Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

lmao that reedquest post is amazing

“Every person in the room was upset by the comments he had made, and by his general attitude for the whole semester,” says Savery.

Conference member Tom Maude-Griffin ‘18 says: “The decision to ban him from the conference was virtually unanimous. There were two guys who vocalized issues with banning him… but neither actually said in the conference that they did not agree with the decision.”

According to Savery, True had made other unsettling contributions to the conference this semester, including a comment about Theocritus that “lower class people didn’t have the ability to create art” and a comment about how “we shouldn’t blame the people who were responsible for the Holocaust… because they didn’t know any better.”

Maude-Griffin says that True’s behavior started out only “a little bit patronizing” and then escalated from there over the course of the semester.

“As soon as we started discussing Aristotle he said how did not believe that people who were drunk could not be held responsible for their actions, and similarly (in his line of logic), that racists could not be blamed for their actions because they had ‘never been taught otherwise,’” Maude-Griffin recalls.

The week after True’s Theocritus comment about social class and artistic capability, Maude-Griffin says that True “began the class abruptly and loudly in an angry tone, reading the Honor Principle stating how no student should face a hostile environment, and demanding an apology of only female members of the class despite the equally strong reaction by the male ones.”

Savery, taking into account the conversation he had with his Hum 110 conference and his conversations with True, made the decision that True could not return to the conference. Instead, Savery suggested that True could receive credit for the class by writing the remaining assigned papers, completing the final exam, and optionally attending Pancho’s office hours to discuss the readings.

True does acknowledge that things he said may have made some students in his conference uncomfortable, but emphasizes both that he was polite and that some level of discomfort is inherent in an education that is supposed to make people question their own beliefs.

“I apologize that I caused survivors of sexual assault to feel uncomfortable with my views, but the views were in no way threatening or hostile,” he states in his online petition. “I did not use any obscenities in class, I did not declare any fighting words, I did not commit perjury, I did not blackmail anyone in the class, I did not engage in incitement to imminent lawless action, I did not engage in ‘true threats’, and I did not engage in solicitations to commit crimes.”

i have no idea what standard of "disrespectful or abusive" this crap meets but if i was this prof OR these students i would be so fucking relieved this kid was 86'd. like, who can talk about anything with this kind of bullshit going on.

xxxp that's just it though, throwing 'safety' in there like that is a non-sequitur. i've had a student who disappeared from class due to apparently mental health problems, and had the police come around looking for him for causing disruptions in other classes. i've had a student who didn't know how to fend off an overly aggressive/clingy/inappropriate classmate's sexual overtures outside class and became afraid of coming to class as a result. there, safety makes sense. but if there was significant discomfort around non-abusive, in-class, school-procedure-appropriate _discussion_, in the course of a presumably short ~16-week college course, how is the educationally and intellectually appropriate response to it anything other than 'more discussion'?

i don't think it's even right like mordy (less than fully seriously) suggests, that the alternatives are TRUTH or PERSONAL RESUME EMBETTERMENT, obviously the way that the 'safe space' criticism has a foothold is that it appeals to the educational quality of the student's experiences in the institution. but the nature of the idea of 'an education' that backs that appeal is unclear here.

the prof kicked him out WITH the offer to do a whole bunch of 1-on-1 work for him FOR CREDIT just to keep him from bothering other students.

like, who is putting whom in the gulag here

xp to Mordy: I don't think those are the only two options. I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that a certain example of "controversial" speech may not be appropriate in every environment. And especially when it's not teaching anyone anything new, and its only effect is to elevate the speaker into public view again and again and feed some other need that person has. His need for therapy and personal growth is not more important than the time and education and agency of every other person in the class.

i guess my concern is that i can imagine some theoretical controversial speech that is deemed inappropriate + is suppressed for less than valid reasons. who do we make the authority about censoring speech in classrooms? can a professor unilaterially decide what is or isn't okay in their classroom? what if they decide a particular political ideology is 'triggering' for them (like that professor who found the anti-abortion protestors triggering)? and i feel positive that we shouldn't be making it a democratic vote in the classroom otherwise anyone who has vaguely right-leaning opinions is going to be at risk for falling afoul of the groupthink. maybe if this was sent up to the dean and they decided that this was controversial speech that shouldn't be tolerated in the classroom (or if there was a specific rule against, eg, holocaust denialism - such as in europe). but throwing someone out bc of "fear of safety" seems way too open to abuse to me.

