Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Fifteen to twenty years ago, books like Wendy Brown’s States of Injury (1995) and Anna Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (2001) asked readers to think about how grievances become grief, how politics comes to demand injury and how a neoliberal rhetoric of individual pain obscures the violent sources of social inequity. But, newer generations of queers seem only to have heard part of this story and instead of recognizing that neoliberalism precisely goes to work by psychologizing political difference, individualizing structural exclusions and mystifying political change, some recent activists seem to have equated social activism with descriptive statements about individual harm and psychic pain. Let me be clear – saying that you feel harmed by another queer person’s use of a reclaimed word like tranny and organizing against the use of that word is NOT social activism. It is censorship.

Let’s call an end to the finger snapping moralism, let’s question contemporary desires for immediately consumable messages of progress, development and access; let’s all take a hard long look at the privileges that often prop up public performances of grief and outrage; let’s acknowledge that being queer no longer automatically means being brutalized and let’s argue for much more situated claims to marginalization, trauma and violence.

there should be a [...] in between those 2 paragraphs

What does it mean when younger people who are benefitting from several generations now of queer social activism by people in their 40s and 50s (who in their childhoods had no recourse to anti-bullying campaigns or social services or multiple representations of other queer people building lives) feel abused, traumatized, abandoned, misrecognized, beaten, bashed and damaged? These younger folks, with their gay-straight alliances, their supportive parents and their new right to marry regularly issue calls for “safe space.” However, as Christina
Hanhardt’s Lambda Literary award winning book, Safe Space: Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, shows, the safe space agenda has worked in tandem with urban initiatives to increase the policing of poor neighborhoods and the gentrification of others. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence traces the development of LGBT politics in the US from 1965-2005 and explains how LGBT activism was transformed from a multi-racial coalitional grassroots movement with strong ties to anti-poverty groups and anti-racism organizations to a mainstream, anti-violence movement with aspirations for state recognition.

And, as LGBT communities make “safety” into a top priority (and that during an era of militaristic investment in security regimes) and ground their quest for safety in competitive narratives about trauma, the fight against aggressive new forms of exploitation, global capitalism and corrupt political systems falls by the way side.

Is this the way the world ends? When groups that share common cause, utopian dreams and a joined mission find fault with each other instead of tearing down the banks and the bankers, the politicians and the parliaments, the university presidents and the CEOs? Instead of realizing, as Moten and Hearny put it in The Undercommons, that “we owe each other everything,” we enact punishments on one another and stalk away from projects that should unite us, and huddle in small groups feeling erotically bonded through our self-righteousness.

“Neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multi-culturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power. It has long proved extremely difficult within the US left, for example, to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without offending the desire of political actors for individual freedom and for full recognition and expression of particular identities. Neoliberalism did not create these distinctions, but it could easily exploit, if not foment, them.” David Harvey's Brief History of Neoliberalism

http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-neoliberal-rhetoric-of-harm.html

There's another strain to Halberstam's polemic that pits professors against students on generational terms. Here is one generation who fought hard for queer rights; who never had a Gay/Straight Alliance in high school or a way to grow up both queer and normal. Who made careers out of queer studies while they watched their administrations professionalize and their faculties casualize, who teach at universities that cost $44,000 a year to attend.

A representative of this generation calls another a bunch of babies. (So they are: their infantilization has been enforced by the privatization of public goods, by debt, and by the destruction of good jobs. Reaching puberty earlier and earlier, likely due to environmental factors, they achieve financial independence later and later, if ever. All their own fault, no doubt.)

Halberstam kind of makes a big deal of this generational gap, pointing to the "friendly adults" who erroneously install "narratives of damage that they [the youth] themselves may or may not have actually experienced." It's as if young people are stealing an earlier generation's trauma, claiming it as their own when really they have it so good. In this bizarrely counterfactual linear temporality, the past is not only past but also dead, and you do not have the right to be traumatized by historical memory, only by things that have literally happened to you—even if you are eighteen and it's all—all—news to you. We (the older generation) were there, and are over it, and so you (the younger generation) should root yourselves entirely in the ameliorated present* and get over it, because it is over.

