The University of Chicago is made of safe spaces

The letter’s references to trigger warnings and safe spaces were vague in what they actually meant, but the letter wasn’t a fine grained statement of policy, it was clearly signalling: “This is the kind of school we are”.

It was also, I think, a bit of an exercise in trolling. Quite a successful one, if the surly reaction in some quarters is any indication. The deans of U of C seem to have needled exactly the people they intended to needle.

There’s something basically right with the idea that universities (in the social sciences and humanities) should be in the business of making their students uncomfortable with their preconceptions

No, this is fundamentally misconstrued.

The purpose of a university is to make the student transcend their preconceptions: making them uncomfortable with their preconceptions is part of that, sure absolutely, but it’s not the entire program any more than “we run until our legs are on fire, and then we do it again tomorrow” is any sort of athletics training program.

The specific language of safe spaces may be newish, as well as the structure of how the idea is articulated, but debates over appropriate curriculum and the propriety of protesting controversial guest speakers were also part of campus life at UofC at a time when I’d never heard anyone use “safe space” as a buzzword, and I imagine for many decades before that as well.

I only skimmed bits of Boyer’s letter but as Henry says, “self congratulatory” seems about right. Chicago sells itself as a special place, often noxiously so. There’s a way to make the case for having to read things you’d rather not read that isn’t quite so preening or dismissive of real concerns, and I’d agree with that case, and I’m not surprised they botched the job. (There’s nothing they could write that would make me donate money to them, but I’m occasionally flabbergasted by how tremendously they can miss the mark of how to appeal to me when they try.)

It’s definitely an assertion of proud institutional dickishness, even as the UofC surely has its own little room in the economics dept. with heavy shades over the windows and a fainting couch for whenever Paul Krugman writes about the dark age of macro.

What is it other than a proclamation of a safe space for conservatives?

The university thus developed an intricate internal organization to protect the faculty from each other.

This seems implausible to me. Isolated departments likely exist because these people tend to work together. This may also, inadvertently, protect them from contamination by other departments in the University. Still, the most trenchant criticism isn’t likely to originate from outside the specialty, but from within it. The enemy of economists are other economists, not sociologists.

Here’s how I score it. After Yale’s incompetent and cowardly response to its students’ histrionics:

Chicago 1, Yale 0 (own goal).

Now Boyer has put his own shot in the back of the Yale net. Gooooal!

Chicago 2, Yale 0.

It is hard to believe that Yale hasn’t irreparably hurt its franchise. True, the season isn’t done yet, but Yale is perilously close to demotion from the Premier League.

(There’s nothing they could write that would make me donate money to them, but I’m occasionally flabbergasted by how tremendously they can miss the mark of how to appeal to me when they try.)

I literally did a spit take once when I got a donation pitch that name-dropped Veblen. I printed out, highlighted and mailed some appropriate pages of The Higher Learning in America to the MBA’d dean whose signature was on the pitch.

Never heard back.

re trigger warnings, does anyone else feel like the dean of students is (however trivially) overstepping his authority with this statement, in that the decision to use/not use trigger warnings in a given class is strictly the prerogative of the teacher? It sounded particularly dumb to me, for that reason. Maybe he can also offer his opinions on how professors will use Powerpoint…

It was probably great trolling from their PoV, b/c it would appeal to well-heeled middle-aged alums in non-academic professions, for whom 4 years at the U of C was the most intellectual time of their life, who (on average) think kids have it too easy these days…

It had never occurred to me that my job is to make students feel uncomfortable. Is this a thing? Last year, teaching the public health of injury, I used snake bite as an example, and one of my students turned out to have a lived grandmother die of snakebite (this is a thing in developing countries). The discussion obviously upset that student, and I felt bad for choosing an example that triggered a bad memory in a student. Do I instead deserve a medal? Should I strive to be more like that academic who hit the news last year because he likes to confront his students with boundary crossing sex, and only teaches men?

I remember back in the 1980s when Tipper Gore was trying to introduce “parental advisory” stickers to stop children and young adults hearing bad things. A lot of metal bands and rock journalists opposed these “tipper stickers”, megadeth even wrote a song (Hook in Mouth, it’s a great song!) about it. I was pretty aware of the campaign against those stickers but I don’t remember the UofC being involved. I guess I should congratulate them for catching up with ’80s metal, but I have this sense that while Dave Mustaine probably thought rock music was a good medium for being offensive, he may not have envisaged extending it to the classroom of elite universities.

But what do I know? I seem to be stuck in a previous era when not offending people at their place of work or study was considered a good thing. I guess I should move with the times …

Adam Hammond @17 “Our administration is tired of being criticized and desires that our students stop questioning our motives and authority.”

Trolling motives aside, I suspect this is what’s really at the heart of it.

Putting side the complacent ageism of this post, which is certainly there and objectionable, or maybe even embracing it: student experience isn’t and shouldn’t be compared to faculty experience. And yes, schools and departments insulate themselves from each other. But that’s not the same as providing faculty safe spaces where they can sue if forced to hear certain ideas. And it’s just not true – at least where I teach – that sociologists don’t judge economists and vice versa. Tenure decisions at the departmental level are far less important than at the level of ad hoc or standing committees on tenure and promotion, which rely or should rely on the expertise of well-informed but skeptical outsiders. And where I teach it’s also the case that, as someone else puts it, the demand for safe spaces, etc. has been “weaponized” by students who have been coopted by administrators seeking to keep faculty meek and frightened. Adjuncts (some of color) at my school have been fired because of the complaints of guiltily rich SJW students able to assuage their guilt through getting to feel oppressed. A tenured antizionist had a speech monitor sent to his class when a student thought she heard him say something disparaging about Latin America. A win-win – student stands up for latinx’s, school pressures antizionist. Except for decency and freedom of inquiry.

It had never occurred to me that my job is to make students feel uncomfortable.

Right. Addressing some material might inevitably make some students uncomfortable, depending on the students and the material involved. But I wouldn’t give much for an instructor who placed “make the students uncomfortable” high on their list of priorities. I would be inclined to suspect that such a person was simply a creep.

That being said, I have colleagues who teach undergrads at less august institutions than U of C. They say that with some regularity the encounter freshman who perceive the mere act of being asked to provide reasons for their positions (as opposed to just asserting them) as some sort of slight or aggression. These apparently are mostly from conservative religious communities, but by no means only from those.

I think Brad Delong has the simplest and clearest answer: this is not a message to students, but a message to Republican alumni and parents that they shouldn’t worry about ‘liberal indoctrination’ at UChicago and should keep the money flowing.

Adam Hammond: You might have missed the time when students protested the appearance of a survivor of Charlie Hebdo, claiming her presence was making muslims unsafe. The people who were afraid weren’t those who faced a real risk of death for what they had to say, but those who have gunmen and assassins waiting to murder anyone who dares draw the prophet.

Then there was the time at Columbia where students insisted Ovid not be taught. Or all the law schools where the laws about rape are vanishing from the curriculum. The danger to academic freedom is real.

1. Kissinger (sorry, should have trigger-warned) once quipped that the fights in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
2. More seriously, U of C’s openness to robust debate will be tested in about 5 minutes when the BDS folks set up their lit table in the commons.

It was probably great trolling from their PoV, b/c it would appeal to well-heeled middle-aged alums in non-academic professions, for whom 4 years at the U of C was the most intellectual time of their life, who (on average) think kids have it too easy these days…

I had not thought of this, but this is a good point. (I see that Joeff makes a similar point @28).

Re the OP — Departments as safe spaces is brilliant.

Columbia students did not insist that Ovid not be taught. Some Columbia students argued that the way Ovid was taught as part of Columbia’s core curriculum marginalized certain students (here’s the op-ed that sparked the furor: http://columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2015/04/30/our-identities-matter-core-classrooms). They did not propose that it not be taught, and even if they had, curricular debates (especially for mandatory courses!) are fair game and not a “danger to academic freedom.”

Similarly, requesting that rape law be taught in a way that is cognizant of the presence of rape survivors among the student body is not an unreasonable request. It can be pedagogically challenging to handle this well, and some professors have decided that they would rather not bother, but that is not censorship nor an infringement on academic freedom.

It is hard to even guess what not supporting trigger warnings might actually mean.

I disagree. Not supporting trigger warnings clearly means — to me — that sensitive students need to take it upon themselves to find out what they need to avoid, rather than imposing their needs upon others.

The only thing easily understandable is the assertion that the university can invite any speakers it wishes and students have no right to disrupt, no matter that speaker invitations are political endorsements, complete with monetary payments.

Ignoring for the moment the misdirection, that goes to the heart of the matter. Progressives have assumed for themselves the role of Thought Police: speakers contradicting received progressive wisdom must be silenced. Progressive thought is true because progressives think it. Disagreement is due to either ignorance or malice.

Which is why this letter is invaluable. It puts students on notice that their opinions are not privileged simply because they have them.

By all means, protest. By all means, invite speakers with more congenial opinions. By all means ask pointed questions during Q&A.

But try exercising the heckler’s veto, and you are out of here.

no matter that speaker invitations are political endorsements

This seems like a very strange assertion. It’s true that with commencement speakers, the invitation implies “this person represents the values of our university”, which is why I think that student campaigns against particular commencement speakers are in a different, more serious, category than protests regarding other speakers that university’s routinely invite. But ordinary speakers? You really think that a university can’t have someone speak on campus without necessarily endorsing their views?

