Kamala Harris: Enjoy The Long Weekend

[Dill]

(06-15-2021, 11:12 AM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: As for rest of your post, where you're holding up universities to be these bastions of free speech and that they should always be open to any and all discussion, I'm going to assume you haven't being paying attention these last few decades.
The title of Headmaster?  Removed, because people complained it had racial connotations.  (Forget the context)
Conservative student group books Ben Shapiro?  Speech is cancelled because some students claim to feel unsafe.  University bans him and threatens arrest if he steps on campus.
Harvard professor argues university shouldn't dictate rules for Halloween costumes.  Her reasoning is that students should police themselves and these decisions are important to their development.  Also argues it allows for discussion and the ability to learn from mistakes.  Husband, who is also a Harvard professor defends her against backlash.  She is fired and he is forced to resign.
Evergreen professor argues against a day that forbids "whites" from stepping on campus?  He was run off campus and was forced to resign.

Thanks for responding, Wes.  Yesterday, I overwrote my first response to you. Today I am going to reply in two abridged posts, first addressing the issue speech in academia.

For the record, I do not hold up universities as “bastions of free speech.” Modern research universities are, rather, supposed to be bastions of academic freedom. This means certain kinds of academic speech should be protected from political religious censure (hence the role of tenure), but not disciplinary*/academic. Because the goal is to foster free inquiry, “offensive” or “divisive” speech is tolerated to different degrees in different venues within academia—in graduate more than undergraduate classrooms, and faculty lectures more than commencement speeches, etc. Fostering that goal includes teaching students to tolerate different/divisive viewpoints and language too. In consequence, such speech is often tolerated to a greater degree in academia than elsewhere. But I have absolutely not asserted that universities “should always be open to any and all discussion.” All political/religious views do not have equal right to place at the table. Astronomy depts. don’t teach Ptolemaic astronomy.

That said, I turn to your examples: there is something unclear about your position regarding them, as all seem to show free speech obstructed on campus by people who, following Hollo, think “hate speech should not get a pass or a second chance”; and who, like you, wonder why the “haters” still have their jobs.   The examples are to establish that I “have not been paying attention these last few decades.” To what?  I guess you are trying to show that U.S. universities are not “bastions of free speech.”

Does the severely reduced Evergreen State example show that? That school had a traditional “Day of Absence/Day of Presence” ritual from the early ‘70s, based on the play in which Black people disappear from a Southern Community leaving a gaping hole in its labor/culture. On the “Evergreen Day of Absence” minorities were invited to off campus workshops to discuss racial issues. White people attended workshops on campus to reflect on the absence of their peers. Participation was voluntary, followed by a “Day of Presence” in which all the community came back together to celebrate unity.

In 2017, after Trump’s election, a student faculty committee of some 200 people decided that that year they would invert the ritual and whites would be invited off campus. Also, there was recognition of multiple identities. E.g., some could identify as both white and black, attend workshops on both sites. (Here is how the change in form was presented to students: http://www.cooperpointjournal.com/2017/04/10/day-of-absence-changes-form/.)

One white professor objected to the proposed racial role reversal in a campus email, saying “phenotype” should never determine who should be allowed to speak or be on a campus. Though the policy only “encouraged” people to follow the reversal, he characterized it as “force.” Some students later disrupted one of his classes shouting “racist,” a video of it went viral, and the professor, in turn, went on Tucker Carlson (bad move for a professor accused of racism).  The amplified protest drew far right groups to campus to protest. Students counter protested, some barricading a building demanding the administration act.

This is one of the few recent campus conflicts which has risen to a level commonly seen in the ‘60s. When the dust settled, some 80 students were disciplined and 6 campus staff resigned, including Rashida Love, “ringleader” of the PC anti-racists. https://crosscut.com/2017/12/evergreen-state-college-racial-protests-professor-resigns-olympia.  Another resigned after accusing colleagues of racism and white supremacy. https://www.foxnews.com/us/evergreen-professor-who-made-anti-white-comments-resigns-gets-240g-settlement. And State Republican lawmakers proposed defunding the school altogether. The “Day of Absence” now appears gone for good, but this does not look like a victory for PC censorship. Other administrators, professors, and students on other campuses are studying this example to see what went wrong, as a model of how NOT to restrict free speech. 

You refer (no link) to a “Harvard professor” allegedly “fired” for suggesting students could think about Halloween costume without paternal guidance from the administration. You might be referring to Erika Kristakis, who resigned a position at Yale’s Silliman residential college after a year of “Halloween costume” controversy. Kristakis’ husband was not “forced to resign.” He stepped down from basically the same post, and stepped up to become the university’s Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science. So both still teach at Yale and hold administrative positions there, Erika in the same program which invited Dr. Khilanani to speak. While I would be more careful about burdening frequently victimized students with their own defense than the Kristakis, their positions on academic freedom align with mine, as stated above. So far as I can tell, the protests against them proved an embarrassment to the university and its program, spawning a range of books on “snowflake” students, as well as policy changes (which I am not clear on yet and so won’t speak on). No one was fired or “forced to resign.”

The "headmaster" controversy, which I find somewhat silly, is all about denying the relevance of context. The controversies around Shapiro are in part security concerns, in part deliberate provocation on Shapiro's part, and in part created by people who think "hate speech" should not be tolerated. Shapiro-style controversies are the daily fare of Fox news, but from my perspective, Academic freedom has been constantly under threat since U.S. universities adopted the research model in the 19th century.  Since WWII, the number one threat to that freedom has been the military industrial complex, in combination with the New Right's push to delegitimize universities, to reduce their funding to open them more to market forces, and to intervene directly in their curricula and hiring practices. A few "leftist" students and faculty challenging the status quo on a relatively few campuses is not a sizeable threat, when one considers "threat" from a longer historical perspective.

*”Disciplinary” as in standards specific to different academic disciplines and fields—Anthropology, Botany, Chemistry, Cultural Studies, Economics, Education, History, Law, Mechanical Engineering, Nursing, Physics, Etc.