Free Speech on College campuses

[jarl the climber]

4 hours ago, lokisnow said:

My sister transferred out of MU as a junior the year before the protests started because the school became too expensive to attend as a child of middle class parents as an in state resident.

At the time she was an education major, and the math didn't work to have fifty to eighty thousand in loans to come out with a job making thirty five thousand as a teacher in Missouri. So she transferred to the local university.

so while I am sure that enrollment is down because Missouri is racist enough for whites to be scared to attend a school that had a black protest, a large factor of the declining enrollment may very well be the increased cost of attendance relative to the poor earnings prospects that degree will earn in Missouri.

Well that's one way to look at it and your right to point out the rising costs and the troubles people find pursuing a career in the field that they study, on the other hand I can't blame people for avoiding a school like Missouri and the circus like atmosphere that started becoming pervasive there or dismiss it as being purely racist.

My own experience is that a lot of stuff going on in colleges were going on 25 years ago, that most students probably 95%, maybe more than that, really don't want to get involved in the politics and its probably being a little overblown. The only thing that's a little troublesome is that in my day a lot of intellectuals, even those on the Left, were a little more critical of it. Still, I think, like you pointed out, that the fact that these institutions actually have a mission to train students for jobs and professions and the fact that the model is starting to become unviable in some instances will in all likelihood do more to tamp this sort of thing down more than anything else.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

Look, students have been protesting things one way or another.  A friend of mine founded a now national organization that has done a lot of good and was staging sit-ins in the administration building and other protests in the mid-late 1990s.  When my mother was in school there 30 years previously, you better believe that the students were active in ways that the administration and the community at large didn't necessarily agree with.

Personally, I think someone getting in trouble for political speech on campus is dangerous (no matter who is being made uncomfortable).  As much as I think Trump is a racist, sexist, dangerous candidate, it doesn't change the fact that he is in fact a legitimate candidate for the Republican nomination (*gag*).  There are those that support him and they should be allowed to speak without interference.  I also think that other students have an equal right to speak against Trump, loudly and often.  I just wish the administration hadn't gotten involved.  What they did was stupid, shortsighted and probably totally legal as Emory is private.  But the suppression of political speech  at the behest of one group against another by administration officials sets an incredibly dangerous precedent.  

[karaddin]

Scot - From what you described of the other incident, I would say that while they are well within their rights to object (and I would be at minimum doing a big fucking eyeroll at that email) I personally wouldn't see that one as sufficiently severe to completely undermine the ability to continue teaching and hopefully learn to see things from other perspectives. So calling for her firing seems a bit too far from that minimal information, but I'm not there and I'm white.

Zabz - what did the administration do that's objectionable at Emory? They're simply enforcing their own policy around political messaging via chalk, that's not suppressing speech. The fact that it took a protest to make them enforce their own rules could just as easily be seen as the problem here.

[sologdin]

10 hours ago, The Killer Snark said:

 

 

Sologdin-

http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/booksabout/haters/haters.htm

 "Given this situation, I suggested in 'Repressive Tolerance' the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressed. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for 'the other side', I maintain that there are issues where either there is no 'other side' in any more than a formalistic sense, or where 'the other side' is demonstrably 'regressive' and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.

     If the choice were between genuine democracy and dictatorship, democracy would certainly be preferable. But democracy does not prevail. The radical critics of the existing political process are thus readily denounced as advocating an 'elitism', a dictatorship of intellectuals as an alternative. What we have in fact is government, representative government by a non-intellectual minority of politicians, generals, and businessmen. The record of this 'elite' is not very promising, and political prerogatives for the intelligentsia may not necessarily be worse for the society as a whole.  ...

....

  Today, these words have understandably an anti-democratic, 'elitist' sound--understandably because of their dangerously radical implications. For if 'education' is more and other than training, learning, preparing for the existing society, it means not only enabling man to know and understand the facts which make up reality but also to know and understand the factors that establish the facts so that he can change their inhuman reality. And such humanistic education would involve the 'hard' sciences ('hard' as in the 'hardware' bought by the Pentagon?), would free them from their destructive direction. In other words, such education would indeed badly serve the Establishment, and to give political prerogatives to the men and women thus educated would indeed be anti-democratic in the terms of the Establishment. But these are not the only terms.