Regarding “right to disrupt”, what sort of “disruptions” do you have in mind. Without hyperventilating about “though police”, I do think that progressives have become a little too enamored of the heckler’s veto in recent years, and I wouldn’t like to see it encouraged.

JHW: I have no problem with protesting speakers. Not even with loud 3 ring circus type protests outside the speaking venue. I object specifically to actions that prevent people who want to listen to the speaker from doing so.

Back during the early days of the Iraq invasion, there was a story in the newspaper about a commencement speaker who started making some general anti-war remarks during his speech (not specifically about Iraq. I think he might have been recalling his own actions during Vietnam). Anyway, some student charged the stage and wrenched the microphone away from him. Not OK. I feel the same way about activists going inside a speaking venue and making so much noise that the speaker can’t be heard.

re Ovid, this is not a matter of intellectual disagreement. Taking something off the curriculum is a big step, not at all to be taken lightly, but if it’s material that’s going to be emotionally harmful to a significant number of students (and obviously reading a graphic account of sexual assault is not a matter of intellectual disagreement), then it’s something that should be considered. I mean, there’s always limited space on a core curriculum, it’s not like anything and everything is in there.

(I’m always tempted to spam people who have such strong opinions about trigger warnings with links to rotten.com or whatever serves that function these days…)

That is not what the UC letter says, which however, is therefore not clear.

Good point. I imposed my assumptions without realizing it.

Good point. I imposed my assumptions without realizing it.

It’s a stupid idea, is the thing. Your self-reliant student will need to ask — and be answered, individually — every lecturer about every possible point of conflict, and they’ll still miss stuff because of possible sensitivities the student was unaware of.

As opposed to simply the lecturer stating straight up, once, in the lecture, “this content has been known to cause problems for people with attribute X”, and only for the things that actually are known to cause problems.

Your proposal simplifies or improves things for nobody. It is not a good idea.

[for a real-world example: why do we print allergy warnings on foods? What would a parallel to your “students need to seek out possible problems themselves look like, and how would it work? Why did you need me to point this out to you? See also posts I’ve made earlier concerning linguistic pragmatics and correlation of disturbances in same with politics.]

This is a great post.   I find the current topic of campus culture very interesting.  The idea that departments are themselves safe spaces seems right and reinforces my thinking on the matter.  

 On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the reaction against contemporary campus movements for calling out “microagressions”, “trigger warnings”, and “safe spaces”.  In a podcast featuring Sam Harris interviewing Jonahthan Haidt, Haidt recalls his own unpleasant experience at NYU.  He was showing a video expounding on research into moral disgust in which (I think I’ve got this right) a subject refers to male homosexual sex as “disgusting”.   A student in Haidt’s class was offended at the viewing and asked Haidt to apologize, which he eventually did out of a sense of expediency, not guilt.  The student was not appeased by Haidt’s apology and began a social media campaign calling out Haidt for homophobia.   He was brought before some administrative committee at NYU but no action against him was taken.   Even so, this would obviously be an unpleasant experience to go through.

Haidt claims that professors across the US are “scrubbing their curriculum” of any potentially offensive material because such battles over “trigger warnings”, “safe spaces”, and “microaggressions” are simply not worth the hassle, regardless of how seemingly irrational and ill-founded the complaints are.   I accept that his claim is correct.    I also endorse the claims made in Haidt’s co-written ( with Greg Lukianoff) article for the Atlantic last year that cognitive behavior therapy is a useful frame for much of this student behavior.

What I think Haidt misses, and pieces like the OP and Vox’s recent article by Kevin Gannon (08/26) see correctly, is that we are witnessing a will-to-power among co-belligerents here.  True: reactionaries are not merely seeking to establish a free and open discourse where students are challenged by new, potentially discomforting ideas.   They are, to the contrary, likely to be blind to their own tendencies to be prejudiced against threatening ideas (thus creating “safe spaces”), to work at avoiding unpleasant representations (and seek “trigger warnings”) or to enforce subtle taboos (and call out “microaggressions”).    So the tenor of both articles and most observations in this thread is correct.  But neither are the students seeking some ideal of social justice and harmonious toleration.   

Students’ claim to need a trigger warning, or the claim to be offended by a microaggression, or the claim to need a safe space to avoid re-traumatiztion is, in these instances, a social act intended to advance a group identity that empowers its members and creates status.  (Let’s not waste time pretending that such claims can ever be objectively, metaphysically “true”. I think we can hold this insight without losing empathy for all of us who get traumatized and victimized as a matter of course.) Haidt and Lukianoff may be baffled that students would harm themselves with psychically maladaptive victimization, but they don’t want to consider that the social payoff for such demonstrations of virtue might be of genuine egoic benefit to the participants.    And the reactionaries certainly do not want to see how similar they and the students (and all of us) are in this regard.   

It’s good to see some thoughtful (as opposed to spiteful) posts from academics. There’s a graceful and generous text by the North Western U president on the value of safe spaces (for students), there’s the Tattooed Prof’s blog post http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/650 taking a stand against the caricature of trigger warnings that the letter implies, and then there’s your post.

It goes, to me, a little far to say that universities “should be in the business of making their students uncomfortable with their preconceptions”. What they should do is to broaden and deepen the students’ understanding, to teach tools for thinking, to have them step beyond their preconceptions and put together more complex mental models.

Me, I’m mostly just appalled at the intellectual laziness and arrogance in this letter and similar screeds. Academic freedom also includes the freedom to select pedagogic approaches, including content warnings, which are typically used precisely in the service of getting students to engage with something that is way outside their comfort zone. Has this guy even talked with or read a text by an academic that uses them? I also hear that the Dean of Students doesn’t have any actual say about the pedagogy employed by faculty, so why the hell is he making such pronouncements?

I’m just as appalled when I hear that a university kicks Ovid from the curriculum allegedly under student pressure. This is a time when ample resources are available to address considerations that, frankly, were sorely neglected in the canonical way of approaching this content. (See for example “From Abortion to Pederasty: addressing difficult topics in the classics classroom” by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy — a book that has the merit to both look at concerns that may arise with socially conservative students (nudity, homosexuality) as well as with progressive feminists (rape, slavery, sex with children)). For the record, my secondary school put me through 5 years of Latin and 5 years of Ancient Greek, Homer, Ovid and the kitchen sink, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But I would do the hell and teach these texts today the way we were taught back in the days in Germany… We’re not any longer teaching 19th century middle-class white male future civil service leaders in a colonial state. A student who raises their hand and asks “isn’t what Apollo does to this nymph rape, and why should we have any respect of this author?” or questions slavery in the Greek or Roman antiquity deserves an answer. Flustered waffling, or flat-footed insistence that the weak-minded millenials need to be made uncomfortable is neither ethically nor intellectually adequate.

Students are almost by definition not-yet-mature, in progress. Sometimes they grab some legitimate concern by the tail end, then get on their high horses over it and ride it triumphantly right into the swamp. Haven’t they *always* done that? And shouldn’t the institution’s response be a pedagogic one — one that gives space to legitimate controversial debate (I could imagine *so* many topics) while affirming freedom of inquiry *and*, where necessary, ensuring the safety (from physical harm or harassment) of everyone involved.

Or maybe that’s too much asked in an academic environment where faculty is pushed to be reduced to content providers to student-consumers. No, I expect more intellectual integrity from what’s supposed to be an elite institution.

We’re not any longer teaching 19th century middle-class white male future civil service leaders in a colonial state.

Indeed. You are now teaching 21st century middle-class multiracial, multigender future service leaders in an imperial state.

harry b @26.

Try asking a UW Madison liberal student to give reasons why abortion is permissible….

I keep saying, we need to have students, starting in high school, write argumentative essays — the kind that examines *both* sides of an ethical question and then comes to a conclusion.

Anyhow, it’s not just social sciences and humanities. The sciences, too, are likely to topple one’s misconceptions. (And science pedagogy these days deals specifically with ways to bring out and address them.) Even a simple class like an intro to earth sciences for non-science majors will put students face to face with the weakness of preconceived wisdom, and some will be uncomfortable. Not only those who don’t want to accept climate change, or want to rely on the bible for the age of the universe, but there are also both conservationists and pro-development people who will figure out that things are more connected than they seem and actions will have unintended consequences. That can be quite as destabilizing as studying slavery or getting your mind blown in philosophy class, TBH.

Actually I’ve invited terrorists to speak at the UofC about what they did, and no one batted an eye about it. There is no “is so-and-so someone we want”, beyond the student organization doing it.

@ Merian

I guess my point was that, just as students are granted a safe space and, according to the OP, so are university departments, so too the US is one great safe space.

I have thought–and said–for more than 40 years that universities are–or ought to be–safe places for people to encounter dangerous, uncomfortable, new, or strange ideas and ways of thinking, and to encounter people who believe or profess those ideas. The safe part of that is that you can encounter those ideas without what I will call here existential risk. But what makes all those ideas dangerous is the possibility that you will change your own beliefs or ways of thinking, and that will perhaps disorient you. Which is another reason why the university needs to be a safe place for that to happen.

That safety needs to be in the first sense physical safety (which id doubtless why in Germany in the 1930s the Nazis made universities physically dangerous places). But it aso needs to be safe in that you have to be able to admit your discomfiture when you are exposed to new ideas, even to the point of trying to reject them. If you can.

It is, of course, complicated, and difficult to achieve.

