In each classroom where my children attend school, there is a behavior management poster to guide classroom conduct. On this poster are written three sentences.
I am here to learn.
I respect myself and my rights.
I respect others and their rights.
Shouting down an invited speaker would lead to immediate expulsion from school. One could imagine a continuum of disciplinary consequences for disruptive and disrespectful behavior. Suspension, fines, removal from class, warnings, etc. This happens to be a private school that doesn’t accept any government money. It would seem that this model would be effective in bringing about order to college campuses.
What’s preventing this model from being implemented at private colleges? In other words, why aren’t administrators disciplining poor student conduct at private colleges?
Greg Lukianoff came to Cornell with Rikki Schlott to talk about the role universities are playing in The Canceling of the American Mind. I would love to bring Mike Rowe to Cornell to talk about the value and pitfalls of an elite college education.
There are some serious methological issues with FIRE's database. For example, of the 18 deplatforming cases this year involving students, 6 of them were at Stanford, when a student yelled out a question during the final question after no questions from the protesters were asked. This was counted as six incidents simply because there were six speakers on the panel. That just fundamentally distorts and inflates the counting of incidents. FIRE shouldn't be counting one minor incident six times.
Another problem is the alleged deplatforming of The Vagina Monologues by the left. When the producer of a theatrical event chooses what play they want to produce, that's an exercise of intellectual freedom, not a repression of it. Certain reasons may be flawed and deserving of criticism, but it's not a deplatforming attempt when it's your platform and you decide who to pick.
It’s very easy to say that college administrators should stand up for freedom of speech. But why should they? What is their incentive, when they seem fully on board with cancel culture?
Would this require rules in place for institutions that receive federal student loans?
By the time the kids get to college most of them have already been indoctrinated. I would encourage everyone to get a copy of this book, read it, and share it.
Sounds to me like the college kids are completely fine. Fine with vicious, cowardly, authoritarian repression of any opinions they don't happen to like. And the reason they don't like those opinions is not based on their life experience with a wide range of people and opinions. The students are fine with being programmed by the cowardly authoritarian faculty that are preferred by the DEI crew that hires them.
The foundation-building for an appreciation of the necessity of free speech to liberty and knowledge development should not begin in college.
I am trying to build the foundation via my Ninja Librarians series for middle graders. There's got to be other such books out there, and I'd love to hear about them. Maybe a little help spreading the word about kids books on this topic, in adult "free speech" circles since its adults who tend to buy the books for this age group? You don't even have to buy them, just request them at your local library. Get them on the shelves so more kids are exposed to the very idea of intellectual freedom vs. suppression.
Via comic adventure, I'm trying to introduce kids to:
The difference between freely choosing not to express a held viewpoint and being coerced into silence.
The various ways in which individuals or groups may be coerced into silence.
The costs to individuals and to society when we don’t value and protect intellectual freedom.
The difficulty of supporting the right of others to express themselves when we believe their opinions or ideas to be dangerous, wrong or hurtful.
The potential rewards of not just tolerating the speech of others, but valuing it as a potential means of testing our assumptions for flaws & refining our viewpoints.
This is all such bad news, I hesitate to suggest that things are even worse than the attitudinal data suggest. Many administrators, faculty members, and students claim explicitly that they support both hostile environment protection and academic freedom. However, when we measure their perception of realistic campus scenarios, we find that identity and belief predict over half the variance in an individual's perception of hostile environments (i.e., identifying a situation as being a "hostile environment," and, thus, subject to administrative sanctions). Worse yet, identifying a situation as being a hostile environment is a powerful predictor that the individual will judge that the action (or speech) that created it does not warrant academic freedom. It is as academic freedom is only supported when it is not needed (i.e., when no one is offended). https://bereatorch.com/2023/02/19/deconstructing-the-baffling-bull-behind-title-ix-at-our-college/
Left and right are poor descriptors. Totalitarians and liberals might be more useful. Left and right creates an artificially vast divide. In reality, totalitarians believe in the use of force, and they are very few. Is China’s Xi on the left or the right? He is a Communist, but he makes common cause with the dictator Putin. They use the same tactics. On the other hand, most of us share the same liberal values. They are embodied in the Bill of Rights, the Universal Déclaration of Human Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and other documents.
I prefer to think of us as living on a ring, with the authoritarians living on one side and the liberals on the other. Several posts have noted the disproportionate number of progressives at universities. Obviously, thought police there would come from that tribe. Left and right are so easy to use though. I fall into the trap all of the time. Yet, there is no clear line to be to the left and right of. Bend the line into a circle and the extreme left and the extreme right are side by side, nearly indistinguishable from each other.
In each classroom where my children attend school, there is a behavior management poster to guide classroom conduct. On this poster are written three sentences.
I am here to learn.
I respect myself and my rights.
I respect others and their rights.