The result is an odd polemic against coddled millenials and their too-sensitive feelings, as if it were somehow ridiculous to be young and too sensitive, or for that matter, old and too sensitive. This cross-generational call to "get over it" is an example of what Sara Ahmed has called "overing": "In assuming that we are over certain kinds of critique, they create the impression that we are over what is being critiqued." It's particularly perverse to demand that young people be "over it," when they have perhaps only just left their parents' homes, and have perhaps only recently come to any political consciousness at all. There's a very good reason college students aren't "over it"; they just got there. Have you met a college student? It's all, all new.

It is its own kind of shock to learn about how you have been historically, rather than personally, hated. It is not about "trauma" but about developing a political consciousness that is also historical, a fundamentally utopian impulse to exist in solidarity with the dead. There is, to be sure, a fine line between identifying with the past and appropriating it, but I think we can allow our students some leeway in figuring out where this line is, and not getting it right every time. Certainly grown-ups need the same leeway.

halberstam thing was so snide and shakily written but i guess i'm not surprised it made waves nor that it would turn up here

look, para 3, a primer on what humor is using monty python as an example, yeah

Couldn't get to grips with the halberstam thing beyond - 'The effect this text has on you, triggering you, is important but is still fixed on you, what about the wider community - if we fix things so that you always get a trigger warning, we could do that and still live in a world of gross inequality and suffering' - am I right, was that what he was saying?

caught some of this on the radio this morning:

“Freedom from Speech”: Speech Issues on College Campus
August 19, 2014

Hour One

Guests: Tim Burke and Greg Lukianoff

Over the past year, students at several colleges have called for “trigger warnings” to be added to syllabi to warn of potentially traumatic material. Also, there have been calls for higher scrutiny of “microaggressions” – subtle prejudices – that are used in everyday language. Additionally, several commencement speakers have had their invitations revoked because of protests from students and faculty members. In this hour of Radio Times, we’ll examine topics related to speech on college campuses with TIM BURKE, professor of history at Swarthmore College and author of the “Easily Distracted” blog, and GREG LUKIANOFF, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Lukianoff has a book out called 'Freedom from Speech': "Lukianoff analyzes numerous examples of the growing desire for "intellectual comfort," such as the rise of speech restrictions around the globe and the increasing media obsession of punishing "offensive" utterances, jokes, or opinions inside the United States. To provide a preview of where we may be headed, Lukianoff points to American college campuses where speakers are routinely disinvited for their opinions, where students increasingly demand "trigger warnings" for even classics like The Great Gatsby, and where students are told they cannot hand out even copies of the Constitution outside of "free speech zones." Lukianoff explains how increasingly global populations are arguing not for freedom of speech, but, rather, freedom from speech."

Long-term, and I know this sounds facetious but, I wonder if 'people who don't like having to negotiate systems of trigger warnings and sensitivities' are going to become one of those groups whose sensitivities are catered for in a system of trigger warnings and accommodations?

Will gladly defer to people who know more, but for example, wouldn't people who have autistic spectrum disorders really struggle in a system that penalised you for not providing trigger warnings?

I think it makes sense that people want freedom from speech now, and that this wasn't an issue in the past. With screens everywhere you turn, we are bombarded with so. much. information. and lots of people fantasize about dropping out altogether. I think it is in this environment that people have come to view information as assault. Even I, with my frenetic, hummingbirdlike mind want to slow stuff down from time to time, and take more active control over my information environment by cutting stuff out.

