Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

speech codes at public universities seem like possible first amendment violations to me and i believe courts have generally ruled against speech codes for that reason. i agree that butler is embarrassingly confused about 1st amendment protections in quote above.

also i think a lot of anti-semites consider their antisemitic speech political and that's probably why it gets mixed up w/ anti-zionism so much since they're both political speech directed against jewish institutions

for instance the chancellor of my university sent out a statement that said something about "nobody is entitled" to express hateful or demeaning speech. um, yes, yes, they are. especially at a public university.

I think they're entitled in a sense, but it's def not the 1st am that entitles them, it's an academic norm. Steven Salaita doesn't have a 1st amendment claim against UIUC, nor would he if he were a student who got expelled for tweeting the same stuff.

Don't know the details of the Salaita case enough to comment, but like 30 minutes ago I was listening to a podcast where a law professor made the exact opposite point re:students--that student speech in non-university forums (like twitter) is subject to first amendment protections against university disciplinary actions.

specifically applied to public universities like UIUC

If a law professor said that, I stand corrected.

yeah, I am no lawyer and can't back it up beyond my initial statement. it was a weird confluence of listening to a podcast at random and then opening up this thread to see the exact same discussion. The law professor in question was either Eugene Volokh from UCLA or Geoffrey Stone from UofC, fwiw.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/25/brown-students-shut-down-trans-activist-s-speech-because-israel.html

http://www.manchesterspring.org.uk/2016/02/23/the-end-of-emo-politics/

kpunk on EMO-POLITICS

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/03/student-accused-of-violating-university-safe-space-by-raising-he/

According to EUSA safe space rules, only gestures that indicate agreement are “permissible”, and then only as long as “these gestures are generally understood and not used in an intimidating manner”.

is that real

It's a good question. The EUSA is not part of the University of Edinburgh, afaik, and they set their own rules. They also have an extremely hostile relationship with the student newspaper that 'broke' the story. They have a rep for pushing edicts like asking student discos to not play Blurred Lines, etc, but it is worth taking anything written about them with a pinch of salt unless it is backed by a lot of evidence.

no i mean like, are there orgs that even do that??

it occurred to me that perhaps some parliamentary bodies have, at least, customs on only voicing disagreements in prescribed ways

The association seems to have a very strict policy on how members are expected to behave when others are speaking. I don't think that's necessarily culturally unusual but it might not be codified often.

http://chronicle.com/article/What-Students-Think-About-Free/235897

paywall :(

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/10/students-censorship-safe-places-platforming-free-speech?CMP=fb_gu

I don't know if this article has been posted here before. One of the authors believes in something called 'concept creep' which I thought might be relevant to this thread (I wish I could now put some disclaimers on the OP because thread makes me look like an idiot, but moving on).

So how did it come to pass that many Emory students felt victimised and traumatised by innocuous and erasable graffiti?

Emory students are not unique. Many other universities have been rocked by protests this year over what seem like small things to outsiders (...). What on earth is going on?

Part of the answer can be found in cultural shifts that have changed the meanings of many words and concepts used on campus, making it hard for people off campus to understand what the protesters are saying. One of us (Haslam) recently published an essay titled “Concept creep: Psychology’s expanding concepts of harm and pathology.” Many concepts are “creeping” – they are being “defined down” so that they are applied promiscuously to milder and less objectionable events.

Take bullying. When research on bullying began in the 1970s, an act had to meet four criteria to count: it had to be an act of aggression directed by one or more children against another child; the act had to be intentional; it had to be part of a repeated pattern; and it had to occur in the context of a power imbalance. But over the following decades, the concept of bullying has expanded in two directions.

It has crept outward or “horizontally” to encompass new forms of bullying, such as among adults in the workplace or via social media. More problematic, though, is the creeping downward or “vertically”so that the bar has been lowered and more minor events now count as bullying. (...) As the definition of bullying creeps downward for researchers, it also creeps downward in school systems, most of which now enforce strict anti-bullying policies. This may explain why Emory students, raised since elementary school with expansive notions of bullying and subjective notions of victimhood, could perceive the words “Trump 2016” as an act of bullying, intimidation, perhaps even violence, regardless of the intentions of the writer.