Shouting down an invited speaker would lead to immediate expulsion from school. One could imagine a continuum of disciplinary consequences for disruptive and disrespectful behavior. Suspension, fines, removal from class, warnings, etc. This happens to be a private school that doesn’t accept any government money. It would seem that this model would be effective in bringing about order to college campuses.
What’s preventing this model from being implemented at private colleges? In other words, why aren’t administrators disciplining poor student conduct at private colleges?
Greg Lukianoff came to Cornell with Rikki Schlott to talk about the role universities are playing in The Canceling of the American Mind. I would love to bring Mike Rowe to Cornell to talk about the value and pitfalls of an elite college education.
A sad and dangerous state of affairs in academia. Deep rot.
There are some serious methological issues with FIRE's database. For example, of the 18 deplatforming cases this year involving students, 6 of them were at Stanford, when a student yelled out a question during the final question after no questions from the protesters were asked. This was counted as six incidents simply because there were six speakers on the panel. That just fundamentally distorts and inflates the counting of incidents. FIRE shouldn't be counting one minor incident six times.
Another problem is the alleged deplatforming of The Vagina Monologues by the left. When the producer of a theatrical event chooses what play they want to produce, that's an exercise of intellectual freedom, not a repression of it. Certain reasons may be flawed and deserving of criticism, but it's not a deplatforming attempt when it's your platform and you decide who to pick.
It’s very easy to say that college administrators should stand up for freedom of speech. But why should they? What is their incentive, when they seem fully on board with cancel culture?
Would this require rules in place for institutions that receive federal student loans?
By the time the kids get to college most of them have already been indoctrinated. I would encourage everyone to get a copy of this book, read it, and share it.
https://www.amazon.com/Indoctrinating-Our-Children-Death-Government/dp/B0CSLW85TL/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3G6TPY4OTF4DF&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.4airoldg_LX6ML0hksEkyA.5Ol4BBKzDpoQTbyKbjvwq6f8h0nOB0bM6Qjd8xTI72E&dib_tag=se&keywords=indoctrinating+our+children+to+death&qid=1711167284&s=books&sprefix=Indoctrinating%2Cstripbooks%2C123&sr=1-1
Sounds to me like the college kids are completely fine. Fine with vicious, cowardly, authoritarian repression of any opinions they don't happen to like. And the reason they don't like those opinions is not based on their life experience with a wide range of people and opinions. The students are fine with being programmed by the cowardly authoritarian faculty that are preferred by the DEI crew that hires them.
The foundation-building for an appreciation of the necessity of free speech to liberty and knowledge development should not begin in college.
I am trying to build the foundation via my Ninja Librarians series for middle graders. There's got to be other such books out there, and I'd love to hear about them. Maybe a little help spreading the word about kids books on this topic, in adult "free speech" circles since its adults who tend to buy the books for this age group? You don't even have to buy them, just request them at your local library. Get them on the shelves so more kids are exposed to the very idea of intellectual freedom vs. suppression.
Via comic adventure, I'm trying to introduce kids to:
The difference between freely choosing not to express a held viewpoint and being coerced into silence.
The various ways in which individuals or groups may be coerced into silence.
The costs to individuals and to society when we don’t value and protect intellectual freedom.
The difficulty of supporting the right of others to express themselves when we believe their opinions or ideas to be dangerous, wrong or hurtful.
The potential rewards of not just tolerating the speech of others, but valuing it as a potential means of testing our assumptions for flaws & refining our viewpoints.
https://jenswanndowney.substack.com/p/yes-kids-can-understand-how-free
This is all such bad news, I hesitate to suggest that things are even worse than the attitudinal data suggest. Many administrators, faculty members, and students claim explicitly that they support both hostile environment protection and academic freedom. However, when we measure their perception of realistic campus scenarios, we find that identity and belief predict over half the variance in an individual's perception of hostile environments (i.e., identifying a situation as being a "hostile environment," and, thus, subject to administrative sanctions). Worse yet, identifying a situation as being a hostile environment is a powerful predictor that the individual will judge that the action (or speech) that created it does not warrant academic freedom. It is as academic freedom is only supported when it is not needed (i.e., when no one is offended). https://bereatorch.com/2023/02/19/deconstructing-the-baffling-bull-behind-title-ix-at-our-college/
Left and right are poor descriptors. Totalitarians and liberals might be more useful. Left and right creates an artificially vast divide. In reality, totalitarians believe in the use of force, and they are very few. Is China’s Xi on the left or the right? He is a Communist, but he makes common cause with the dictator Putin. They use the same tactics. On the other hand, most of us share the same liberal values. They are embodied in the Bill of Rights, the Universal Déclaration of Human Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and other documents.
I prefer to think of us as living on a ring, with the authoritarians living on one side and the liberals on the other. Several posts have noted the disproportionate number of progressives at universities. Obviously, thought police there would come from that tribe. Left and right are so easy to use though. I fall into the trap all of the time. Yet, there is no clear line to be to the left and right of. Bend the line into a circle and the extreme left and the extreme right are side by side, nearly indistinguishable from each other.