     However, the alternative to the established semi-democratic process is not a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy. Part of this struggle is the fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination. For this struggle, I proposed the practice of discriminating tolerance. To be sure, this practice already presupposes the radical goal which it seeks to achieve. I committed this petitio principii in order to combat the pernicious ideology that tolerance is already institutionalized in this society. The tolerance which is the life element, the token of a free society, will never be the gift of the powers that be; it can, under the prevailing conditions of tyranny by the majority, only be won in the sustained effort of radical minorities, willing to break this tyranny and to work for the emergence of a free and sovereign majority - minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior which tolerate destruction and suppression."

Herbert Marcuse

This is merely revolutionary Marxist propaganda with a cherry picked idea of 'liberal establishment/ existing equal opportunties instead of equal outcomes social order'' substituted for 'liberal bourgeouisie'. Marcuse makes valid points within the first pages of his essay, but only as a smokescreen in defense against accusations of anti-liberalism, in order to repudiate or subvert them by the end.

 

that's just dreadful citation protocol, as the URL does not disclose those bits.  i think that the reference is to marcuse's essay in the critique of pure tolerance, which argues that the majoritarian position in liberal society acts as a domination by default and must be subject to critique.  he overreaches to the extent he argues that the minority should be entitled to repress the majority.  duh.  that's just ludicrous--so silly that no one actually follows his advice. i'm not sure your recitation at the end is an accurate summation of his argument; you will always fail to persuade when you dress your arguments in silly mccarthyist rhetoric, and when the citation is to a 'marcuse hater' website--there's simply no credibility there at all.  (and 'marxist propaganda,' really?  as though i can't see you coming from a mile away with the overwrought ayn rand/von hayek/karl popper dunning-krugerisms.)

even if this one writing stands for a distasteful proposition, be advised that i am both a frankfurt marxist and a former university instructor, and this article of marcuse's is not something for which anyone cared.  it is therefore in itself insufficient to discharge the burden that you have assumed--that critical theory and postmodernism should be banned from the university.  more important to critical theory is marcuse's one diminesional man and eros & civilization (my favorite is his soviet marxism, which is a devastating critique of the theory developed by the stalinists--it is absolutely crushing to leninists). even so, frankfurt theory is so much more than marcuse. horkheimer's eclipse of reason, and his dialectic of enlightenment (with adorno) are basically perfect, and there's nothing theological or totalitarian about them; they are in fact critiques of the totalitarianisms of the right and the left, as well as of liberal society. 

i am not impressed in the slightest by the purported evidence in support of the ban, which ban is somewhat ironic, given the content of this thread.  university students are of course generally adults. is the rightwing paternalism here so strong that it is not enough that students are exposed to bogus rightwing ideas with almost no opposition all through their childhoods, but rather these children upon becoming young adults must also be shielded from leftwing ideas even in higher education?  how outrageous this sounds, how weak the rightwing ideas must be.  if one wants hhigher education to be a place of free exchange of ideas, it makes little sense to exclude the minoritarian position.  if by contrast one wants to dominate the discussion with one single tone of seriousness, the monologism of stalinist terror so perfectly identified by bakhtin, then, yeah, sure, fire all the leftwing professors and hire a bunch of wall street douches.

it is kinda comical to lump frankfurt marxism in with postmodernism, as these are of course entirely separate bodies of disparate doctrine.  second generation critical theorist habermas considers pomos such as baudrillard and lyotard to be neoconservative; lyotard's most famous book is specifically an argument against marxism and liberalism as discredited metanarratives FFS.  foucault and deleuze/guattari assume classical marxism but then write about other things, altering the underlying doctrine fundamentally.  perhaps it's safe to assume that the famous post-structuralists (derrida, barthes, kristeva, lacan, butler, de man, cixous, irigaray, and so on) have some marxist influences, but they also form a trenchant critique thereof--sufficient to piss off the normal roll call of regular old left reds.

seriously, what point in banning all this stuff that you obviously haven't read?  leave off the rightwing websites already.  that url is just dead wrong idiocy.