A second key concept that has crept downward is trauma. Medicine and psychiatry once reserved that word for physical damage to organs and tissues, such as a traumatic brain injury. But by the 1980s, events that caused extreme terror, such as rape or witnessing atrocities in war, were recognised as causing long-lasting effects known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The original criteria for PTSD required that a traumatic event “would evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and would be “outside the range of usual human experience”. But in recent trauma scholarship these stringent criteria are gone; like bullying, trauma is now assessed subjectively. (...)

A third key campus concept that has crept downward is prejudice. As overt prejudice has declined precipitously, the term has crept outward and downward. For example, the concept of “modern racism” was developed to refer to people who may show no overt prejudice, but who endorse policy positions that might be associated with prejudice, such as opposing the use of racial preferences in college admissions. More recently, the concept of “implicit prejudice” has become popular after experiments showed that it takes most people slightly longer to associate pictures of Black people (vs. White people) with good words (vs. bad words).

As with bullying, prejudice is now in the eye of the beholder. If a person feels that a word, facial expression or even a subtle hand movement makes them uncomfortable in a way related to a protected identity, then an act of prejudice has occurred. For Emory students steeped in training about prejudice and inclusion, there is no need to know the intentions of the midnight chalker. The word “Trump” activates associations to racism in their minds. Therefore, anyone who writes his name has committed an act of racism, perhaps even traumatizing racial violence.

Concept creep does not happen to all psychological terms – it happens primarily to those that are useful in what sociologists have called a “culture of victimhood”.

This feels plausible. 'The meaning of words changes over time, therefore some older people don't get why some younger people call some things bullying, traumatic or prejudiced'. I haven't read the actual case they use to back it up though, so I'm not going to dive in and agree that, for example the definition of bullying has changed as they say. I believe they provide a link at the bottom of the article.

Mind you, this article is also a perfect example of that creepy vibe I mentioned right back at the start of this thread. Quite a lot of it could be paraphrased as 'Hmm ... but why would anyone feel that Donald Trump or one of his supporters was a threat to their life?'

oh look, another think piece

http://chronicle.com/article/Slogans-Have-Replaced/236099

'course as a card-carrying creepy lib, this is the part that gets me:

More to the point, the claim that a college campus should be a locus of absolutely unfettered free speech is a pose. There are certain opinions and topics which an enlightened society can today justifiably exclude from discussion. No university any of us would want to be associated with would entertain "free speech" in favor of genocide, slavery, or withdrawing women’s right to vote, even in the vein of airing them in order to review the arguments against them, as John Stuart Mill advised be done with repugnant ideas. There comes a point where all will agree that we have made at least some progress in social history and, in the interests of time and energy, need not revisit issues that have been decided.

The problem is in deciding when an issue has been settled. If tens of millions of people believe something we find to be wrong can it really be not worth discussing anymore?

I went to college at a place where ppl really loved to argue that women's place was in submission to men, and that women shouldn't be allowed to lead groups of mixed genders, wear pants, etc. So maybe that's why I think you all are not understanding the exhaustion of fighting this shit over and over like it's your job to be a sounding board for ppl who aren't affected by whether their argument is true or not.

i feel the same way but joy karega is still on staff at oberlin so colleges need to decide whether they are or aren't a place for "all speech" no matter how offensive

there's a distinction between "if someone wants to say this stupid thing then fine they can and people can pay attention" and "we specifically are creating a venue for people to listen to this horseshit and treat it as something that is potentially not horseshit" and it gets eclipsed, which i think is malicious.

because if people say "ok maybe it's not a great use of time and resources to ask people to take this horseshit seriously" then that turns into "censorship" when of course it isn't.

there are plenty of things that you can find a loony person spouting somewhere near a college campus. for example, that judgment day came 30 years ago and people just haven't realized it yet. or that the moon landing was a hoax.

that doesn't mean that you then invite the shouty person in rags soaked with their own urine to then give a commencement lecture.

or that the person who says "maybe don't do that" is like censorious

More to the point, the claim that a college campus should be a locus of absolutely unfettered free speech is a pose. There are certain opinions and topics which an enlightened society can today justifiably exclude from discussion.