UC reminds me a bit of Slate.com: it sees itself as contrarian, edgy, and intellectually superior, but far too often just winds up coming off as … dickish, for lack of a better term. See also its inexplicable decision to hire Jason Lieb.

Or should also be noted that a safe space to discuss something is almost by definition an unwelcoming space to someone else. The whole reason you might feel that a space needs to be made safe for certain discourse is because you’re worried about being attacked for what you say. But making the space safe for people who might get attacked for what they have to say means silencing those who might want to respond in ways that make them uncomfortable.

Nothing about that is new insight, mind. Any academic who is unfamiliar with that principle must either be very new or woefully naive.

Easy example: a safe space for law students to discuss the ins and outs of sexual offense law will probably not be a safe space for a sexual assault victim; a safe space for sexual assault victims to feel that their experiences are being validated will not be a safe space for that law student to freely ask questions about the exact edges of what does or does not count as rape.

This is why the discourse of safe spaces is so pernicious. “Safe spaces” are only defensible when they’re as limited as what OP discusses- things like specific subgroups of campus. But of course that isn’t all people want, and the real point of this post isn’t to defend anything actually controversial, but rather to redirect the conversation while playing the part of the Socratic fool- how can anyone object to safe spaces if the concepts boundaries can’t be perfectly nailed down? But that was always the least valuable aspect of Plato.

The article by the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Boar linked to by JHW @32:
>During the week spent on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work.

Fuzzy Dunlop @40:
>re Ovid, this is not a matter of intellectual disagreement. Taking something off the curriculum is a big step, not at all to be taken lightly, but if it’s material that’s going to be emotionally harmful to a significant number of students (and obviously reading a graphic account of sexual assault is not a matter of intellectual disagreement), then it’s something that should be considered.

Whatever the relevant brief passages are, one thing they decidedly aren’t is ‘vivid depictions of rape’, ‘detailed accounts of rape’ or ‘graphic accounts’ of the same. No sexual act even takes place in either of them – one describes only the abduction (the original meaning of the word ‘rape’) of a wife-to-be and the other describes the failed pursuit of someone who turns into a laurel. I assume that they can still cause distress to traumatised people and perhaps a trigger warning would not be out of place if the discussion is going to be focussed on them, but scrapping Ovid altogether because of them – if that really happened – was insane. In general, most significant and influential literature contains references to various sorts of abuse, violence and killing, so purging the curriculum of anything that might conceivably evoke somebody’s personal trauma means scrapping literature in general.

Perhaps I should add to 67 that people’s resorting to such absurdly inaccurate descriptions of texts suggests dishonesty and/or laziness, as well as confidence that one will get away with both. This is not a healthy phenomenon. At all.

All very well said, but it could use a good metaphor to tie everything together.

Perhaps some sort of fortified structure affording a sweeping but immobile view, made of an exotic material largely inaccessible the masses. And ideally of a nicely symbolic color.

“Platinum Spire,” maybe? No? “Moonstone Minaret?”

@72
You’ve omitted the end of this ‘account of a rape’, so here are the remaining sentences, for the sake of completeness:
‘The ravisher whipped up his chariot, and urged on the horses, calling them by name, shaking out the shadowy, dark-dyed, reins, over their necks and manes, through deep pools, they say, and the sulphurous reeking swamps of the Palici, vented from a crevice of the earth, to Syracuse where the Bacchiadae, a people born of Corinth between two seas, laid out their city between unequal harbours.’

Has anyone here seen the ALF video Hidden Crimes? I assume it is a legitimate video to show as part of certain courses on contemporary political struggle, animal rights or medical ethics – Peter singer might show it! (And indeed there is a chapter in his seminal text that uses similar material culled directly from animal research publications).

It is impossible from a syllabus or the title to understand how horrific that video is. I don’t understand why you can’t put a trigger warning on that, or indeed why there is anything different between trigger warnings, polite warnings, and censorship classification. Indeed we do this with friends and colleagues all the time – “I doubt you’d enjoy this documentary, it’s got talk of child abuse,” etc.

Is it the assumption of some commenters here that it is our responsibility to be rude to students, or do you just get off on it? Because warning someone that the content of a class might shock or offend them, or teaching in a way that reflects and understands modern sensibilities -isn’t that just common decency?

Yeah, I left it out because it’s irrelevant. We’re talking about college students. They stop reading whenever they like. (And, if they’re in a class that does Ovid, have likely encountered the concept of a metaphor.) My point is simply that calling the description absurdly inaccurate and its proponents dishonest doesn’t make me trust in your own intellectual impartiality.

@78

>Yeah, I left it out because it’s irrelevant.

Well, it might be useful to see clearly that what the passage describes is Persephone’s capture and transportation, not a rape.

>My point is simply that calling the description absurdly inaccurate and its proponents dishonest doesn’t make me trust in your own intellectual impartiality.

And conversely, if you disagree with my assertion that the description of these texts as ‘vivid depictions of rape’, ‘detailed accounts of rape’ or ‘graphic accounts of rape’ is absurdly inaccurate and dishonest, then that doesn’t make *me* trust in *your* intellectual impartiality. In fact, it seems to me that you are arguing obstinately mostly because you have already taken a side in this. Whatever – all the evidence is here, everyone else is free to make up their own mind, I’m done.

F. Foundling, I’m having to restrain myself from believing you aren’t simply trolling at this point.

Just because Dis abducted her, doesn’t mean he didn’t fuck her first.

Rape being a crime, it true that as far as the literal definition of rape in whatever jurisdiction is applicable to your location, there is reasonable doubt! No insertion of penis or object into orifice. OK. Let’s call it violent sexual assault — I think we can go for that.

But in the court of literary analysis? Let’s see:

• young girl picking flowers
• Dis “saw her, prized her, took her”. Out of “love”.
• She screams in fear, her dress gets torn. At the front.
• There’s a climax, and petals get spilled forth from her clothing.

That’s not supposed to be a description of rape? It requires about a 10th grade level of poetic analysis to come to that conclusion. Not to mention that sex after he took her is unlikely to have started out consensual. Can some literary types back me up here? Where’s Belle when you need her…

How to teach this part of the Western canon to American undergrads is a question that is genuinely interesting. Whether this part of the Western canon contains vivid descriptions of sexual assault which said American undergraduate (at least the women) will easily and sure-as-hell read as rape, is a matter of fact, not of debate.

Faustusnotes @ 75

Because warning someone that the content of a class might shock or offend them, or teaching in a way that reflects and understands modern sensibilities -isn’t that just common decency?

First, modern sensibilities have changed. On tv and movies (and podcasts!), depictions of sensationalist graphic violence and/or realistic sexual behavior have become far more common, perhaps signaling to professors that students are as liberal in their media exposure as the popular culture seems to suggest. So professors might not have an accurate sense of what will/won’t offend. To my (limited) sensibilbities, the Ovid passage above wouldn’t require a warning of any sort.

Secondly, I assume that what is controversial about trigger warnings is that students may now actually act on them. I imagine the dynamic goes like this: professor gives “trigger warning” (which,as you say, is perceived by the prof. as common decency) and then begins, assuming that he can be regarded as responsible and sensitivite and assuming that the students will now be prepared and participate. So far, so good, according to traditional academic norms. But now, perhaps, one or a few students leave, or complain after the fact, or before the fact, making the professor’s performance of patrician benevolence irrelevant. This grates, and he’s not sure that material that goes beyond what his teenager daughter takes in regularly is really triggering acute anxiety or depression. He smells a rat: the uncomfortable realization that his authority and status are being neutered by a social dynamic completely beyond his control.

It’s basically impossible to go through every possible example of every possible thing that might bother someone. This is especially true in an environment where people are actively looking for ways to be offended. It’s also true that the underlying assumption – that reading can recreate trauma across a wide range of experiences – has vanishingly little evidence behind. (Yes, combat veterans can experience flashbacks from things like loud sudden noises. That is not the same as reading something that, with effort, can be turned into something similar to a bad thing that happened to you in the past.)

In addition, these things are intensely unpopular across the ideological spectrum, across races, across genders, and across age groups.

So, other than being extremely unpopular, unworkable, and largely counterproductive, there is nothing wrong with trigger warnings.

By contrast, I have conversations with students every class about special adjustments that they may need. There are professionals who can diagnose conditions (as opposed to having me guess about things that I’m not trained to do, and that may not even be relevant), and as a matter of course we do things like give extra time on tests, audio recordings of lectures, excused absences, and so on. We can deal with individuals well, better than trying to do some bullet-proofing to prevent a student from even having to talk to a professor about whatever problems they may have had.

And that’s why this is so frustrating – there are such straightforward alternatives.

Maybe part of the problem is that, in depictions of sex and violence, we usually think of content warnings as being about how graphic or explicit a work is. Is there gore? Do you see genitalia? And so on. On this score, the Ovid passages being discussed in the comments above wouldn’t qualify.

But there are other ways in which they are pretty disturbing. The fear and violation of the woman. The callousness of the man. The sense you get that the narrator doesn’t see anything seriously wrong going on here, the portrayal of the events as just an exciting story. And put atop that the classroom context: look at what a good writer Ovid is, look at his skillful use of language, aren’t we glad we get to appreciate this kind of literature? For this purpose, it’s enough that Ovid dwells on it, that we get a vivid literary depiction, though not a sexually explicit one.