[jarl the climber]

Yes the environment that students in the USA are exposed in the public school system is essentially authoritarian. My High School journalism teacher resigned at the end of my junior year because the Supreme Court essentially took away the free speech rights of the students and allowed the school administrators to censor students. So when students get to college its the first opportunity students get to organize and express their views and maybe here and there things go to far, people show poor judgement but its understandable, they have to learn somehow, they sure as hell aren't learning anything about this in the public schools, there is some pent up frustration . All in all its definitely overblown but when its spilling over to the point where other points of view are being suppressed that needs to be looked at.

[lokisnow]

It's a good point that students having no constitutional rights while in high school or earlier--fuck you very much in loco parentis--probably results in some overreaction in college when they now have rights, and their only frame of reference is that misbehavior is punished by the authorities via removal and suppression of rights, is it any wonder this is the outcome they expect to use and be used?

 

It also teaches kids that rights are just squishy things granted and taken away at a whim and that there is nothing inherent, inalienable or natural about their constitutional rights.

 

theyre more like guidelines...

or perhaps privileges is the term?

[The Killer Snark]

sologdin - I'm not saying to ban all the Left Wing professors. They can state their own political viewpoints in class if they want, but only within the debative contexts of unbiased political discussion classes where Right Wing viewpoints are given equal balance. That way, students are left free to make their own minds up. The banning of the libertarian traditionalist Nietzsche Club in London University last year by the university administration in order to pander to the Far Left student groups shows how far the more negative influence of Frankfurt theology has spread through universities, where right to speak or hold a view is usually decided on illusory and anachronistic notions of representation based on comparative privilege. I lifted that Marcuse example straight from a publicly accessible, 'non partisan' webpage disseminating modern social theory. I came across a Radical Feminist professor on Twitter recently who admitted she teaches Frankfurt School theory in university based on Marcuse's assumptions of democratic right as relative to positions of assumed privilege. My point is, that the partisanship is everywhere, and therefore has to be curtailed, or at least balanced out by Right Wing professors spreading equal propaganda, or most ideally we can just protect non bias ideals in education by banning all professors, including Right Wing ones, from university positions whose main priority is anti-education in the shape of dissemination of idelogical one-sidedness.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

12 hours ago, lokisnow said:

It's a good point that students having no constitutional rights while in high school or earlier--fuck you very much in loco parentis--probably results in some overreaction in college when they now have rights, and their only frame of reference is that misbehavior is punished by the authorities via removal and suppression of rights, is it any wonder this is the outcome they expect to use and be used?

 

It also teaches kids that rights are just squishy things granted and taken away at a whim and that there is nothing inherent, inalienable or natural about their constitutional rights.

 

theyre more like guidelines...

or perhaps privileges is the term?

Lokisnow,

When I was in high school the principal decided to suspend and prevent the publication of an issue of the school newspaper.  A political cartoon in the paper played on, then candidate later Governor Carroll Campbell's pledge to pee in a cup to have a drug test and his request that all other candidates do the same.  The principal, V. Keith Callicut, said the cartoon was salacious and refused to allow the papers publication and distribution.  I remember walking down the hallway and seeing a huge banner (obviously hand painted) that read "whatever happened to freedom of speech?".  The students took their materials, including the "salacious" cartoon to the local paper and the cartoon was published there the next day.  

Callicut later relented and allowed publication as everyone had already seen it.  My point is this, yes High Schools are exceptions to normal free speech and free press rules, but, smart kids can make their voices heard as these kids did back in 1986 (I think).

While rights do depend upon a government willing to recognize their existence, a society that recoginizes their existence and that reacts poorly when anyone is silenced also helps a lot.  If people continue to support the suppression of speech they find "offensive" the society's support for freedom of speech and the press will evaporate eventually.  Once its gone I fear it will be very hard to reestablish.  

If it is "priviledge" then it is "priviledge" every resident of the US should possess and denying it to anyone reduces everyones free expression.