Opinions and topics?

No university any of us would want to be associated with would entertain "free speech" in favor of genocide, slavery, or withdrawing women’s right to vote, even in the vein of airing them in order to review the arguments against them, as John Stuart Mill advised be done with repugnant ideas.

I wouldn't mind attending a university where we looked at why people in the 18th century thought slavery was a good idea?

There comes a point where all will agree that we have made at least some progress in social history and, in the interests of time and energy, need not revisit issues that have been decided.

I dunno I find reading about the Great Schism quite interesting and that was in about 1000 ad

Think this person doesn't understand what the history department is for, and envisions a college rather as a series of platforms where people advocate for things and other people counter-advocate?

I thought I was going to agree with them when they said 'the claim that a college campus should be a locus of absolutely unfettered free speech is a pose' - I assumed what followed would be about how you're never going to get total freedom of speech because always there's going to be one party with less command of English, less ability to put their story across in newspapers, or a point of view no-one involved in the discussion has thought of because it's not theirs, etc.

Anyway I think the idea that the whole of society looks at certain ideas and says 'right, this is done' and just agrees not to go over old ground anymore is wrong. Too many different people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLlTlYfqQV4

Not a current event. Just remembered this old and it made me think of you guys.

'No university any of us would want to be associated with would entertain "free speech" in favor of genocide, slavery, or withdrawing women’s right to vote, even in the vein of airing them in order to review the arguments against them, as John Stuart Mill advised be done with repugnant ideas.

I wouldn't mind attending a university where we looked at why people in the 18th century thought slavery was a good idea?'

Sure, and I can't imagine a course on the topic that wouldn't discuss or critique those ideas. You're conflating teaching with the issue of whether student organisations should ban certain speakers or groups from their events. To give another example, banning fascist groups from campus hasn't stopped anybody teaching about Nazism.

http://qz.com/687395/venmo-is-turning-our-friends-into-petty-jerks/

Venmo

not a whole lot of new stuff 4 ppl diligently following this thread but nyer's take on the sensitive college phenomenon:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges

worth noting:

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/160530_a19708-690.jpg

Had to stop reading at the lukewarm green juice yoga contextualisation, it hadnt been explicitly judgemental enough so i bailed.

Under a previous ideal, one that drew on terms such as “affirmative action,” students like Eosphoros and Bautista would have been made to feel lucky just to be in school. Today, they are told that they belong there, but they also must take on an extracurricular responsibility: doing the work of diversity. They move their lives to rural Ohio and perform their identities, whatever that might mean. They bear out the school’s vision. In exchange, they’re groomed for old-school entry into the liberal upper middle class. An irony surrounds the whole endeavor, and a lot of students seemed to see it.

“Oberlin does a really good job of analyzing intersectionality in the classroom—even in discussions, people are aware of who’s talking, who’s taking up space,” Kiley Petersen, a junior, told me. “But there’s a disconnect in trying to apply these frames of intersectionality and progressive change to departments and this school as a whole.” Some students have sought their own solutions. Earlier this year, a sophomore, Chloe Vassot, published an essay in the college paper urging white students like her to speak up less in class in certain circumstances. “I understand that I am not just an individual concerned only with comfort but also a part of a society that I believe will benefit from my silence,” she wrote. She told me that it was a corrective for a system that claimed to value marginalized people but actually normalized them to a voice like hers.

This is good stuff imo

“We’re asking to be reflected in our education,” Adams cuts in. “I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!” She shrugs incredulously. “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”

this on the other hand is a nightmare

I think some of the quotes from students that are supposed to come across as reasonable, earned dissatisfaction with the system just come across as thoroughly petulant to me. Obviously I had a lot easier time empathizing with the old white people in the article but like, I was an angry kid in college! I was right about most of the stuff I was angry about! The way to fix any of those things is NOT to pitch a fit and leave.