It is perfectly reasonable to think that teaching this to undergrads, especially as part of a mandatory literature course, requires a certain level of care about this issue.

b9n10nt @81:

It’s not so much that the passages *require* a content warning necessarily: it’s more that there should be expected to be some degree of framing.

I read at least one of these Ovid passages, if not both, in 11th grade Latin class. We were expected to know how to translate the Latin, recognize and identify the meter, read in meter, write intelligently about the role of the muse and how the gods get subverted. What we completely missed out on was the social aspects. The whole heroic boys-will-be-boys, and love justifies taking what is yours wasn’t even considered worth mentioning. So no, I wasn’t traumatised, but my education missed out on something. Something that kids that *had* encountered sexual coercion would have recognized, and it would have made them quite rightfully question why the lessons considered it not worth mentioning, and whether this sort of literature was for them in the first place. Something that in today’s time, thankfully, is a little more recognized as a problematic aspect.

faustusnotes, quoting:

What has changed is that now minority groups (and women) are demanding an extension of those trigger warnings to cover things that might not trigger your average crusty middle-aged white dude: rape, colonialism, slavery, KKK violence – the sorts of things that are just abstract details to your average academic.

This, too. A friend of mine said about this UC letter that what came across loud and clear to her and her teenage son (white, male, well-educated, likely straight) is that *he* could expect not to be troubled in his sensibilities in a place like UC, then.

Is it the assumption of some commenters here that it is our responsibility to be rude to students, or do you just get off on it?

Speaking only for myself, it is the students’ responsibility to show up prepared. Which means they have taken it upon themselves to know the syllabus, and have — I know this might sound like a huge burden — also at least hit Wikipedia to get an overview of any books, movies, etc. in the course.

Students have ample opportunities to afford themselves of whatever trigger warnings they might need.

Another good example might be the use of Tombstone for Fireflies or Barefoot Gen in an advanced Japanese language class. These are both famous and well-respected films in Japan but the former involves two children starving to death and the latter involves quite horrible scenes of wartime destruction. What on earth is wrong with the professor telling the students “the next class is going to be a bit confronting, so you might want to steel yourselves” or even – heaven forbid – finding a less confronting movie that teaches the same stuff?

And supposing it did – what is the difference between the student googling the syllabus to get trigger warnings, and the professor telling them the trigger warnings?

Besides the obligation to due diligence I mentioned above, sensitive students have their own unique sensitivities, which they know, and professors do not.

So the question comes back to you. If it is possible for students to ascertain course contents for themselves, why do trigger warnings exist at all?

Hey Skipper, maybe trigger warnings exist out of politeness, or because people aged 18-22 don’t know what will make them angry or upset yet, and professors have experienced it before?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard that there are teachers who respect their students and try to treat them with respect. Mythical creatures, I’m sure, but it’s possible some of those professors might think that interacting with the students about the emotional effects of being challenged is a sign of respect. But in any case you seem to think trigger warnings are a good thing, just that students should look them up rather than teachers, so it seems your primary concern is with reducing teacher workload, not any deep objection to the nature of the thing.

b9n10nt regarding “offensive” trigger warnings, I can see how teaching some of this stuff could get tricky if you have to think about everyone’s perspective, but it also seems to me that a lot of professorial resistance to this aspect of trigger warnings comes down to not wanting to have to think too much about other people’s perspective. i.e. intellectual laziness.

merian @ 88 and js @ 91:

Yes, Ovid and old Hollywood films can be used as an opportunity to say “this is what mysogyny looks like. ” I think that to not frame these texts in this way would be a passive-aggressive attempt at anti-feminism. (And I only think that because of work done by earlier -mostly campus- activists.)

However, what I don’t see is that a student’s reaction to Metamorphosis or The Thin Man can be expected to be similar to Hidden Crimes, or the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, or the rape of Tony Soprano’s psychologist.

A general audience should have trigger warnings for the latter 3, not the former 2. An individual recovering from trauma will not benefit from specifically avoiding the former. But…a political movement- a group identity- can gain cohesion and benefit from claiming that certain texts represent values so repulsive as to need trigger warnings.

I could be wrong! But that’s what I think I know.

We are very political beings, and there are frequent opportunities to leverage privilege or claim privilege in myriad social situations. If one were to to say that this is not a motivating factor for student advocates for “trigger warnings” “safe spaces” and against “microagressions”, they would be naive and actually dehumanize those students into Pure Beings of Virtue and Insight.

Let me memorialize one of Brad DeLong’s best typos:

To say that you are against sage spaces, without immediately saying that the two overriding purposes of the university are to be a safe space for ideas and for its members as scholars is also unprofessional.

How are first year students not a general audience?

b9n10nt, today Vox had a first person essay about this (can’t be bothered linking) and the second part of the essay was about your “kids going too far” issue, and it made it pretty clear (without intending to) that the root of the problem was the complete lack of employment rights and career prospects of adjunct and junior faculty, which make them vulnerable to any student complaint. There was really no way to separate the “chilling power” of the complaints and campaigns from the obvious power of the university authorities over junior staff. So maybe the problem here is not that students have changed in this regard, but that universities have.

[faustunotes:] But in any case you seem to think trigger warnings are a good thing, just that students should look them up rather than teachers, so it seems your primary concern is with reducing teacher workload, not any deep objection to the nature of the thing.

No, I don’t think they are a good thing. My primary objection is that trigger warnings infantilize students. Presuming sufficient detail is available about courses’ subject matter and materials — a professional obligation — then it is incumbent upon students to familiarize themselves with that information. Having done so, then they will have actively provided themselves with all the warning they specifically need.

The alternative requires professors to be aware of the entire universe of triggers, which seems, like the real universe, expanding at a significant fraction of the speed of light, to the point where the whole concept has become a clown car.

I think the recent article in The Atlantic, The Coddling of the American Mind.

The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.

1. Television stations, at least in the UK, habitually give the viewer a warning before showing violence (either simulated, as in horror movies, or real, as in footage of terrorist attacks), sexual activity, or strobe lighting (the latter because it can cause epileptic seizures). I think the US is similar. So the idea that certain kinds of material are supposed to be preceded by some kind of warning is culturally commonplace .

TV, of course, is a high regulated medium, much more so that the university lecture; compare George Carlin’s “Seven Words you can never say on television”. But I could imagine an argument that lectures that don’t meet broadcast TV levels of acceptability are permitted, but should be preceded by content warnings.

2. There is a paradox in this letter. It is a trigger warning, sent to all students in advance of them seeing them material. Admittedly, it’s a rather vague trigger warning, analogous to “may contain nuts” on food items, but it still is one. Despite the fact that it appears to disparage trigger warnings.

3. I wonder to what extent the letter is “virtue signalling”, and to what extent the lawyers made them do it. A possible reading of the subtext might be “Our legal department has advised us that showing students sexually explicit and/or violent material without prior warning is likely to be construed by the courts as negligence on our part, leaving us liable to tort claims by the students. Accordingly, we are sending you a generic warning now, covering the entire course material”.

1. On the “safe spaces” thing, academic progress seems to need something that is at least analogous.

Suppose you want to present some new result in classical microeconomics. Someone in the audience is bound to make the point that classical microeconomics doesn’t really reflect how actual human beings behave, and so your spiffy new theorem is wrong and irrelevant before you’ve even got at far as expounding what it is. To make progress, it appears necessary to bracket concerns (ok, I’m an fan of the phenomenologists like Derrida and Heidegger…) such that you can see “ok, probably none of this describes the real world, but bear with me for the interesting hypothetical I’m about to explain, and we can return to cover the deeper issue in a different seminar”. (I can recall at least one occasion where some of the audience walked out when this move was made, but there you go).

Quantum computing, etc. etc. also require this.

Basic plan for a doctoral dissertation: look through your PhD supervisor’s publications for the thing that strikes you as being the most completely wrong-headed. Explain in detail, at book length, why your PhD supervisor is completely wrong on this issue.

“It’s wrong-headed turtles all the way down”, to adapt Terry Pratchett.

2. In the arts/literature, we sometimes need to talk about personal experience more than you would in the sciences. e.g. imagine that in art classes your are discussing each others paintings. Doing this effectively often requires a more select and sympathetic audience than would typically be the case for the sciences.

Ronan(rf)@113: +1 to everything you said.

Like I said upthread, content warnings about things that could reasonably be expected to be upsetting to a general audience (sexual assault, explicit depictions/descriptions of violence) are something that instructors have been providing all along. The current bruhaha comes from the demand that we should somehow magically anticipate every possible bad reaction based on the idiosyncratic personal history and circumstances of each individual student. This is ridiculous and unworkable on its face. Even those arguing for trigger warnings, when they are not in “I must defend the position of my tribe” mode, will admit this. That’s one reason I’m surprised that this non-issue keeps cropping up over and over again.

Marc @ 115:

I’m not sure. Maybe it’s a positive development that students are taking responsibility (per Ronan (fr) @113) for curricula that they want and that best promotes the skills they are asked to demonstrate in class. Do you argue that professors (I’m limiting this to literature classes, in this instance) need to have autonomy over what they put in the syllabus?

Ronan (rf) re: students on Ivy League campuses not being oppressed

But what these arguments about the curriculum might represent is a move from a hierarchical model of instruction (wherein an authority chooses the content and the students must first passively absorb it and then respond) to a cooperative model of instruction (wherein the participants choose the content and the authority facilitates their discussion). Ivy League students may not be oppressed, but they participate in an oppressive model of instruction that, if upended, could affect norms and expectations beyond campus life. Is that a ridiculous thing to argue?