[DireWolfSpirit]

16 hours ago, sologdin said:

that's just dreadful citation protocol, as the URL does not disclose those bits.  i think that the reference is to marcuse's essay in the critique of pure tolerance, which argues that the majoritarian position in liberal society acts as a domination by default and must be subject to critique.  he overreaches to the extent he argues that the minority should be entitled to repress the majority.  duh.  that's just ludicrous--so silly that no one actually follows his advice. i'm not sure your recitation at the end is an accurate summation of his argument; you will always fail to persuade when you dress your arguments in silly mccarthyist rhetoric, and when the citation is to a 'marcuse hater' website--there's simply no credibility there at all.  (and 'marxist propaganda,' really?  as though i can't see you coming from a mile away with the overwrought ayn rand/von hayek/karl popper dunning-krugerisms.)

even if this one writing stands for a distasteful proposition, be advised that i am both a frankfurt marxist and a former university instructor, and this article of marcuse's is not something for which anyone cared.  it is therefore in itself insufficient to discharge the burden that you have assumed--that critical theory and postmodernism should be banned from the university.  more important to critical theory is marcuse's one diminesional man and eros & civilization (my favorite is his soviet marxism, which is a devastating critique of the theory developed by the stalinists--it is absolutely crushing to leninists). even so, frankfurt theory is so much more than marcuse. horkheimer's eclipse of reason, and his dialectic of enlightenment (with adorno) are basically perfect, and there's nothing theological or totalitarian about them; they are in fact critiques of the totalitarianisms of the right and the left, as well as of liberal society. 

i am not impressed in the slightest by the purported evidence in support of the ban, which ban is somewhat ironic, given the content of this thread.  university students are of course generally adults. is the rightwing paternalism here so strong that it is not enough that students are exposed to bogus rightwing ideas with almost no opposition all through their childhoods, but rather these children upon becoming young adults must also be shielded from leftwing ideas even in higher education?  how outrageous this sounds, how weak the rightwing ideas must be.  if one wants hhigher education to be a place of free exchange of ideas, it makes little sense to exclude the minoritarian position.  if by contrast one wants to dominate the discussion with one single tone of seriousness, the monologism of stalinist terror so perfectly identified by bakhtin, then, yeah, sure, fire all the leftwing professors and hire a bunch of wall street douches.

it is kinda comical to lump frankfurt marxism in with postmodernism, as these are of course entirely separate bodies of disparate doctrine.  second generation critical theorist habermas considers pomos such as baudrillard and lyotard to be neoconservative; lyotard's most famous book is specifically an argument against marxism and liberalism as discredited metanarratives FFS.  foucault and deleuze/guattari assume classical marxism but then write about other things, altering the underlying doctrine fundamentally.  perhaps it's safe to assume that the famous post-structuralists (derrida, barthes, kristeva, lacan, butler, de man, cixous, irigaray, and so on) have some marxist influences, but they also form a trenchant critique thereof--sufficient to piss off the normal roll call of regular old left reds.

seriously, what point in banning all this stuff that you obviously haven't read?  leave off the rightwing websites already.  that url is just dead wrong idiocy.

Agreed 100%, very well stated.

It almost seems like KS want's discussion limited to Western values. That's a tragic, limiting ideal on what a University should offer and the antithesis to a free and open exchange of ideas, which should rightly include exposure to both good and bad ideas if students are ever going to achieve any level of critical thinking.

[DireWolfSpirit]

This thread subject made me think of Prof. Ward Churchill and his 9/11 essay controversy that resulted in a protracted legal battle with the Univ. of Colorado.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

DWS,

Good catch.  We should have the freedom to speak even when we're wrong.

[The Killer Snark]

DireWolfSpirit - There is no discussion of Western values in modern universities. That is exactly why I'm terrified of what the current generation is going to do.

[HexMachina]

1 hour ago, The Killer Snark said:

DireWolfSpirit - There is no discussion of Western values in modern universities . That is exactly why I'm terrified of what the current generation is going to do.

Do you actually believe this or are you just regurgitating you read in the right wing news?

[DireWolfSpirit]

59 minutes ago, The Killer Snark said:

DireWolfSpirit - There is no discussion of Western values in modern universities. That is exactly why I'm terrified of what the current generation is going to do.

