted based on this account right now,” he said.