Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

A lot of the letters to the old Ethicist column struck me as what I'd retroactively term humblebrags.

I went looking for this and didn't find it

sorry JRN, I was thinking of this passage: It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives). Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative.

last sentence is utter garbage

One thing that's going on here is a clash of intuition/experience about how the word "fact" is used. Sometimes I use it in reference to things that no one is a position to prove, it seems natural to me, and no one objects. Other people do this too. I guess that's less true in your experience.

Another thing I've been reluctant to go into is what "prove" means in this context. Very few things can be proven in the strict sense, and the less strict you want to be about proof, the blurrier status of fact becomes on your view, the more satisfying a rhetorical-force-not-meaning explanation of the connection between fact and "proof" becomes.

I think you could come up with a plausible fact/opinion distinction suitable for second-graders that would please McBrayer really easily. You could say facts are things that are true, and opinions are beliefs that we can't prove (we can agree that second graders don't need to get into the vagaries of what exactly "prove" means). Then you could give examples that would track the common sense distinction without asking the kids to classify moral claims as opinions (and opinions as non-facts). That would do the trick.

I don't see McBrayer suggesting that children should be taught that moral facts are just like scientific facts. It seems to me like he's saying (1) that kids shouldn't be taught that moral beliefs belong to the realm of opinion where opinion is thought of as strictly distinct from fact and (2) the latter approach is especially confusing when the same institution is trying to inculcate certain moral values in its students.

In other words, it's not that thoroughgoing moral realism should be part of the grade school curriculum, but rather that a confusing distinction that biases kids against that kind of realism shouldn't be a part of the grade school curriculum.

It hadn't actually occurred to me that McBrayer might be a religiously-motivated philosopher when I first read this. Looking at his website now, it seems that's probably true. But there are plenty of atheist moral realist philosophers, and I encounter those more often than the religious kind. That might explain why I didn't have the allergic reaction to the article that some others did. Moral realism is a hard sort of view to defend, but then I think every view is hard to defend.

I'm not gonna get into this but Οὖτις, whether "proof is required for facts" is a pretty widely-debated philosophical point; I guess "garbage" is just ILX hyperbole but at any rate it's not obviously wrongheaded to think that something can be true but could never be proved (by an agent of our cognitive type at least; let's leave gods out of this). A classic example is whatever is happening on the other side of a black hole: we can never verify it one way or the other, so does that mean that there's no fact of the matter of what's happening over there?

ah fuck why I am getting into this

lollllll

xxp I agree that "if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative" is a bad inference. But the first part of that passage distinguishes truth from proof, not truth from fact.

What is this thread about exactly?

creeps

http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1310-liberals-are-stifling-intellectual-diversity-on-campus

the terrific Sarah Jaffe:

Being offended is not in itself political. “What is political,” Cross writes, is the way that racist ideas contribute to systemic violence, the way transphobic language acts as “the spearpoint of violence against trans women, used to justify it and all but ensure such crimes will be repeated.” We are not talking about offense. We are talking about actual harm and lost life.

As Sara Ahmed points out, making arguments turn on hurt feelings is an excellent way to cover up the actual mechanisms of power at work.

hat we've seen too often lately is the feelings of one or a small group of people being substituted for an actual understanding of harm and of power. And the people whose feelings get aired in public and taken seriously are often those who already have a level of power to begin with.

For women in particular, the ways we have been limited in public discourse and action have shaped the very writing and actions we take to challenge sexist structures. As Mary Beard noted in The London Review of Books, women historically were allowed to speak publicly on two subjects: “First … as victims and as martyrs—usually to preface their own death,” and “second … women could legitimately rise up to speak—to defend their homes, their children, their husbands or the interests of other women.”

We can either detail our own victimhood, or we can speak about the victimhood of other women. (It is unfortunate that Beard, who makes this point so well, signed on to a letter in The Guardian which itself is an excellent example of feelings-as-politics.)

We see this in what Phoebe Maltz Bovy calls “feelings journalism”: writers “making an argument based on what they imagine someone else is thinking, what they feel may be another person’s feelings.” The offspring of the personal essay, feelings journalism substitutes reporting on facts, systems, even asking people about their situation, with an emotional appeal. It takes up the victimhood of others, without even asking them if they consider themselves victims.

