Can a major university get free speech right?

Colleges and universities are absolutely horrible over free speech matters. This includes speech codes, protest restrictions, hurt-feelings protections and lately, submitting to close-minded students who want to ban visiting lecturers, entertainment acts and graduation speakers with messages they don't like.

It's sad, really. Free speech really is being pushed out of university's, even though university's will pat themselves on the back over and over and dub themselves champions of free speech.

Well, kudos to the University of Chicago for taking a stand against this trend. Here are some excerpts from a new statement the university has released.

President Hanna Holborn Gray observed that “education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.”

...Of course, the ideas of different members of the University community will often and quite naturally conflict. But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.  

...As a corollary to the University’s commitment to protect and promote free expression, members of the University community must also act in conformity with the principle of free expression. Although members of the University community are free to criticize and contest the views expressed on campus, and to criticize and contest speakers who are invited to express their views on campus, they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe. To this end, the University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.

By the way, here's what a violation of that last paragraph looks like. When you're pulling a fire alarm to keep a speaker from being heard, or physically barring the doors of an assembly hall, you are an enemy of free speech. It is the duty of the university to thwart those activities and protect the rights of people who want to hear ideas.

Let's hope the University of Chicago lives up to the great platitudes expressed here.
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Two narratives on academic discrimination

I credit an interview with government studies professor Harvey Mansfield for showing me two inconsistent narratives on diversity in higher education faculty.

If there is a lack of minority faculty members, including women and racial minority members, it is the result of discrimination, prejudice and other efforts to keep them out.

However, when asked to explain why there are so few conservative faculty members, those same people will say they lack the competence to become faculty members, or there is a lack of interest for academic jobs among conservatives and they self-select into other fields.

That is to say, in the first scenario the problem is prejudice, while in the second scenario the university functions as a meritocracy and the problem is with the conservatives themselves.

I will add that people like me tend to see it in reverse, where the university is a place of discrimination for conservatives, but when it comes to minority hires it is a perfect meritocracy.

In a recent blog post, Bryan Caplan gives the political diversity question a one-two-three combo beatdown, with a jab showing just how deep the imbalance is in faculty political positions, a right and a left hook showing the value of a politically diverse faculty and for the haymaker? He showed a 2012 study of social psychologist academics where 82 percent of surveyed liberals admitted they would be prejudice against a conservative candidates.

The usual defense of this is that conservatives are just plain wrong, well, paper authors Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers addressed that argument in the paper:

Is it a problem that conservative political opinion is not tolerated? If one believes that conservatives are simply wrong, perhaps not. After all, geologists are not obliged to accept colleagues who believe the earth is flat. But political or moral beliefs often do not have a truth value. A belief that the earth is flat is factually false; a belief that abortion should be prohibited is not. Neither is a belief that cultural traditions should be respected or that economic inequality is acceptable. It may also be that many aspects of conservative thinking can serve as inspiration for interesting research questions that would otherwise be missed. Finally, as offensive as it may seem to many (liberal) social psychologists, believing that abortion is murder does not mean that one cannot do excellent research.

I can't speak for how much of demographic diversity is discrimination, but it looks compelling that political diversity is a result of discrimination.
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Affirmtive consent is the new Patriot Act

I've been writing against "consent" campaigns for years, as they promote the idea that all sex is assumed to be rape unless any female participants blatantly declare they want to partake. I even wrote about this when I was a college student myself.

Last month it become an actual law in California, although it strangely only applies to college students. In my conversations with supporters of the law, I was constantly told that it will not be used against innocent people, that it sets a reasonable standard for bedroom behavior and absolutely will not declare loving couples to be mutual rapists.

In short, I was told that the law is well-written and there will not be any negative side effects.

Well, Ezra Klein completely threw that narrative out the window this week. He confirmed that all of my fears would come true, called the law "terrible" but then he went ahead and said it's worth it.

For example, Klein wrote:

It tries to change, through brute legislative force, the most private and intimate of adult acts. It is sweeping in its redefinition of acceptable consent; two college seniors who've been in a loving relationship since they met during the first week of their freshman years, and who, with the ease of the committed, slip naturally from cuddling to sex, could fail its test.

But, Klein claims, it's all worth it because there is an ongoing epidemic of rape on college campuses. That's a dubious claim, but suppose it were true. He's saying that since we're in the middle of a crisis we need to sacrifice civil liberties and due process to protect people.

Does it sound like the Patriot Act yet?

If the Yes Means Yes law is taken even remotely seriously it will settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt and creating a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent. This is the case against it, and also the case for it. Because for one in five women to report an attempted or completed sexual assault means that everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.

Okay, now he just sounds like a supervillain talking to a chained-up hero.

Klein's remarks drew a lot of criticism, prompting a second post where he doubled down and argued even louder that there's an ongoing crisis, then made some bogus claims about the legal system, which drew even more criticism.