Also nobody gives a shit if you stay up until 2 am and then go to class at 9 am the next day and do that over and over and over. You are a senior. Regularly getting five or six hours of sleep is good stuff for a grown up.

Eosphoros' analogy of trigger warnings to nutrition labels is a good one.

(to be clear, I did pitch a fit, and left) (we were still right about the shit that was fucked up)

i liked the new yorker piece. my own concern with these developments (and im not overly concerned about them) is the extent to which, for all their talk of being political, how little these students seem to value the political--politics as (schmittian) conflict, compromise, etc. they seem to have very little tolerance at all for the political as a distinct sphere in the social life of modernity (they speak of how "tired" they are of it--arent we all!) and seem to want to be done with it, to "solve it," leave the country, etc. (go where you want, and politics will find you, however) and so while i wouldnt go so far as to say they are anti-democratic they are definitely against the conflictual political basis of liberal democracy. i think you can see this in the emphasis on "activism" rather than politics--it's clear which side of that distinction is the pure or immune one--everything else is tainted with power, "capitalism," etc. activism is the way out, the way out of a despoiling and frustrating politics and towards some kind of self-affirming purity of intent and freedom.

in some roundabout way this represents the hidden heart of the enlightenment political project as the achievement of an immune and absolute moral basis for criticisms of society, politics, etc. (if you follow koselleck..)

similarly with the complaints that sound probably hella bizarroworld to people far outside these circles - 'i'm doing all this work being radical or being oppressed, i should be getting paid for it', and 'my education should be meeting every need i insist on the legitimacy of and should not waste any time on anything i reject' (that one's more perennial, but has a new tone to it).

for the former the older traditions of civic engagement, religious service, literal moral action in the sense of selfless help to the worst off, are maybe sufficiently distant/broken now that it's practically impossible to conceive of engaging in radical work if it does not directly benefit you personally (no surprise when much of it is caught up in identity-construed politics), so that there's an enormous amount of resentment and recrimination circulating around the work.

for the latter there's some residual acceptance of self-education as a thing, within the shell of the more traditional idea that in education you and 'your' culture meet up and wrangle, with some give to the process contingent upon your serious and passionate engagement in it, mostly to be made good later as the byways of culture and knowledge-production feed back into the university (so maybe 10, 20, 50 years later, education has been slightly remade in the direction of you and your cohort, the concerns that caused you friction with the formal education you received). but it's not really self-education, in that it still addresses itself to institutions and their credentialing/legitimizing function but claims the right/power to detail the terms of the education to be given.

perform their identities

is this English

I'm guessing it's meant to mock Butler ideas of gender as performance.

All identity is performance.

all hatcats are cats

The New Yorker article kind of beggars belief, writing about Oberlin as is this stuff was brand new and changing the place. They INVENTED this shit.

I think I instinctively reject all this 'students are safe space censors' stuff because of the sneer it's presented with.

the interesting thing is the article sort of does highlight how the strange-looking demands of the students are an aspect of them actually taking the promises of the campuses seriously. on their own they're strange demands. as responses to precisely the claims of campuses they make sense, and point to this gap between the rhetoric of the campuses and what they actually do, and it would be great if more coverage picked up on that.

i forget if we discussed this robin kelley piece from the boston review on this thread (maybe it was the other?)

feels germane https://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle

i keep wanting to start a thread about the collapse of academia. i think even if these students' specific demands are unreasonable or seem silly they are being made within institutions that are deeply + catastrophically flawed. i'm not sure exactly how to connect seemingly disparate phenomena like the abuse + poverty of adjuncts + TA's, the reams of superficial jargon-laden worthless critical theory from celebrity academics, students making bizarre demands, the rise of activism academia as a replacement for scholarship, the funding crises and exploitation of students through student loans and obscene tuition spikes... but they all seem to be a part of a similar thing - an institution that has become completely dysfunctional.

Also stop charging ppl to learn hobbies and opinions