in some of the other (fuller?) quotes of student reax, they make it sound like he was saying, i dunno, jenny holzer style, 'racism should come as no surprise', 'yeahp unquestioning participation in systems of oppression wiiiill give ya things like the holocaust'. are those… absurd things to hear from a black student? given what's been reported i'm not even clear why his classmates were offended by them, rather than at least puzzled by or curious about them, as opinions.

nb i should clarify i'm not a fan of europe's holocaust denialism laws but at least there's some consistency by having censorship delineated and enshrined in law/written policy

xpost
idk, it's basically impossible to interpret "we shouldn’t blame the people who were responsible for the Holocaust… because they didn’t know any better." without context, though it's not a statement I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt

I doubt this guy is a nazi. What if his argument was something like "all human behavior is deterministic and free will is bogus therefore..."

i really feel like this is a symptom of the *reduced* power of the professoriate, which in earlier days could run their classrooms as petty fiefdoms (lord knows how bad that could be).

the professor did him a slight favor by (and probably had no real choice but to) taking his expressed views as being seriously held by a serious person and not just getting schoolmastery on him and telling him to quit being an annoying little attention-whoring shittalker

"and telling him to quit being an annoying little attention-whoring shittalker" << would have a lot more respect for this choice

xp
I don't think he's a Nazi either. what he seems like is a troll/shit-stirrer with a martyr complex who liked to say things that would piss people off, so unlike j. I do see why his classmates would be offended

ha, i see we agree on that anyway

in my experience 'i don't think that's right but we need to move on, you're welcome to come talk about it with me in my office' does everything it needs to

but this guy's actual argument is "it is tough to be a man in college these days". he's a straight up 19 year old "just saying what everyone else is thinking" attention-deprived troll. he skeeved out everyone.

xps goole otm.

well, that's his argument after he got booted! bound to be hella bad faith and anguished gibberish coming from him from here on out.

https://www.change.org/p/reed-college-restore-jeremiah-josias-luther-george-true-to-his-humanities-110-conference-2

from the professor's email to him:

They, and others, do not feel comfortable being in the same classroom with you; not only because of this topic but because of other things you have said to people personally or on facebook in which you seem to undermine women's abilities in general. The entire conference without exception, men as well as women, feel that your presence makes them uncomfortable enough that they would rather not be there if you are there, and they have said that things you have said in our conference have made them so upset that they have difficulty concentrating in other classes.

from reedquest:

In a statement about his own character, True says, “I believe that I am an emotionally capable, intellectually gifted, cutting wit, hell of a person. I believe I have experienced more trauma and suffering and pain in my life than many of these, well frankly, middle class white girls at Reed could ever know in their lives.”

True distinguishes himself as a “freedom feminist,” differentiating himself from what he calls “toxic radical feminism,” which “speaks out against rape culture at the expense of men.”

literally salivating at the thought gamergate getting a hold of this, if they haven't already

yes it is making the right-wing concern-troll online media rounds now

"freedom feminism" was coined by Christina Hoff Sommers so, they basically already have

man, how old is he? 19? what a way to spend your spring. totally unsympathetic as i am, damn, poor kid.

well someone will buy him reddit gold so he's probably in hog heaven

what does that even do for you

intellectually gifted, cutting wit, hell of a person

ha idk! I just know it's a thing reddit people buy for reddit people. xp

j otm on all this. ~kinda~ wonder how earnest the prof was in class. ime as a humanities prof it's better to treat all undergrad classroom discussions as playacting, so that you get out just ahead of the weird views yourself and so take away oxygen from students who want to play those hard. you usurp their hoped-for surprise that way. it's true that your students might think you're a mixed-up weirdo but so what

I don't think generalizing about profs & classrooms based on REED is a good idea though

also both the student and the prof are African-American which means there are other things going on here too

Good points all around, but leaning toward mordy’s & j’s takes here, especially re (mis)use of “feeling unsafe.”

imo one problem with a lot of seemingly well-intentioned speech-policing on campus (e.g. re triggering) is that a) it doesn’t discourage but actually stimulates attention-seeking trollery, like academic performance art and b) what it does discourage is intellectually productive contentious discussion. E.g. out of the subset of students who genuinely (not trollingly) question or demur on some preponderant politico-ideological campus views, or just question some claim or use of statistical data, the reasonable/ diplomatic/ sensible ones are more likely to stay quiet and avoid the circus. So tough debate is too often run (or derailed) by egocentric drama-addicts. What could be an interesting discussion escalates to ridiculousness.