Trigger warnings at Oberlin, concealed carry at UT Austin, both assiduously enforced? I was fond of the somewhat simple-minded idea that a university should be a place where you can’t get strung up for holding that the earth orbits the sun, but trying to stuff both second amendment fetishists and advocates of safe spaces into some sort of unified cultural context flat drives me crazy. Somebody may have the right idea here, but I bet it’ll be a long time before we sort out who it is.

As people have pointed out, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is no longer required reading at Columbia, thanks to student activists and a feckless administration anxious to oil squeaky wheels. Not reading the Metamorphoses not only robs students of a cultural treasure many of them go to Columbia to discover, but attenuates what they can get out of writers who assume that work as a background, just as not reading the Bible does. Those Ovidian writers include Dante, Spenser, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Joyce, Kafka, and Proust — white males, some straight, to be sure — but also Behn, George Eliot, Bishop, Woolf, Soyinka…. Why? Because of scenes you might find in PG movies (scenes, moreover, highly sympathetic to the women being chased and not the powerful gods chasing them).

There is nothing that isn’t offensive to someone. A default expectation or demand for trigger warnings is just a shoulder chip. Any decent faculty member will note when reading may be emotionally challenging, even at the cost of blunting the effect of hat reading — e.g. in Mrs. Dalloway or Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. But legislating decency leads to puritanical tyranny, and always has.

To follow up 119, at every university where I’ve worked there have been these things called “curriculum committees” that periodically evaluate the courses and content for each major and make suggestions. And at every university these curriculum committees have had student members. So students are not, in fact, without a voice in these matters.

On the other hand, allowing the loudest self-styled “campus radicals” to dictate course content to everyone else…I don’t really need to explain why that’s a bad idea, do I?

Manhood:

Not “just” a shoulder chip, but a way to claim status so to speak. The chip on the shoulder is the will to power, not something that is objectively there as a psychic fact. What if the question isn’t “will the society have taboos” but “what taboos will they be”? 60 years ago, depicting homosexuality was taboo. In 20 years, maybe depicting authority figures as protagonists will be. But to claim that the entirety of modern Western Civ. has been “puritanical tyranny” because of the hang-ups that have thankfully relaxed is probably as much of an overstatement as predicting that campus activists will turn us all into a left-wing equivalent of Saudi Arabian subjects.

As for the Canon, no one’s stopping anyone from reading it on their own.

I don’t think we are appreciating how (potentially?) awesome this moment is, culturally. In the last 50 odd years, we are successfully pursuing a radically new experiment in women’s equality as well as sexual and gender equality generally. The fight against racist oppression and imperialist violence is claiming victories (amid setbacks, to be sure). How could it be that these momentous, unprecedented advancements could occur without radical shifts in how cultural works are produced and interpreted? And who but the young will be the vanguard of these new productions and interpretations.

Too much pearl-clutching by the old guard, I say, who would blithely accept out-moded taboos and sensibilities because they weren’t inconvenienced by them and were’nt driven to seek status by challenging them.

@ZM; I think I mainly agree with you here.

on the other hand, I sometimes think that both in the arts and sciences there’s something of a difference in character between the public aspect of an art work or piece of scientific research, and the between-insiders discussion that went on during its creation. That insiders might be more candid when talking to each other than when presenting the finished thing to the public. That art works might contain aspects apparent to their creators but not made fully explicit in the published form. (Possibly also true of scientific research, in a more oblique way).

AcademicLurker @ 122:

On the other hand, allowing the loudest self-styled “campus radicals” to dictate course content to everyone else…I don’t really need to explain why that’s a bad idea, do I?

Have a go at it! (Just watch out for the idyllic-past-and-linearly-progressing-slippery-slope fallacies).

Mahood –

Well, I’m substantively against the idea that a student or group of students should be able to say “no, I find this reading troubling, and I demand that I not be exposed to it,” and that the university should capitulate to them. But:

(1) Metamorphoses. A must if you’re going to pursue the academic study of classical literature. A handy signpost if you’re going to pursue the study of literature, period, to be able to glean references to it (as you point out). But these days it hardly seems possible to arrange for the general student to acquire the entire literary backdrop used as source material for the last 500 years of Western literature; you wouldn’t have time to read anything actually IN the last 500 years of Western literature, or anything that isn’t Western literature, while also keeping up with fields of study we’d like students to be aware of that weren’t part of a gentleman’s education when every gentleman had some Latin and Greek. More specifically, I somehow managed to get through what passes for a pretty good education these days (maybe not by CT standards, but by everyday standards) without ever being assigned Ovid, and not only did I attend a selective college that prides itself on a robust core curriculum, I took all the Latin classes my high school offered (we read Virgil, Horace, and Catullus). I’ve missed something by not reading Ovid (actually, I checked it out of the library a few years ago [in English!] but decided to try again in the future, because I wasn’t getting into it), but surveying the rest of the world, I’m not sure Ovid is the indispensable linchpin holding our cultural understanding together.

(2) Based on the general tenor I see advanced in arguing against student requests to exclude certain curriculum (particularly the kind of curriculum I think they shouldn’t exclude, for the most part, Ovid included), I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Columbia did a BAD JOB of explaining why it was worth reading Ovid regardless of the objectionable content, and failed to make an argument that accommodated student concerns, and decided it was easier to capitulate. The job of the university is to educate, and if it was really worth keeping Ovid in the core curriculum, this was an opportunity to educate. If they chose to abandon the field, that’s not the students’ fault, any more than it’s a teenager’s fault when his parents say “fine, you know what, it’s your life!” and let him do something stupid the inadvisability of which nobody prepared him to understand.

That’s an amazing story, ZM. This is just to say that I do understand what triggers are. The demand for trigger warnings that UC is resisting is a demand that is based on a false notion of triggers. But it’s had baleful effects.

I’d just like to point out the very reasonable statement made by the UofC Student Government President as reported in the campus newspaper, the Maroon.
https://chicagomaroon.com/2016/08/27/student-president-calls-free-speech-letter-messed-up/
The kids get it – “the administration is far more fearful of challenge and discomfort than any student I know.”

There was some student demand. The real issue, as I’ve said above, is the current administration playbook. That playbook seeks to weaken faculty governance. They go to meetings and conventions where they figure out how to do this. One way is to make common cause with students against the academic freedom of faculty. And it’s a sad commentary on what passes for left liberal discourse that a lot of leftists think this is a good idea.

I never said, by the way, that Ovid is the linchpin of western literature. I said he was important (a LOT more than Catullus) and great. If you go to a college with a core curriculum partly to learn a great tradition, it’s kind of false advertising to then tell students they can go read it on their own if they like. Most people go seeking an education. Pressuring an administration to remove the Metamorphoses from a syllabus erodes the education they’re seeking.

bob@142: No worries.

That wasn’t a letter to the students, that was a reassuring purr for alumni so that they would conttinue to donate to the University. They like the college they remember – it is the safe space in their memory. It is all about cash flow.

So many great comments, folks. Thank you. I’ve enjoyed the thread. I was suspicious and worried that no one was acknowledging the excesses of the student activists AND defending them, but then Ronan (rf) @146 voiced my sentiments quite well (as you did with your 113 post).

merian @ 140: Apologies for not excerpting.

AcademicLurker @ 137: I’m pretty sure your post was a microaggression ;)

Cheers,

I have taught Ovid in English and Latin multiple times, and I always let the students know that what is coming their way. I do so in part for students who might have a sensitivity to the subject, but mainly because it just makes a better class discussion if they know ahead of time. And, no, most undergraduates have no idea that Ovid is so rape-heavy (especially the first six books of the Met. and the Ars Amatoria).

As for the idea that Persephone and Daphne sections are not really descriptions of rape, I have no idea what to say here. Daphne would rather turn into a tree than be touched by Apollo, that is how strong here resistance to him is. And Persephone’s cries for her mother, and ripped dress?
Ovid is one of my favorite authors to teach, and if indeed Columbia has removed it from LitHum, that is a shame. But yes, “trigger warnings” (or whatever you want to call them — I’ve never used that term in class) make for a better classroom experience for everyone.

ZM @138,

Despite being awesome in every way, including writing a ripoff of VU’s Sister Ray that’s almost as great as the original (Roadrunner), I’m pretty sure Jonathan Richman was completely wrong about this. Surely a great many people called Pablo Picasso an asshole? I’d like to believe he really did drive an El Dorado, though.

@134, I should stress I have many students passionately interested in social justice, but their talk of justice doesn’t focus that much on stuff like safe spaces and trigger warnings. In general they seem more interested in politics in the conventional sense on a national and international level than the politics of campus life.

Part of this is because many are non traditional working commter students, so there’s less of a campus culture and things like healthcare, wages, and childcare are more immediately pressing issues in their lives. Another reason is that most are working class kids who can barely afford even our school’s relatively low costs, so economic issues tend to get at least as much attention as other matters of justice. They’re not used to getting their way or being listened to by people with power. Finally, many have conservative and/or religious backgrounds (not just white Christians, but many minority and international students) that cultivate a certain deference to authority that makes them less willing to criticize faculty behavior or course choices.

I don’t know how generalizable my experience is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s common in colleges with mostly working class, and working, students in debt. They have clear practical reasons for having different political priorities than the average Yale or Oberlin student.