Business schools overwhelmingly stress-

Freedom/free enterprise, individual liberty, personal responsibility, frugality, limited govt, free trade, democracy, and they often push it under an umbrella of judeo/christian ethic and values. Considering the millions of grads these schools pump out, and considering millions more who get that same exposure of ideas and customs in prep schools, I think the West is still safe. A little exposure to other philosophy and culture should serve as a rounding influence, a broadening of the students learning. Speaking from the perspective of one from the U.S. who went through a college prep then Business school as an undergrad, my impression later in life has been "Geez it would've been more rewarding to learn a little more from the Alan Watts and Edward Said POV's and maybe a little less of the Trump, Drucker, POV's." I dont fear we are out of balance. The most learning can be gained from studying the ideas and cultures least like the one you were already reared in. Most Westerners will have absorbed the basic values through life experience (with or without University) already.

I could be wrong or outdated in that view but that's my perception?

[Guest]

Just now, DireWolfSpirit said:

Business schools overwhelmingly stress-

Freedom/free enterprise, individual liberty, personal responsibility, frugality, limited govt, free trade, democracy, and they often push it under an umbrella of judeo/christian ethic and values. Considering the millions of grads these schools pump out, and considering millions more who get that same exposure of ideas and customs in prep schools, I think the West is still safe. A little exposure to other philosophy and culture should serve as a rounding influence, a broadening of the students learning. Speaking from the perspective of one from the U.S. who went through a college prep then Business school as an undergrad, my impression later in life has been "Geez it would've been more rewarding to learn a little more from the Alan Watts and Edward Said POV's and maybe a little less of the Trump, Drucker, POV's." I dont fear we are out of balance. The most learning can be gained from studying the ideas and cultures least like the one you were already reared in. Most Westerners will have absorbed the basic values through life experience (with or without University) already.

I could be wrong or outdated in that view but that's my perception?

 I work in big business and the huge sea change that has occurred since the grads of the 1970's and 1980's have left and the grad school folks of today have taken over - biz school used to teach basic values that companies were required to do as part of a compact with society.  These days only money is discussed, and employees are simply another cost center.  I worry where we are headed in a society that no longer values people and society, and now simply chases money.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

DWS,

Rounding absolutely.  Provided we keep teaching and the values of free speech and open exchange of ideas as opposed to silencing those with whom we disagree.

[DireWolfSpirit]

32 minutes ago, GrapefruitPerrier said:

 I work in big business and the huge sea change that has occurred since the grads of the 1970's and 1980's have left and the grad school folks of today have taken over - biz school used to teach basic values that companies were required to do as part of a compact with society.  These days only money is discussed, and employees are simply another cost center.  I worry where we are headed in a society that no longer values people and society, and now simply chases money.

Imagine my surprise while being lectured how corporate charitable giving/donations should be limited and discouraged because it's the shareholders money and the managers objective is of course to maximize profit not practice community outreach and so forth. Funny thing is we rarely see this conscientiousness over the shareholders money when exhorbitant executive compensation packages are calculated imo?

[BloodRider]

8 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

DWS,

Good catch.  We should have the freedom to speak even when we're wrong.

Really?  You want to give people with wrong, and terrible ideas like that the ability to use the institution's name to further their message?

[ThePrunesThatWasPromised]

31 minutes ago, BloodRider said:

Really?  You want to give people with wrong, and terrible ideas like that the ability to use the institution's name to further their message?

It's better than firing someone like Tim Hunt for no good reason, if the ideas are that terrible and wrong they can be refuted without petulant tantrums.

But as we see in cases like that of Tim Hunt and Mizzou's President, being terrible and wrong basically just means being prominent, white and male.

[The Killer Snark]

I wouldn't have fired Ward Churchman either. What I'm discussing is not where a teacher's personal opinion is under dissection due to their extracurricular activities, or points where their viewpoint will be brought into consideration in the natural contextual process of teaching. I'm discussing systematised propaganda, which is counter to the ethos of education and is designed purely for the purposes of suppressing student points of view.