As a side note, to be a devil’s advocate, the characterization of his other contributions to class may be more tendentious than accurate. E.g. “As soon as we started discussing Aristotle he said how did not believe that people who were drunk could not be held responsible for their actions, and similarly (in his line of logic), that racists could not be blamed for their actions because they had ‘never been taught otherwise’.” Thing is, these are *precisely* some of the problems and cases which Aristotle discusses in the Ethics, to figure out what it is (or what it means) for something to be voluntary/ involuntary, or for someone to be responsible/ not responsible. Whether or not he “believed” these theses, they’re completely on topic, explicitly discussed in Aristotle’s text.

good discussion ITT but this guy shoulda been beaten outta this class he's a total ass

gonna put a big ol uhhhhh on this one

http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/19/male-students-non-pc-views-on-rape-stati

read the very last bit

Ugh hope that's the last we hear of this kid

it does sound to me like the professor lost control of their classroom, or at the least lost control of the messaging about what happened in the classroom.

i mean that said, they have the absolute ability to kick people out if those people are getting in the way of everyone else learning -- one would just hope that the better the teacher, the less that should even be a possibility.

they tell you that. i've never had to kick anyone out (the one time i might have tried was in my very first class, and i didn't quite know how to pull off dressing down a couple of serial class disruptors well enough to induce them to leave). but i've always wondered what exactly you're supposed to do if the student says, no way, i'm not going anywhere. students tend to defer magically to your authority, and if it's an actual class situation, i would suppose there might be some amount of shame and flight-response connected to being called out in front of everyone and asked to leave for their sake. but students are equally well acquainted with completely disregarding the teacher's authority, so who really gives a shit if someone is telling them that by the power vested in them by the university of so-and-so, they're kicking a student out of class?

Based on what's been reported so far, kicking the kid out of the discussion portion of the class seems entirely unjustified. And the suggestion that he was making others "feel unsafe" should only have been made if he was behaving in an actionably threatening manner. Otherwise, it amounts to a soft form of slander, a handy tool for ostracism of the inconvenient.

So, a jerky student maybe voiced some unwelcome/trollish views in an open classroom discussion. If he was dominating the room, then it was the professor's job to moderate and control the discussion. If he continued to behave disruptively and wouldn't respect the professor's authority, then that would have been a good reason, after an appropriate series of disciplinary steps, remove him from the conference. Not because he gave voice to unpopular views, but because he made it difficult for others to productively contribute.

I've had to ask a student to leave in two cases, one for medical reasons, and, yes, one rebellious group (an early morning summer course) suddenly deferred to my authority.

i.e. s.clover otm:

it does sound to me like the professor lost control of their classroom

I want to go to where all you guys went to school it sounds amazing these free open discussion journeys towards the truth. I went to a 4-year college and a 2-year college and both of them were just sitting and listening to the teacher and then taking tests.

Also this is a private school. I can't go into McDonalds and start projecting videos of chickens in cages.

Is $55k not a lot of money to you truth-seekers?

Do I get a discount on my liberal arts tuition if there is a vocal holocaust denier in the class?

I'm sorry if I sound crude here. I am bias because I take great offense at his insistence that the lower class cannot make great art.

^ Several of the things he's accused of saying strike me as blatant devil's advocacy, positions taken for purposes of inquiry & debate. And, as mentioned upthread wr2 Aristotle & moral culpability, likely germane to the texts discussed.

Oh great another performance artist.

Maybe he could change the conversation to aether as a proposed fifth element.

yeah, maybe

Maybe he could change the conversation to aether as a proposed fifth element.

Depends on context: e.g. in a philosophy of science course or any theory course reading e.g. Thomas Kuhn, this might not be amiss.

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/19/male-students-non-pc-views-on-rape-stati

goole linked that only a few posts ago

Reason's history on race relations might influence how willing an African-American student is to engage with them in good faith, tbf. Not that this kid doesn't sound like a nightmare on all other fronts.