So whatever your political or religious views they haven’t hampered your career.
Agreed. But surely one of the rights under the law ought to be the right to determine one’s own reaction to ideas and to express that reaction? I shouldn’t have the right to stop someone from speaking; but no one has the right to stop me from vehemently contradicting everything the speaker said. Yet if I demand the license to criticize, I have to allow the license to speak to the person I’m criticizing.
(If he is agitating for a criminal action, e.g., advocating lynching someone, that’s a different matter, but we aren’t talking about such things here. We are talking about, e.g., whether the fact – if it be a fact – that in many US inner cities more crimes are committed by people of one color rather than another – should be allowed to be stated in a scholarly context, or whether it should be suppressed because somebody might feel hurt or uncomfortable if they hear it. We are talking about whether someone like Doreen Kimura, if invited to a campus to explain her research on differences in brain development by sex, should be “disinvited” because a mob of angry students incited by feminist teachers is throwing rocks at the President’s office window and declaring that such ideas are a betrayal of women’s rights everywhere.)
I’m glad you wouldn’t show up and yell. Neither would I, in an analogous situation, e.g., if Hillary Clinton came to speak. I just wouldn’t bother to go hear her. And actually I wouldn’t even protest the invitation, unless such invitations were always issued to politicians of the Left and never to any of the Right. Then I would ask about speaker selection bias. Beyond that, I couldn’t care less whether or not she was invited. It’s a free country, and she has the right to hawk her wares to anyone who will listen.
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First, that does not follow from what I said; you did not pay sufficient attention to the first three words. Also you did not pay attention to what I said about a particular job interview in another post above, where I indicated that my perceived religious and philosophical views were very much a factor in causing a key member of a three-person department to veto my candidacy.
Second, my personal case is not what the argument is about. The phenomenon has been reported across the continent in all kinds of institutions, by people in a position to know. If it were just me, who would care? It’s only because it is a widespread thing that it requires social attention. So forget about my case. The problem is real.
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Of course you do. It’s called libel and slander.
I think the absurdity of saying we should die for the right for anyone to say whatever they want in a world where people say Hillary Clinton shaved off a child’s face and wore it in a satanic ritual or that Sandy Hook was staged and grieving parents played by crisis actors should be painfully obvious. I’m not even stubbing my big toe for a world that lets this nonsense go unchecked let alone dying for any of it. And no universities shouldn’t be hosting attention seeking con-artists like Milo Yiannopoulos or Danesh D’Souza.
No, the solution is for departments to hire people only on the basis of research and teaching ability, regardless of ideological or religious leaning. That has not been the practice in most Arts departments on this continent since about 1980. And it’s unlikely to change in the near future, because the current faculty in most Arts departments aren’t big enough as human beings to look past ideological disagreement to the qualities of the researcher and teacher.
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I have little doubt that’s your perception of what happened and that the offs in your on again off again academic career you are going to attribute to some perceived discrimination.
So if this amazing teacher happens to be a “potential fascist” that’s fine.
Libel and slander, yes; but not everything that anyone says that I find offensive. If I say that women tend to prefer jobs involving people to jobs involving things (building bridges, etc.) that may be erroneous, but it’s not libel or slander. It can be challenged if it’s wrong, but it should not be forbidden speech – even if a number of students or professors say that it’s “demeaning to women.” It should be treated simply as a factual statement and either accepted or rejected based on the evidence.
I’ve been talking about intellectual and academic freedom in the context of serious university discussion. Obviously libel and slander laws will remain in place, and laws against shouting Fire in a crowded theater.
Here you fail to see the problem. To many people, Michael Mann and Al Gore are attention-seeking con artists, and should not be invited to speak at universities. If they were invited to speak at your school, and the student body or faculty agitated to have the invitation rescinded on the grounds that they were attention-seeking con artists, what you do then, given that you’ve already authorized the rescinding of invitations to people of that category?
A passionate dislike of the views of someone is not a sound basis for deciding what is allowed to be spoken and discussed in a free society. A free society requires that everyone restrain their passions when the question is freedom of ideas and debate.
If you want to make sure that no jerks get invited to speak at your school, get on the invitations committee and make your voice heard before the invitations are issued. I have no problem with that. but if you are outvoted and the invitation is issued, then you’ve done your duty of advising your school and you should not interfere with the event after that. You can of course boycott the event, or criticize the speaker, etc. I have no problem with that.
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Equating a former Vice President of the United States with Milo Yiannopoulos is ridiculous
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Great. So we can just choose to completely ignore self-righteous, long-winded, blowhards spreading whatever persecution complex they’ve invented for themselves. Is that OK?
It’s not up to faculty to act as “potential fascist” detectors. It’s up to faculty to determine whether the candidate has produced quality scholarship and would be a good teacher that undergrads would benefit from hearing. If you can’t see this, put the shoe on the other foot. Should faculty try to discern who might be a “potential communist” and make their hiring decision based on that? Or should they just judge on the merits of the candidate? I think they should do the latter.