As Maltz Bovy notes, feelings journalism arose from economic constraints on the media industry; budget cutbacks and the accelerated 24-hour news cycle online lead to a demand for content that simply can't be filled by costly reporting. It is itself a structural issue. The feelings evoked by such pieces drive the clicks that pay the bills, and the writers themselves are usually underpaid (or unpaid).

Whatever the cause, though, the result has been an individualizing of political issues, a narrowing of our understanding. As I wrote in For Love or Money, a chapbook I co-authored with Melissa Gira Grant, “When we center our own feelings about something that’s happening to someone else, we lose all potential for solidarity.”

What we end up with instead is a politics of pity and charity; endless articles in newspapers and magazines about the abject misery of the poor and handwringing about what “we” should do about it. Gira Grant argues in For Love or Money that tears become a substitute for the hard work of political organizing. “Weeping, from a safe distance. Weeping that somehow isn’t also read as a form of objectification.”

As for the people who are the objects of all this feeling, well, their voices continue to simply be wiped out of the conversation. Sydette Harry brings up the example of Janay Rice, whose wishes after the video of her then-fiancé assaulting her made news were continually ignored. The NFL, which employs Rice’s now-husband, hired “domestic violence advisers” but, Harry writes, “This major step to ‘address issues’ still hinges on making a Black woman’s personal affairs heartbreakingly public and assuring that no one who represents her voice—which has asked for very different things than advocacy—will be heard.”

http://www.damemagazine.com/2015/03/02/are-we-mistaking-feelings-politics

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/03/10/no-a-public-university-may-not-expel-students-for-racist-speech/

on the expelled oklahoma frat students

is expulsion a first amendment issue? huh.

public university = state funding

yeah idk surely there's room for rules of comportment in any such institution that needn't be held to constutional level challenge?

YU had a big controversy a few years ago about allowing an LGBT club on campus. They didn't want to but were federally mandated bc they received fed money. They are otherwise a private institution so much more w a state university

Last sentences of WAPO article show that argument hinges on just-because-U-receives-public-funding,-it's-an-arm-of-the-government. Argument is nonsense.

You could also interpret the speech as a violation of the student conduct code of OU, which I actually looked up today bc I am ridiculous

http://www.ou.edu/content/dam/studentlife/documents/AllCampusStudentCode.pdf

yeah i think the state funding thing is kind of far reaching to be used in WAPO 'expert's context.

xp why nonsense? i've personally seen it come up in other cases and was seemingly accepted. (nb it could be that the threat of the fed withdrawing funding was so severe that the universities complied even tho it might not have stood up in court)

You unlicensed lawyers should really read the link he provided with the case citations:
http://www.volokh.com/posts/1172536284.shtml

If it's "nonsense" then SCOTUS and its children have been on some nonsense for 30+ years

Volokh is a dick but he is in fact an expert

as an unlicensed lawyer i wont bother my arse but nice tude

http://studentactivism.net/2013/02/04/expelled-student-activist-wins-50k-court-judgment-against-university-president/

a similar case but on the righteous side

As an administrator at a public university, I've seen similar speech vs conduct argument come up before (and faculty/staff aren't protected like students are). It's a legal muddle. My instinct tells me that these guys shouldn't have been expelled for speech b/c they uttered no fighting words but the use of the "hostile working environment" defense probably alludes to their student code of conduct, the bible for these institutions and mine.

Okay "nonsense" is a little strong. Sue me, lawyers.

(I find what is protected and unprotected speech a bit strange). Maybe the U wouldn't have a good legal defense in this case. Maybe it was still a good idea to do what they did, considering all factors. Might be a trade-off.

It feels really weird to me that you can sing happy songs about lynching black people, and not be expelled. Like, clearly that creates a 'hostile' environment? Also, allegedly, SAE Cornell killed a black student during a hazing ritual in 2011.

Basically, expell all frat-members.

First Amendment, man, and a generation's worth of rulings.