I know trigger warnings don't directly address this problem, but I think they speak to an anxiety that comes from living in the modern information environment.

xxxp you mean like "Trigger warning: Trigger warnings"?

good point, treeship. information overload has to be a factor here. also proximity.

one of the big questions for the 21st century, imo = how do non-homogeneous societies manage themselves, given ever-increasing population density, travel & communication opportunities, and access to a tidal wave of unfiltered information? one obvious answer = redefine social permissions so as to restrict things that might exacerbate tensions between groups. there's no nice, simple, ideologically "pure" defense for such an approach, at least none comparable to "all people should be free to say whatever they want," but it does make a certain kind of pragmatic sense.

for the record, i'm not advocating legislative speech restriction in the name of peace 'n' harmony, but i can easily see why less formally codified social rules might shift in that direction, things being what they are.

I think consent is important here ^

An agreement between people not to cross each other's lines just feels so different to an order coming down from above that you and they must not cross each other's lines

yeah, absolutely. but any shift even in loose social permissions will generate the sense among some that they're being unfairly restricted, even oppressed (e.g. conservative grousing about "political correctness").

also, the two things - social and legislative permissions - aren't so clearly distinct. when a society collectively demands something, it will rarely limits itself to non-legislative means of obtaining it. today's common agreements will likely form the foundation for tomorrow's laws.

"...it will rarely limits itself..."

i haven't been following this case too closely, of the newly hired uiuc prof whose job was retracted (against custom, and against the hiring department, by the higher-ups) because of his pro-palestine/anti-israel tweeting. consensus seems to have been pretty strongly with him and against the school, since the retraction seems to provide good grounds for an academic-freedom suit, and although the prof's employment hadn't been formally approved yet (so technically ok to retract?), no prof's employment customarily IS before they start their new jobs and move to new cities and begin teaching, so a retraction of this scale has a 'chilling effect'.

but ppl have been waiting for the school to justify themselves. here's the chancellor:

http://illinois.edu/blog/view/1109/115906

A pre-eminent university must always be a home for difficult discussions and for the teaching of diverse ideas. One of our core missions is to welcome and encourage differing perspectives. Robust – and even intense and provocative – debate and disagreement are deeply valued and critical to the success of our university.

As a university community, we also are committed to creating a welcoming environment for faculty and students alike to explore the most difficult, contentious and complex issues facing our society today. Our Inclusive Illinois initiative is based on the premise that education is a process that starts with our collective willingness to search for answers together – learning from each other in a respectful way that supports a diversity of worldviews, histories and cultural knowledge.

The decision regarding Prof. Salaita was not influenced in any way by his positions on the conflict in the Middle East nor his criticism of Israel. Our university is home to a wide diversity of opinions on issues of politics and foreign policy. Some of our faculty are critical of Israel, while others are strong supporters. These debates make us stronger as an institution and force advocates of all viewpoints to confront the arguments and perspectives offered by others. We are a university built on precisely this type of dialogue, discourse and debate.

What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them. We have a particular duty to our students to ensure that they live in a community of scholarship that challenges their assumptions about the world but that also respects their rights as individuals.

As chancellor, it is my responsibility to ensure that all perspectives are welcome and that our discourse, regardless of subject matter or viewpoint, allows new concepts and differing points of view to be discussed in and outside the classroom in a scholarly, civil and productive manner.

A Jewish student, a Palestinian student, or any student of any faith or background must feel confident that personal views can be expressed and that philosophical disagreements with a faculty member can be debated in a civil, thoughtful and mutually respectful manner. Most important, every student must know that every instructor recognizes and values that student as a human being. If we have lost that, we have lost much more than our standing as a world-class institution of higher education.

good response from t burke

http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2014/08/22/on-the-salaita-decision/

yes this is...relevant to my...interests

uggggggh

I am not troubled by the idea that an acceptance of all students as they come to you is an important professional standard. I would go even further than you do in your statement and suggest that persistent inability to accept and respectfully work with students and colleagues with many diverse views is not just a legitimate weight on hiring but should govern whether someone retains tenure. But you must not measure adherence to this standard by reading what scholars or intellectuals say or write in the public sphere, whether in formal publication or in social media.