Put it this way: apparently you think it would be fine if Arts faculties hired Karl Marx, but that it would be evil for them to hire Friedrich Nietzsche. I say they should hire both, because the students deserve to be exposed to minds of that caliber, minds that will expose them to disagreement at a very high level. I’m in the education business, not the indoctrination business.
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Really? How about potential sexists, or potential racists?
I mean really Eddie you are the one saying we should give a platform to potential fascists now you say we shouldn’t bother to even know who the potential fascists are?
Well, on and off.
My example of just one job interview is a drop in the bucket. Discount it if you like. There are thousands of others. Thousands of the best young Ph.D.s over the past 40 years have been denied academic careers because the faculty doing the hiring don’t like their views. It happens regularly in the Arts. I probably happens in some of the sciences, too, e.g., Psychology, though it probably happens almost never in Physics or Chemistry or Mathematics. In retrospect, since I started out on a science scholarship, I would have done better to stay in the sciences, where my conservative views would fly under the radar. But hindsight is always perfect, and there is no point dreaming.
Well, again, it really has very little to do with “rights” in the sense you mean. The government’s power to stop someone from speaking is what the First Amendment restrains. People stop one another from speaking for all manner of reasons. I have an NDA on my desk which I signed as part of an intellectual property dispute settlement, for example. And while I can’t stop someone from delivering a speech on the sidewalk outside my office, I bloody well can stop him from delivering it in my office. Private parties are essentially unlimited in their right to impose restrictions upon speech when that speech consumes their own resources, and who a university should or should not invite is a legitimate topic for people to debate.
And legally, under the First Amendment, all that means – literally, legally, all that means – is that neither he nor you can rely upon the government to help you in the matter. That’s all. The question of whether it’s a good IDEA to use nongovernmental means is a matter committed solely to private judgment, except of course when those nongovernmental means constitute a crime.
I do agree that people react very badly to things they don’t want to hear, even when those things are or may be true. The principal, and most obstructive, example of that which I see is creationism. Creationists, however, repeatedly try to do precisely what the First Amendment prohibits: to enlist the power of the state on their side, e.g., the Kitzmiller case, the Edwards v. Aguillard case, the Scopes case, and so on.
Now, as for “fascists,” we live in a time where fascism is on the march. Like you, I consider myself an intellectual conservative, but from the things you say here I have very much the impression that there is absolutely no overlap between what you mean by that and what I mean by that. Anyone who truly is a conservative, and who prizes above all the conservation of the western liberal tradition, has got a lot to worry about these days; and while Edmund Burke might not have been persuaded to man the barricades for very many causes, I think from what I know of the man that he might be out there today, getting pepper-sprayed. If I were younger and fitter, I sure as hell would be. And when I ran into, at one of these protests, one of the environmentalists who, years ago, slammed me in newspaper editorials and books as a shrill right-wing ideologue, I would shake his hand and call him a brother.
Same answer. You apparently confuse the role of a University with that of an Inquisition. The job of a university is to produce high-quality thought, not orthodox or politically popular thought.
And, by the way, further to that: I do feel that these ideological conflicts over issues do lead people to miss their common ground. After I’d been slammed as a shrill right-wing ideologue, I found myself writing articles for the local environmental-movement newspaper in one community where there was a deal of gap-bridging to do: that even people whose liberality did not extend to fully endorsing what my client wished to do with his farmland could understand the rightness of the cause of insisting that he was entitled to fair and non-corrupt practices for DECIDING what he would be allowed to do. When we allow our disputes over underlying issues to bleed over into disputes over whether to accord fair process, it tends to run ill.
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…or apparently avoiding misogyny or racism among their faculty.
Fine, but I wasn’t limiting my discussion to what can be derived from the First Amendment alone. I thought you would see that I was talking more broadly about the spirit of a free and democratic society, which is why I gave the paraphrase about defending to the death one’s right to say something.
Americans have always been at their best when they act as if they believe that statement, and at their worst when they try to find some socially pressing excuse to avoid its implications. The McCarthy scare, for example, was America at its worst, forgetting that freedom to preach even socialism ought to be defended by anyone with the spirit of the Revolution in him. And this new political correctness, which is the inverse of the McCarthy one, one ruled by the Left rather than the Right, is again America at its worst. I hate both the Left and the Right when they become dogmas or orthodoxies. To me, a conservative in the older sense of the world is neither Right nor Left in modern parlance.
Of course it’s wrong for the religious right to try to mandate religious ideas into the school curriculum. It’s also wrong for professors of religious studies in secular universities paid for by the state to systematically (if slyly) humiliate Christian students and their beliefs – unless the same secular universities make sure, by their hiring processes, that an equal number of professors are systematically humiliating atheist and materialist students and their beliefs. Otherwise, the state is indirectly funding a particular religious slant (atheism/materialism is better than Christianity). But there is not the slightest effort at intellectual balance in most religious studies, philosophy, English, etc. departments, even when those are fully state-funded. Conservative religious views (Christian and other) are vastly underrepresented, in relation to agnosticism, atheism, very liberal forms of Christianity and Judaism, New Age flakiness, etc.). This has not happened by chance alone.
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