Also, allegedly, SAE Cornell killed a black student during a hazing ritual in 2011.

well I think this violates many amendments and laws

Like I said, my instinct tends to embrace an absolutist embrace of the First Amendment: it'd make no sense to write an amendment protecting citizens from governments' infringement of speech if governments infringed on disgusting speech. But courts have carved exceptions, and many universities' "hate speech" codes haven't been challenged. But using a student code of conduct to punish students is another question.

(I'm well aware btw that until the 1920s SCOTUS did not recognize that the Bill of Rights applied to the states)

Well, it's not that they should be criminally prosecuted, but the idea that because the university is public, it should allow students to sing about lynching other students? That seems weird to me. That does not seem to be protecting students?

How do they reconcile that song with their ridiculous "True Gentleman" creed?

Like, it feels like there must be some kind of Title IX-like loophole that would allow universities to expell students who sing about killing other students, regardless of first amendment.

there is

again, it has to do with creating a hostile learning environment

I don't know enough about US law, or care enough about these racist assholes, to have a firm opinion but surely there are disciplinary options in between "allowing students to sing about lynching other students" and expulsion.

Flogging

There we go. The sensible compromise.

look at all these ilxor creepy liberals trying to suppress these students' free speech >:|

if we'd done better job they might still be enrolled lol

wow, three different buffoons on the morning joe show blamed it on all the rap music. best dumb tv pundit stuff in a while, think I'll even watch the daily show & see if it gets covered.

Often people blame 'the culture' without considering that 'the culture' they are talking about might just be something they themselves are making up on the news.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-calling-academic-freedom-stanley-fish

At this point in his career, Fish is as much a legal theorist as he is an English professor (he’s been teaching in law schools since the mid-1980s), and it’s his contention in his latest book that “[ a ]cademic freedom is rhetorically strong but legally weak. Indeed, it is not at all clear that academic freedom has any substantial presence in the law.” But Versions of Academic Freedom is not, as one might expect, an attempt to strengthen the legal standing of the concept; Fish’s project is less about finding a new way to defend academic freedom than it is about defining and debunking what most working professors seem to think “academic freedom” means. On what grounds do claims for academic freedom rest? Why is it a good thing and what would academic life look like without it?

In search of an answer, Fish identifies five schools of academic freedom, “plotted on a continuum that goes from right to left.” (It’s worth pointing out that this ideological framing is Fish’s; I would argue that there are left and right versions of all of the positions he describes.) At the conservative end of the spectrum, we have the “It’s just a job” school (Fish’s own position), which holds that, “[ r ]ather than being a vocation or holy calling, higher education is a service that offers knowledge and skills to students who wish to receive them.” Thus, “academics are not free in any special sense to do anything but their jobs.” Second is the “For the common good” school—the mainstream position in the American academy today—which insists that academic freedom has special value to a democratic society; Fish traces it back to a founding document, the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure (drafted by Arthur O. Lovejoy and John Dewey, among others). Third is the “Academic exceptionalism or uncommon beings” school, which essentially treats academics as an elite class with special privileges. Fourth is the “Academic freedom as critique” school, which finds the real value of the academy in the “ruthless criticism of everything that exists”; fifth, and most radical, is the “Academic freedom as revolution” school, which travels further down the same road by advocating not only the critique but the abolition of existing social structures.

http://features.columbiaspectator.com/eye/2015/03/12/left-and-lefter/

“Left and Lefter: What does it mean to be a liberal activist at Columbia?”

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/03/berkeley-bans-intifada

actually, a hashtag, 'dintifada'

Following up on Daniel Mael’s claim that Sumayyah Din promoted “the murder of innocent men, women and children as part of her campaign platform,” I asked Din if she had any plans to inflict violence on campus.

Haha, no. I can confidently say I have no plans to inflict any violence towards any groups on campus. I would never want to carry or condone any message of violence or hatred. In fact, my campaign is themed with a central dogma of love, solidarity, and unity.

haha, no. lol college

There seems to be a big back and forth in the UC system between the Israeli divestment crowd and the jews.. and since these kids are in lol college it gets really stupid

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-allegations-of-anti-israel-sentiments-rock-uc-campuses--20150307-story.html