The discussion of trigger warnings and safe spaces, with few exceptions, strikes me as grossly undialectical. Trigger warnings are useful for instructors who want to push the boundaries on the material they present. They’ve been useful that way for me in the past. Safe spaces are crucial for students to be able to take risks or deal with uncomfortable material. I always begin each quarter with a collaborative exercise with students in which we figure out how our seminar discussions can be safe — so we can get to a level of individual and group challenge. Safety and risk, a necessary duo.

Naturally, some people will see only one side of this and demand safety without risk or risk without safety.

More from the “Oberlin College Black Student Union Institutional Demands”:

“We as a College-defined “high risk,” “low income,” “disadvantaged” community should not have to carry the burden of deconstructing the white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist system that we took no part in creating”.

Indeed, why should they if they have the privilege of outsourcing that job to Haitians?

They may not have asked, but excluded it was.

Mahood at 157: “Columbia decided not to teach ‘Metamorphoses’ in their core curriculum because it didn’t want to expend effort on figuring out how to teach it sensitively and conscientiously” is a pretty different story from “Columbia decided not to teach ‘Metamorphoses’ in their core curriculum because coddled liberal students insisted that nothing ever be taught that upset them.” And “Columbia decided not to teach ‘Metamorphoses’ in their core curriculum because they made general curricular changes that had nothing to do with student complaints” is still a third story, which is, for what it’s worth, the official story.

The idea that it requires some extra effort to teach the Metamorphoses sensitively and conscientiously after they’d been teaching it for decades, like the idea that they thought teaching the Heroides would somehow be more in keeping with a core curriculum and not a strange compromise is, well, hard to believe.

Perhaps if we presented it as a clickbait listicle it’ll get through to you: “five ways that new discoveries and perspectives on personality and identity change how we have to teach literature [number three will blow your mind]”

But a smart person wouldn’t have needed me to point that out.

The 2016 Columbia first year syllabus appears to include Ovid’s Heroides. The Columbia page states that texts rotation and off. Metamorphoses is also on the curriculum of another myth and literature course. You can find the Columbia curriculum if you google it – it includes the bible (Genesis) which is poorly written misogynist trash with shallow characters and a ridiculous plot, and should be triggering for anyone who gives a toss about not losing minutes of their life in that miasma. I would put the link here but immediately after I put the link to the Oberlin policy here I got accused of having not read it – presumably by an academic who is trained in understanding and analyzing texts. I won’t waste my time trying to put further links here since I don’t want to invade this safe space with micro aggressions like “facts”.

However since I already put the link here I will point out to the person who accused me of not reading it (Academiclurker) that the document in question is neither a pedagogic policy nor a curriculum document – it is a sexual offense policy. Furthermore it states clearly that it is not intended to restrict academic freedom in any way and specifically states that its suggestions are “tips” for teaching. I found this out by reading the document, which is available online for anyone (let’s refer to it as a “text”, shall we?)

Through a process of analyzing this “text” it is possible to conclude that a) the right wing pants wetters complaining about this “issue” we’re lying to you (news at11!) and b) nothing chilling to academic discourse happened here.

These are all things I said above, and I will never get back the one minute of my life I spent explaining them a second time. Still, at least I’m not being forced to read Genesis – so there’s that!

The university is a cruel institution. It takes the best and the brightest, promises them the world, and then it throws most of them to the dogs.

This is true, but incomplete.

Google is a cruel institution. It takes the best and the brightest, promises them the world, and then it throws most of them to the dogs.

The State Department is a cruel institution. It takes the best and the brightest, promises them the world, and then it throws most of them to the dogs.

And so on.
The NBA is a cruel institution. It takes the best and the brightest, promises them the world, and then it throws most of them to the dogs.

Well, for a case study on using films when teaching about Nazi Germany, see the first seven paragraphs of

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189543/trigger-warnings-on-campus

Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s, locally-famous “general education” course Soc Sci 2 taught by Sam Beer.

I don’t understand this idea (eg in tablet mag above) that you’re “at school to be disturbed.” What is that!? I watched The Descent to be disturbed, I went to school to learn path integrals.

A few months ago this blog covered the case of that dodgy English creative writing teacher who likes to force transgressive texts on his young female students, to desensitize them to various sexual and horror themes, and everyone agreed it was classic sexual harassment behavior. Somewhere in the last few months we have gone from shock at this behavior to approval.

I don’t go to school to be disturbed. If you can’t teach without disturbing people, maybe you should consider the possibility that you are not a very good teacher.

I was going to write a question on this thread but I’m a bit thrown by this business with ZM. Whatever the reasons, surely at least CT could have communicated with ZM privately before this decision?

Val, while I appreciate your concern, this has nothing to do with me having a disability. I don’t think you are familiar with the indie musicians work, and I don’t think you know about their lives either.

Anyone who has been reading or even glancing at CT for a while knows that ZM has been writing about this particular topic for a long time. It’s not like it’s new with this thread. (I’m tempted to say a lot more, but I’ve decided not to.)

My guess is the CT crew are worried about defamation, or they just don’t want to have critical comments about real people on their blog, since they aren’t in a position to determine the truthfulness of anything written. ZM, is there a reason you haven’t written this down somewhere yourself, like on your own blog?

I run a (pathetic, unpopular, fortunately) blog and I would be definitely uncomfortable with this kind of material appearing on it – even my pathetic and unpopular blog has once or twice led to scary real life consequences, and I can understand if the CT crew are overly careful about this kind of thing.

Faustusnotes 08.29.16 at 11:30 am @ 167 —
I conclude that there is a business model problem. Being disturbed is not a problem: all you have to do is hear the news, or become aware of what’s going on in your neighborhood. That would normally apply to institutions of higher learning. Certainly ‘In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’ [Eccl.1:18] However, there are other concepts of school: for example, I have been told that for many years much of even the most prestigious liberal education was based on a concept of the university as a finishing school for young gentlemen, where they could get a smattering of foreign and dead languages and maybe a taste of mathematics, and thereafter be ready for the era’s equivalent of cocktail parties. This was the sort of education I encountered back in the later Middle Ages, and it was not very disturbing or disruptive because one was already used to certain aspects of the bad stuff, the rapes and murders and enslavings and so forth, from daily life and common knowledge, and everyone but scurrilous radicals agreed it was just the way things were. Then there was a religious school model, where, as in Genesis, really bad things happened but they were God’s will and the fault of Man, so maybe OK. Finally, in recent years, we have observed the advent of The Great Fear and the urgent desire of many to protect themselves and their children from the world and Ecclesiastes’ grief and sorrow. As you can see, the last set is bound to have a lot of problems with learning and knowledge, so the solution might be a new business model or rather set of models in which some institutions are for learning, some for disruption, and some for keeping safe.

Hey Skipper 08.29.16 at 12:24 pm @ 168 — This is theater. It would be a simple matter to construct a situation in which people could yell at each other as much as they wanted and no one had to shut up. Anyway, we have the Internet for that kind of ‘discussion’.

OK folks, I have just unapproved (not deleted, just put back in the moderation queue), 3 comments by ZM subsequent to the earlier deletion. Henry is travelling and is unable to manage the thread at this time. He did not want things to spin out of control when he was unable to access the internet. I suggest that ZM refrains from commenting now until and unless Henry gives the all-clear and that you all wait a few hours at least before engaging in further argument or speculation. Meanwhile, feel free to continue discussion of the substantive topic of the OP.

155,167: Right. Trigger warnings stopped being a remotely controversial subject with instructors once it became clear that administrators were not going try to mandate when/if/how they are used.

The increasing popularity of the heckler’s veto among certain preening factions of the left is a much more serious concern.

faustusnotes –

Incredibly off-topic, but online conversation about Tolkien and race is one of my triggers, so I spent a little time looking at your blog. Without disagreeing with you in toto, I think you do your analysis a disservice by conflating Tolkien’s subdivisions of men with Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, etc; as much as genetic destiny is a powerful component in JRRT’s writing, I think conflating the two is incorrect, and he does not make similar use of the Dwarves and the Haradrim. It’s also worth noting that my perspective is shaped by reading The History of Middle Earth, which means I’ve read a lot of JRRT’s letters and notes to himself ABOUT all this stuff, to a degree that I’m not confident about what really exists in the novels vs. the background material. One interesting takeaway (and from some of your posts I think you’ve read at least some of this material as well) is how aware JRRT was of some of these problems. For example, he was very uncomfortable about the status of the Orcs, which is why there’s a lot of contradiction over what exactly they are: his storytelling need for hordes of arrow fodder discomfited his theological perspective, which was baked into the world-building.

Combining no safe spaces and open carry policies is somewhat contradictory.

Eli Rabett @ 183

Combining no safe spaces and open carry policies is somewhat contradictory.

Hard to tell this late in the thread, but if your comment was in response to my 119, the contradiction was kinda the point. There’s a massive conflict of expectations at work in our culture these days, and not just in the U.S. Does a decent regard for other people’s feelings keep us safe, or is it guns that keep us safe? Shrill voices are plentiful on either side of the question, more heat than light is the rule, it seems. And in France, for a non-U.S. example, is wearing a burkini to the beach evidence that a woman is oppressed, or is it the three armed policemen forcing her to disrobe in front of a crowd of onlookers?

Honestly, I wasn’t trying to be flip, or derail a serious discussion of the OP, I was just thinking of all the ways we seem to be talking past one another these days

Willam @ 185, nope just thread fatigue didn’t see yours.

