Consequences Coming For Once in Academia? HotAir

Respectfully, I disagree. And here s why: these schools have zero commitment to free speech and have repeatedly demonstrated that. What we saw in Congress was not a renewed appreciation for defending the rights of students to express even abhorrent opinions; if it were, I would be 100% on board with FIRE.

But it wasn t. According to the organization, Harvard and Penn are the two worst schools for free speech in FIRE s rankings the most oppressive schools in America. They literally cannot get any worse and deserve no defense at all. FIRE should use this as an opportunity to work with the new presidents of these universities to craft unambiguous policies that distinguish between speech and conduct, and help universities enforce these policies.

They shouldn t defend the enforcers of the current unequal regime.

These presidents weren t defending free speech, but antisemitic speech in particular. If students had been chanting Kill the Trans or even White Lives Matter, they would have come down like a ton of bricks, and everybody knows it. When conservatives attack them for defending antisemitism, they are 100% correct, not demanding special treatment for Jews, conservatives, or any other group.

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I ll join FIRE in a fight for free speech, but I won t defend the academic tyrants against people trying to hold them to the rules they created. As I said, goose, gander.

Let s change the rules to make them friendlier to free speech, but until they are changed, let s hang the tyrants with their own words, clean them out of academia, and start afresh.

via hotair.com

David Strom.

I see this as a popcorn moment. It’s probably too much to hope for, but I would be happy to see the three Presidents lose their jobs for their idiotic statements, that is, for apparently not condemning genocide against the Jews in Israel. But I haven’t reviewed the cases carefully, and I don’t intend to, so that’s just my knee jerk reaction. We here at the RC, however, condemn genocide as a bad thing, intolerant, and so forth. BTW Happy Hanukah everybody!

There’s also the question of how much free speech a university can stand. I’m partial to the private model, where universities set their own rules of what speech is allowed and letting the market sort it out. Under any sensible policy, speech advocating genocide or anything like it would not be allowed at any university one wanted to go to. This of course would render many of our brilliant scholars unemployable. The faculty of UC San Diego, UCLA and Cal would be decimated. Gender studies departments would have to close. Sociology departments would be depopulated.

If they were privatized that is. But public universities presumably do have to respect students’, and faculty’s free speech rights. Then you get into the morass of free speech laws, including time, place and manner restrictions. I really don’t like this area of law — a complete mess. Presuming that offensive speech doesn’t rise to the level of incitement — you could say “gas the Jews” so long as there wasn’t any likelihood anyone would immediately — you would have to let people say that. This is where hypocrisy comes in. Universities have been very quick — including my own formerly cute university — to bring the hammer down even upon those making arguably funny comments directed against large communist governments, or for other “racist” or other wrong-thinking sentiments, while only nodding in approval at explicit calls for more of the enormities we witnessed last October 7th. So it’s hard not to agree with David on this point.

But the university is no place for First Amendment absolutism. There’s a lot of nuance to be parsed out as to what speech policy should be at a university. I know ever so slightly some of the deans of various law schools and universities; some were my classmates. Sadly, they seem much better at knowing how to climb the ladder than they seem likely to sort out the puzzles involved in this question. There are no solutions; only tradeoffs, as Thomas Sowell famously remarked.