This same week, 28 Harvard law professors, including Alan Dershowitz, penned a joint statement criticizing efforts to bring affirmative consent laws to Harvard. The New York Times put the law professors head to head with social justice undergrads in an article featuring non-insightful comments like, “It just seems like they’re defending those who are accused of sexual assault."

Guilty as charged on this accusation, among other things. I completely confess that opponents of these witch hunts are indeed motivated by wanting people accused of terrible crimes to have a fair legal defense.

I want to live in a free country, and you can't have a free country where loving couples are labeled rapists if they refuse to follow a seduction checklist provided by puritanical busybodies.
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A college administrator nails free speech

One of the criticisms lobbed at old-school journalism is that corrections never get as much attention as the original stories. Well, that rule applies to the blogosphere as well and I want to do my part to give an important update.

I also want to give credit to a college administrator for bucking the trend and making a real contribution to the public discussion of free speech.

Last week a letter to students from U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks drew ire from first amendment circles because it seemed to say that he thought free speech needs to be civil. Well, Dirks read that criticism and issued a second statement to clarify his position.

My message was intended to re-affirm values that have for years been understood as foundational to this campus community. As I also noted in my message, these values can exist in tension with each other, and there are continuing and serious debates about fundamental issues related to them. In invoking my hope that commitments to civility and to freedom of speech can complement each other, I did not mean to suggest any constraint on freedom of speech, nor did I mean to compromise in any way our commitment to academic freedom, as defined both by this campus and the American Association of University Professors.

Bravo.

I'm used to seeing college administrators go the wrong way on free speech issues, and Dirks made some great nuanced points.

Hat tip to free speech crusader Ken White for the link.

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That animal just turned on you

I'm a huge fan of Harvey Silverglate and his Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. For several decades left-wing academic administrations have been violating the free speech rights of students. Most of these students were attempting to spread conservative messages, and Silverglate warned left-wing censors that they were crafting their own doom.

In an interview released last December, his exact words were "Eventually that animal is going to turn on you, and you're going to end up the victim."

Well guess what folks, the beast just turned.

University College of London has just banned a philosophy group from campus for spreading the works of Nietzche, which they (correctly) believe has lead to fascism in some cases.

From a British tabloid:

The union ordered the UCL Nietzsche Club off campus because they say it promotes fascism and racism – even though they don’t know anything about the group. 

Concerned students had called for the SU diktat after posters emerged advertising the society under the title “Equality is a false God.” 

Although they knew nothing about the society except the 31-word content of the posters, the Union Council banned it from meeting or advertising on campus, accusing it of promoting fascism and racism on campus.

So what if Nietzche's words were twisted nearly a century ago by the national socialists? I see it as a result of misunderstanding his philosophy, and there are plenty of other ways to interpret what he wrote. Nietzsche's words didn't kill anyone and the public deserves the choice of reading them or rejecting them.

It's not too late to cry out in anguish, my left-wing friends.We warned you and assured you that standing up for speech is a virtue unto itself, even when it's speech you disagree with. Some of you stood with us, but many did not. This is what happened.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of left-wing censorship victims, but this one is especially troubling. If Nietzche is going to be banned from campus, what philosophers are next? What subjects will be banned in turn? Is this the society you want?
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My philosophy of writing

I highly recommend Strunk & White to anyone interested in writing, because it gets to the heart of what I believe good writing is: Sharp, well-placed words and as few of them as possible. Clunky phrasing and show-off SAT words are signs of weak writers, and attempts to impress the reader only water-down the message.

But for people who can't be bothered to read an entire book, there's George Orwell's famous essay, Politics and the English Language. Orwell carves out the same message but in a smaller space.

Well now I've seen this Calvin and Hobbes comic and I have a new alternative to people who can't sit still enough for Orwell.

It's from 1993, but the message is timeless.
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I'm completely stumped

I can't tell if this image is sarcastic or not:

If you can't see the image, it's a young woman holding a "I need feminism because" sign that finishes it with "My gender studies degree is just as valid as anyone else's degree."

This could be a perfect parody. I really have no idea. Does anyone have any insight to share?

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Fringe feminists oppose free speech

I had to stop myself from titling this entry "Feminism isn't a religion, it's a cult" because I started writing immediately after I watched the following video from the University of Toronto:




Feminist activists tried to stop men's rights and gender equality author Warren Farrall from speaking at the school defaced and removed promotional posters and blocked audience members from entering the venue until police forcibly removed them. They also assaulted police and harassed people who tried to enter.

I realize that the brutes who staged this violent protest do not represent all of feminism. That's why I wouldn't let myself use that pointed title I first came up with. However, the protesters who blocked the doors did behave like cultists. One of the hallmarks of cults is shutting out the influence of outside messages. That's exactly what they did here, try to block other students from hearing a message they don't like.

The target of these protests wasn't just Farrell, it was also the public. In a summary of the fundamentals of freedom of speech, Christopher Hitchens said:

It’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen and to hear. And every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own action because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words, your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view.