Hmm, but if you can't use that to gauge what somebody's going to be like as a teacher, what can you use? Which question is sort of answered by this:

The proof is in the pudding: in how a professor teaches, in how they participate in the professional evaluation of other scholars, in how they execute their administrative duties. There are innumerable examples of faculty in the last fifty years whose intensely expressed public views had no impact on the professionalism of their work with students and colleagues.

Sort of answered.

But basing it on how they behave in class with students requires you to hire them first

FIRE are really creepy even tho they occasionally seem to come down on the right side of some things. on the whole they feel like some astroturfed koch/reason operation

http://jewishphilosophyplace.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/steven-salaita-uncivil-speech-obnoxious-speech-abusive-speech/

If anyone wrote this way about or addressed Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians, vilifying broad sectors of an entire community for its political commitments, he would have found his head on a platter, and rightly so.

Worth quoting this recent LGM blog post in nearly its entirety, as it bears directly on this little bit of sophistry:

You will be unsurprised that Glenn Reynolds has no problem with academics being fired for the political content of their Twitter feeds:

A FACULTY CANDIDATE WHO TALKED ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE THIS WAY WOULD BE UNEMPLOYABLE ANYWHERE. SAY IT ABOUT JEWS, THOUGH, AND IT’S CONTROVERSIAL. “Yet ad hominem attacks are also a BDS strategy that serves to silence opponents. Many faculty who believe the university made the right decision about Salaita are now unwilling to say so publicly.” BDS people have made clear by their actions that they are nasty antisemites who deserve no respect.

First of all, let us once again dispense with the silly idea that Salaitia was a mere “candidate,” despite having agreed to an offer and been scheduled to teach classes. By this logic, he could have been teaching for a month and not been hired. The trustee approval is pro forma; he was treated by the university as an employee, which he was. The idea that he wasn’t fired is such vacuous formalism it would embarrass proponents of the Hilbig litigation. He was fired.

So let’s consider another hypothetical. What if someone said “something like that” about, say, Palestinians? I happen to have a test case handy:

Dean Obeidallah @Deanofcomedy
.@instapundit I applaud ur honesty in cheering the death of Palestinian children.

Instapundit.com @instapundit
Follow
@Deanofcomedy If Palestinians acted civilized, no one would die. You are a mouthpiece for bloodthirsty savages.

Note here that Reynolds isn’t talking about Hamas, or Palestinian terrorists; he’s talking about Palestinans as a group. The evidence alleging anti-Semitism in Salaita’s tweets is far more ambiguous. (Indeed, I don’t think they constitute evidence that Salaita is anti-Semitic at all, although some of the tweets are hateful and indefensible even if they are not anti-Semitic.) It is being asserted that Salaita retweeting a tweet saying that a reporter’s story — not the reporter, the story — should have ended at the “point of a shiv” is a firable offense. Reynolds has called for the literal, not metaphorical, murder of Iranian nuclear scientists.

My position at the time of the latter incident is that Reynolds could not be fired for his statements based on the principles of academic freedom, and that applies to his new disgusting tweets as well. Reynolds himself, however, is happy to benefit from these protections but does not want them extended to people he disagrees with, which is a disgrace.

That does not really bear on the link I posted at all.

Of course it does. You can regularly find academics saying that and worse about Palestinians and Muslims all over Twitter and other outlets, every day, which puts the lie to the handwringing about "If anyone wrote this way about or addressed Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians, vilifying broad sectors of an entire community for its political commitments, he would have found his head on a platter, and rightly so" and all the surmising about separating someone's social media activity from who they are as a person.

(The use of "head on a platter" is particularly funny for LGM-related reasons as well.)

Glenn Reynolds is a very controversial figure who has received tons and tons of disapprobation. He has also, as far as I can tell, never said anything as damning as blaming Jews for anti-semitism (where he does not just make a generality about a group of people, but actively and directly promotes bigotry). If you can locate some reputable academics who have publicly approved of, eg, Islamophobia, I think you'd have a stronger case.