I accept what you are saying Henry and understand the problem. I realise now that some of the comments ZM made about particular named individuals were not things that should have been published. I guess it would have been good if someone had been able to contact her and explain that first but obviously your circumstances made that difficult.

@167 If you teach about the violations of Bell’s inequalities, or even the full implications of the equivalence principle, without disturbing most of the students, you haven’t really taught them. Did you really go to school just to be trained in some techniques?

fn @ 195
Yes that’s partly why I said in my case the scholar/activist distinction doesn’t exactly apply. As you probably know, the MPH is primarily a professional qualification and in the CC and Public Health unit we are in fact teaching students about what they can do about CC in their professional careers. But
– it can be depressing in the unit when they realise how big the problem is and how little is being done
– even when they have their MPH, including their elective in CC and Public health, it’s still likely they might encounter a lot of frustration trying to get anything done within the health service or sector they work in (my own research certainly confirms that)

The other thing fn is not just policy but the personal response of caring – not quite so relevant in my example (though still relevant) but I think part of the problem being discussed here may be that for students of colour and women, when they learn about bad things that have happened in the past, it’s like they are learning a white male ruling class canon that doesn’t care as long as the content is ‘good’ by technical criteria.

‘So now we will read part of Ovid that is describing a rape, but we are not interested in your emotional response, your demand that we condemn the rape (because no matter what campus policy says, we actually don’t think it’s that important compared to the importance of Ovid as high literature/historical record/…)’

There is a conditionality in some men’s response to women, which I became aware of when I was studying popular attitudes in turn of the (19th) century Australia, and which I think still exists in some quarters:
‘in the olden (‘barbaric’) days, men used to do whatever they wanted to with women, and we don’t do that now (because we are ‘civilised’) (and you should be grateful, because if we weren’t so civilised we might)’

I will let others speak about the subtexts around racism, if they dare – since likely we will get reproached/mocked …

(btw fn I am not suggesting you don’t know this, just that it needs to be spelled out)

Nick I think you should consider the specific example given in the tablet mag above – a lecturing format designed to shock and awe the students into … something. It’s presented in a laudatory way, as an argument against trigger warnings. But it doesn’t seem very good teaching to me.

AcademicLurker 08.30.16 at 12:06 am

Faustusnotes@184: My “heckler’s veto” reference was to the pharyngula thread, where the emerging consensus seems to be that disrupting events that you don’t like is A-OK.

Here is a professor who thinks it is perfectly okay to censor points view, based upon his say so.

To be more specific, I’ll pick Ben Shapiro as an example. Self-identified SJWs have, in various ways and places, prevented him speaking to groups that invited him.

Obviously, because his opinions are so far beyond the pale that the hecklers’ veto is what all right thinking people must do.

Here is a recent lecture he gave.

I’m having a tough time not concluding that SJW’s desire dominion over others’ opinions.

But hey skipper, in the example the professor cited the students didn’t use a hecklers veto – they asked the university to withdraw a speaker invitation.

That the students were unsuccessful does not mean they weren’t attempting to use the hecklers’ veto. The students’ goal was to exercise their dominion over others thoughts.

Unless you think every person is equally entitled to speak at every university then you have to accept some people need to be privileged over others …

No, I don’t think that. For instance, I don’t think I’m as “entitled” to speak at a university as, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates: I have done absolutely nothing worthy of interest in a university setting.

But I’m not sure what you mean by “privileged”. If it is the university itself inviting speakers, then the university shouldn’t engage in privileging certain view points. On the other hand, if it is campus organizations inviting speakers, then it is most certainly an exercise, whether attempted or successful, for others to stop invitees from giving their presentation.

Such attempts at view point suppression is exactly what the UoC letter was getting at.

Ben Shapiro has been prevented from speaking due to the heckler’s veto. He has been disinvited because a college rescinded a campus organization’s invitation. Ayan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis. Christina Hoff Sommers at UMass. An Israeli academic getting shouted down at the University of MN. There plenty more examples.

In each case, SJWs are insisting on subjugating everyone else’s thoughts. Why should everyone else think that is OK?

Hey skipper — I mainly agree with you but need to correct an error. Ayan Hirsi Ali had the promise of an honorary degree withdrawn. She wasn’t invited to speak, so an invitation to speak wasn’t undone. Indeed Brandeis particularly said they’d welcome her to speak on campus. They just rethought the appropriateness of an honorary degree.

Not directly to do with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”, but: the FIRE database of disinvitations allows looking only at cases where the event is a debate (not the honor of speaking at a commencement), and where the “heckler’s veto” of event disruption has happened (not protested elsewhere, or arguing beforehand for disinvitation). The results (sorry if the link doesn’t work) include recent events shouted down at UC Berkeley, on two occasions, and at UC Davis, Penn, Brown, and UChicago.

Collin, I’ll take that in the spirit in which it was intended.

The rhetoric of “safety” has been used to justify canceling a debate on abortion, disinviting an afrofunk band with too many white musicians, and outrage at a discussion that mentioned That Euphemism.

Protesters at Missou in November 2015 made the public quad at a public university a “safe space” from journalists (Daily Beast):

Then they turned their attention to the press, forming a human chain around the quad where protesters had been camping out for the past week.

“No comment!” they chanted as at least one held a sign saying, “No Media, Safe Space.”

The students pushed and shoved reporters and cameramen to prevent them from breaking through and interviewing protesters on the quad, including Butler.

Hey skipper, allow me to quote some Shapiro for you:

But that is precisely the problem—common sense tells us that there are people who cannot and ought not to command our respect or empathy. We regard what they stand for as stupid, crazy, evil, or all three. To be respectful of them would be to abandon all moral sense, so that a completely tolerant person would be totally passive, without a moral center.

This is from the book that he wrote about the importance of destroying an entire realm of speech. He wrote that back when he was pals with WND and Breitbart, before he supported trump and palled around with the gamer gaters at breitbart – people whose disgusting war in free speech be supported until he suddenly noticed they were anti Semitic . You’ll have to forgive me if I’m surprised that someone who supports vicious attacks on public figures, censorship and death threats is shocked at being told he isn’t welcome at an institute of higher learning.

Funny how his sneering about how and tolerance is completely changes when he isn’t being tolerated…

ZM @ 171 – don’t want to revisit all this but just want to clarify that I wasn’t referring to your disability in the context of your statements about the musicians (which as you say I know little about and won’t comment on) but in the context of a poor process at CT in removing all your comments without explanation to you. I’ve now had explanations from several CT bloggers and I completely accept that it was just an unfortunate process due to circumstances and no-one on CT was being intentionally dismissive or insensitive to you, but they did need to remove some of your comments.
Won’t comment on this any further here. Best wishes.

Is this the winning entry for the 2016 All World Newspeak Competition?

And, yeah. Speech is rivalrous. I’ve run the proof up here a couple of times before [it’s a consequence of the fact that audiences require social coordination], and it has some pretty important consequences: by definition a rivalrous action is not cost-free.

In a lot of cases this doesn’t hugely matter, and under normal circumstances we can treat speech as if it were non-rivalrous… but in the edge cases the differences matter, and it’s the edge cases we need the rules for.

@19

“It had never occurred to me that my job is to make students feel uncomfortable. Is this a thing?”

The authority on this is of course Mr Kennedy, as played by Stewart Lee long ago:

Oh look, suddenly Hey Skipper is studiously ignoring the fact that his heroic victim of censorship is not just in favour of censorship, but in favour of death threats and vicious public speech if they achieve censorship of his political enemies.

Shock!

SusanC this is another example of why teaching through appeals to emotion is wrong, and why we need to be aware of other people’s emotional responses when we teach. I didn’t find the implications of Bell’s Inequality disturbing at all, but liberating. But someone here thinks it’s obviously disturbing. If you’re standing in front of your class trying to disturb them and half the class think what you’re saying is not disturbing but liberating, you a) haven’t understood your class’s emotional standpoint very well or b) aren’t able to because the standpoint is too diverse and c) probably can’t craft an effective class on the basis of the participants viewpoint, since half of them are feeling radically different things to you. If you teach from facts and theories then you don’t have to deal with the obvious problem that your emotional perception may be different to that of your students.

This is why I think people who believe “university is there to make people uncomfortable” aren’t deploying an effective didactive strategy. It’s either propaganda or just useless for a certain proportion of the class, and as Collin Street has noted above, if you’re really confident in your position or insensitive, you won’t even notice that half the class aren’t getting it.

Which is probably why Ben Shapiro took so long to notice that his allies at Breitbart were anti-semitic.

The “college should make you uncomfortable, the whole point is to challenge your complacency, etc” lines conservatives are throwing at liberals are literally a copy of liberal talking points from a few years ago, when conservatives were complaining about how college classes that discuss privilege, patriarchy, etc.

The fact that everyone is pretending not to recognize this is baffling to me, and makes me wonder how seriously I should take certain commenters.

From my own perspective- I don’t really care about trigger warnings on their own. There’s nothing wrong about students being told the content of a course so that they can avoid it if they personally don’t wish to encounter the material. These are usually humanities classes anyways, it’s not like med students are going to opt out of microbiology or something and real world harm might result.

That being said, I care a ton about the use of trigger warnings as a way to back door in the idea that certain things aren’t appropriate in a classroom, and should either be removed, or, students who object to them should be given accommodations. I don’t like the mendacity of switching back and forth between these issues as needed in order to only have to defend the more defensible point.