Hitchens went on to ask who would the listener entrust the great responsibility to decide what they should be allowed to listen to or read. The implied answer was no one.

Watching that video, I can't say that I would appoint a group of ignorant, self-righteous, close-minded angry fanatics to decide what I can hear.

I find it frustrating when someone tries to dismiss a thinker based on something tangential they said that is separate from the important ideas they contributed. Last week I tried reading what progressive writer Corey Robin had to say about Friedrich Hayek, but he was more interested in alerting people to Hayek's embarrassing support of Augustus Pinochet than to address any of his major ideas. This is a sign of a hack, and it's telling that the Toronto protesters focused on a single line Farrell wrote in 1993's The Myth of Male Power.

Farrell had criticized watering down the definition of "date rape" to include cases where women say "no," then change their mind and engage in sexual activity without verbally declaring "yes." Farrell was critical of labeling this as "rape" because no unwanted sexual activity occurred. Instead, the sexual partners did not follow a protocol established by certain activists. He then wrote "We have forgotten that before we began calling this date rape and date fraud, we called it exciting."

That's where the out-of-context quotes of saying Farrell supports date rape come from. They have no interest in understanding his message, they just want an excuse to shut him down.

It is customary to blame media bias when stories like this fails to capture much media attention, even though reporters where there when it happened. I try not to make jump to those conclusions when a story like this fails to spread, but I would bet money that if this was a Christian group shutting down Dan Savage from trying to speak using the same forceful tactics it would be all over the news.

Is there anyone who would find tactics like this acceptable when used against a speaker they agree with?

These activists are brutes. They are so absolutely sure that their world view is correct that they are willing to stomp all over the rights of others to silence their opponents. This is fanaticism and it has no place in a civilized society.
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Criticism is not suppression

Inside Higher Ed ran a story in the past week about Timothy J. L. Chandler of Georgia's Kennesaw State University. Chandler was on his way to becoming provost when an op-ed piece in a local newspaper criticized his nomination, and cited a rambling paper Chandler had written in 1998 with Walter E. Davis, who later became a 9-11 troofer.

The infamous paper heavily quotes Marx and was sprinkled with academic jargon and clueless anti-capitalist gems like:

Although the close connection of capitalism to violence is easily shown, it is seldom acknowledged. The allocative resources, which are increasingly disproportionably possessed, were obtained by individuals and groups, at one time or another, by physical force, coercion.

That's an odd way to describe a system of voluntary cooperation, especially from a mindset that has always ended up replacing it with actual force and coercion.

What really bothered me about the spin this story is getting is that Chandler is being held up as the victim of an assault on academic freedom - that op-ed pieces and and blog entries critical of Chandlers nomination are an assault on free speech.

People - that's one of the worst free speech fallacies out there. Freedom of speech means you have the right to express ideas - it is not freedom from criticism or the consequences of expressing certain ideas. Popehat has a great running tally of cases where fools claim the free speech of their critics is tyrannical.

This issue has made me question my position in a post I wrote last year about "take them off the air" campaigns where sponsors are pressured into dropping advertisements for a targeted show, like what happened to Don Imus. I still don't approve of this tactic, but I no longer label it as solid anti-free speech behavior because it's hard to draw the line between lobbying to remove a venue for speech and criticizing a venue being used to express a certain view.

However, no one pressured university donors to pull strings and drop Chandler - all he got was a few editorials and blog entries critical of his appointment. Academic freedom has never meant freedom from the public's ridicule. That's not tyranny or suppression, it's a normal response. It doesn't matter if the criticism is warranted or justified - those concepts don't matter here.

Criticism itself is a form of speech and it needs to be respected too.

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Will military recruiters be allowed back on campus?

As mentioned before, now that Don't Ask Don't Tell is no longer the law of the land, universities will have to find another excuse to chase away military recruiters.

Peace activist and academic Colman McCarthy has answered that call with a recent op-ed piece:

ROTC and its warrior ethic taint the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace.

The piece is more of a swan song than a rallying cry, as McCarthy does not reveal an actual loophole, just an anti-military sentiment. In fact, this piece shows why McCarthy is a liability to the campus anti-military movement, not a valued ally. His penultimate paragraph contained a line he will never live down:

To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America's or the Taliban's: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home.

This kind of loose-cannon extremism is the last thing peaceniks need to hone their image, and distancing themselves from McCarthy should be on the top of their list right now. He is the living embodiment of the "peace at any price" extremist that Ronald Reagan caricatured in his 1964 A Time for Choosing speech:

There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace and you can have it in the next second – surrender. ...From our side [Nikita Khrushchev] has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he would rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain.

McCarthy revealed in a 2008 interview that his opposition to all wars makes no exception for World War II, and that "Hitler could have been waited out."

If this is the kind of leadership emerging to keep the recruiter ban, then that side has already lost.
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