"very controversial figure"? he teaches law at tennessee, has a column in USA today. he's about as reputable as it gets for a conservative public intellectual

I guess my experience of him is colored by only ever reading about him on ILX and Crooked Timber, lol. (Didn't Glenn Greenwald used to tee off on him regularly when he was writing for Salon?)

ha, google//site:salon.com greenwald reynolds
About 212 results (0.18 seconds)

He has also, as far as I can tell, never said anything as damning as blaming Jews for anti-semitism

He just referred to every Palestinian as "bloodthirsty savages." And he doesn't just "teach law," he is a tenured senior faculty member.

blaming Jews for anti-semitism

This, of course, is not what Salaida did, unless we're going to go over the "'Zionist' does/does not mean the same as 'Jew' PICK ONE" thing again.

I don't have the details of the exact tweet but I recall reading something like "Israel makes antisemitism respectable."

Also does Dawkins still count as a "reputable academic?"

wait, so your proof that other ppl wouldn't similarly be fired/contract unapproved is from a guy with tenure?

he runs pjmedia, writes books that get reviewed outside the rightwing pastemill ghetto. he ain't drudge but he's a big deal

this isn't to excuse salaita's antisemitism (if that's what he is, i haven't looked into it myself tbh). it should not even be questionable to state that open hatred of palestinians and muslims generally can be done w/o much sanction on the right, and therefore treated as alien and controversial (at best) by the mainstream

xps

I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here! The tweet in question read: Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.

xxp Let's ask Ward Churchill just how much protection tenure revokes when the right wing gets its panties in a knot, shall we?

*tenure provides

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/08/a-very-letter-to-chancellor-wise-from-the-eminent-historian-natalie-zemon-davis.html

golly she sure is good

i don't have time to fully investigate the articles he links to here but this seems relevant to what we were discussing above re double standards:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/09/03/steven-salaita-more-than-just-an-obnoxious-tweeter/

But a lot of people are using him as an example of how academics with pro-Palestinian or “anti-Zionist” views are punished in American universities. This is laughable. For every Steve Salaita, there are a larger number of people interested in Middle East Studies who get rejected for academic jobs, or decline to go into academia to begin with, because they have pro-Israel views. As I noted several years back, top universities have found it necessary to create special “Israel Studies” programs and chairs because Departments of Middle Eastern Studies are so closed to anyone who wants to do objective, much less sympathetic, scholarship on Israel. That final link goes to a story about what passes for debate at the Middle East Studies Association: “Should we boycott all Israeli goods, products, services, and people, or should we exempt academics?” The vast majority of those who are agitating for Salaita on the grounds that political views shouldn’t affect academic appointments don’t care at all that MES programs are so one-sidedly hostile to Israel, and hire accordingly.

no, we're agitating b/c of faculty governance; i.e. it shouldn't matter what rich people who happen to have been named to the board of trustees think about an appointment

i'm not sure why someone who apparently exclusively writes about palestine/israel would be getting a tenure job in a native american studies program tbh, and this article suggests his scholarship is not so fantastic either. someone said early on that this makes the perfect 'freedom of speech' in academia case bc of how much salaita fails on every other merit.

because decolonialization

"fails on every other merit" : maybe you should be consulted on every faculty hire! would save us a lot of work. congrats on tenure btw

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ASteven%20Salaita

he fails on the merit 'actually seems to be a scholar in the field'

lol, what is "the field". like I don't have a clue what people in area studies do but I don't presume to judge its boundaries. I mean right wingers hate area studies generally so I get what's going on here

U of I actually has a Middle Eastern Studies dpt - I was scanning through the faculty and I've actually read some of Pitard's work on the Ugaritic Baal Cycle. I wonder why he didn't try to work in the actual department that fits his area of expertise.

don't force boundaries on him man