Safe spaces are similar. If a campus group wants a “safe space” where the only speech that is accepted is that which is compatible with, I dunno, let’s say, gender critical radical feminism that offends and dismisses modern trans advocacy, that’s fine by me. And if a different campus group wants a safe space where the only speech that is accepted is that which is compatible with modern trans advocacy, that’s fine by me too. They can each have a limited space where they can ban the others ideas, and talk about how awful the other group is. I don’t see this as any different from a pluralistic view of religion- you can have a church that says awful things about the mosque down the street, and the mosque can say awful things about you. The reality is that a lot of groups and ideologies out there have some really awful things to say about each other, and if we’re going to let them exist at all, which we kind of have to, we need to let them occasionally retreat into their own space to do their own thing unmolested. It’s fine because everyone has limited spaces in which they have authority to control ideas, and then we all (perhaps a bit belligerently) share public space.

Yeah, that “share public space” part is enormously important though. And I think it’s incredibly important not to allow safe spaces to creep outside their borders, because the whole point of a safe space, really, is to exclude people or ideas. There are times and places where that’s appropriate, but it needs to remain limited.

This is all just the standard gospel of pluralistic liberalism. It’s disappointing how increasingly unpopular it’s become.

One thing is really bothering me about the whole Ovid/trigger warning issue. There is some comments up-thread that seem to treat rape as if it were a rare experience. But estimates and stats on college-age women and sexual assault, in the US, put the number anywhere from between 1 in 5 to 1 in 10, with 1 in 6 being an oft-used figure.

Which means that any class with 10-15 female students in the US is going to have at least one and possible several students who have been raped or sexually assaulted. Anyone teaching a college class should assume that there are rape survivors in that class. Treating it as some sort of unusual situation which might come up is just wrong. If you teach, it has already happened, and it is guaranteed to happen. To act otherwise is just ignorant.

awful many discussions about uchicago’s missive ignore the pretty obvious explanation, (over)reaction to the fairly recent episodes of campus rows over safe space in places like yale. it’s probably not as nefarious as some sort of alumni pr move, although that obviously may be a benefit or influence.

[faustusnotes @228:] Oh look, suddenly Hey Skipper is studiously ignoring the fact that his [Ben Shapiro] heroic victim of censorship is not just in favour of censorship, but in favour of death threats and vicious public speech if they achieve censorship of his political enemies.

No. Epic point missing.

Until the start of this thread, I knew heck all about Ben Shapiro, other than that I had read he had been subject to the heckler’s veto. As a consequence of this thread, I went to Youtube. (IIRC, I provided a link.)

Based on the two Youtubes I viewed my unavoidable preconceptions, Mr. Shapiro is, IMO, guilty primarily of attacking progressive shibboleths and, secondarily, of tunnel vision about white privilege.* Of course, it is entirely possible, per Collin Street, that since you can never see that you are in error, only that you were in error , I am both completely wrong, and in blissful ignorance of my wrongness.

Could be. But the road to enlightenment isn’t on account of SJWs said so.

Faustusnotes, I am perfectly happy to accept your charges against Mr. Shapiro as true. That doesn’t lead to concluding that, therefore, you, I, or anyone else, is in the position to determine what others may think. I would assume anyone posting at a blog the thesis of which is of humanity, no straight thing was ever made would take that as given. Unfortunately, the evidence on offer isn’t encouraging.

The UoC letter repudiates the notion that self appointed bien pensants may intellectually subjugate the rest of us. Yes, trigger warnings, as a concept, are common courtesy. Yes, safe spaces provide refuge for those who feel overwhelmed by the predominant culture (while, as an unavoidable side effect, giving the impression that those demanding safe space are hothouse flowers).

But that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that a group of people belonging to a very particular point of view, through nothing more than circular logic, get to exercise intellectual dominion over everyone else.

—

* By that I mean — IMO — he hasn’t taken on board enduring consequences of institutional racism. (Trigger warning: by Crooked Timber’s standards I am a despicable racist sexist conservative white racist cis-gendered patriarchal neo-liberal racist. Did I remember to mention racist? And that doesn’t even begin to cover the expanse of my thought crimes.)

Similarly, while I very much admire Heather MacDonald, I think she has a woodpecker’s view of the forest when it comes to police interactions with black communities. Just like BLM.

Oh, for the love of whatever, where is Preview?

You balance these things out as best you can. Obviously, you decide everyone’s needs are legitimate — if you don’t, you should either complain to the admissions people for admitting people whose needs are not legitimate, or quit and get a different job. U of C, in a way, is doing the former (“if you are a veteran, or a sexual assault survivor, go elsewhere”) — as daily nous says, the letter is just one loud trigger warning. And, as with every need, not all can be met in the classroom simultaneously all the time. So you make judgments, balancing the needs of different students. You make relationships so that students feel they can trust you to do just that, and so that when something triggers them they know they will be treated with consideration and care. Of course, no space is fully safe, but the vision of academic life that many of the anti-safe-spacers seem to have U of C Department of Economics faculty colloquium. That is not a good model, for most people whom we want to educate.

Every syllabus, btw, should specify what the learning goals are, what is expected of students, and what topics will be covered and how. So, people should be able to go in with their eyes open.

Patrick – why not?

A safe space does not mean that you must avoid certain subjects, but that you approach them in a way that is sensitive to the individuals that might be affected by those experiences. I would think that the experience of being a sexual abuse survivor might allow one to bring different perspectives to sexual assault law (eg. regarding witness interview strategies).

If this is a general or introductory level law class that every law student must attend, then I think it is reasonable to treat the subject in way that is respectful of the fact that there are sexual abuse survivors in the lecture hall (or have an alternative assignment for someone for whom it is just to raw at that time). I can see there being specialist classes that might need to cover certain potentially triggering subjects in a graphic and difficult way – if you are going to be a criminal attorney dealing with crimes of sexual violence, you are going to have to be able to face some pretty tough stuff, just as you need to be able to handle the sight of blood to be a surgeon.

But for the most part we are not talking about specialist classes, we are talking about core curriculum, and it is completely reasonable to expect that classrooms are conducted in a way that is respectful of student experience. If you have students read a passage about rape (and I think in many classes you should), you can guide the discussion in a way that is respectful and does not belittle the experience of a sexual assault survivor. If you have a discussion about anti-war or anti-imperialist politics, you can teach it, and ask students to discuss it, in a way that is respectful of someone who has seen active combat. Again, particularly if this is a survey course or part of the core curriculum that every student must attend. I would expect that most good classes have ground-rules for keeping classroom discussions respectful – I don’t see where these sorts of things would not be part of it.

“the goal is to divert the focus from “here’s Ovid; learn it on it’s own terms” to “here’s Ovid; let’s discuss how it has non-WEIRD sensibilities.””

How do you learn a Greek work in English translation “on it’s own terms”? What does that even mean?

If it means to uncritically accept the worldview of the writer – who was from a time and place where women’s lives and perspectives were not considered to be worth consideration – then I think that you are doing a serious disservice to students. To expect women to read this and not point out that the whole experience really sucked for the nymph who was raped chose to be mutilated and turned into a piece of wood rather than be raped, and was treated like prey, is really a problem.

To say that we have to only look at the aesthetics of the language (in translation?) and not to ask what the nymph might have though about it all is an act of conservatives trying to exert political domination over their students.

To expect everyone to filter all of their readings through a prescribed ideological filter is not reasonable either.

Kiwanda 08.31.16 at 2:32 pm
faustusnotes:

Oh look, suddenly Hey Skipper is studiously ignoring the fact that his heroic victim of censorship is not just in favour of censorship, but in favour of death threats and vicious public speech if they achieve censorship of his political enemies.

Ben Shapiro’s opinions about censorship are irrelevant to the question of whether he should be censored.

It seems to me that what somebody is trying to say would always, or nearly always, have to be relevant to whether they should be prevented from saying it.

J-D:

It is not a valid principle that people should never be prevented from speaking.

Could you state that a little more generally? There’s no point in dwelling on minutiae.

Maybe I misunderstood, but it seemed to me that Hey Skipper was referring to instances in which Ben Shapiro had been prevented from speaking as if that automatically had to be wrong. Did you have a different and more specific interpretation of a principle Hey Skipper was defending?

Academic Lurker

“Ragweed@241: That sounds fine, but in that case “safe space” becomes simply a synonym for “properly conducted class”. I’m not sure why these fancy new terms are suddenly needed for things that already exist.”

I agree with this, and that fancy new terms are not needed. What is needed, apparently, is that teachers be alerted to what it takes to conduct a class properly. Not so surprising given that professors get no training in how to teach and are not hired for their competence at conducting classes properly. (I say this as someone who, I think, failed to make my classes properly for many years, and is, of course, still trying to learn how to do it better). Of course, some of the demands are silly, and some are counterproductive, etc, but part of the reason for that is that the issue has been seized by people who are interested in making political points or in making names for themselves (maybe on both sides, but certainly on the anti-trigger warning/safe space side, eg that appalling piece by Haidt that seems to have set things off).

So, yes, this is all about pedagogy.

ragweed. Snap!

Faustusnotes @ 181

>Yes it’s a business model and the business model for Columbia appears to be “propaganda for the elites.” That’s why they’re teaching misogynist junk like Genesis. That’s why the tablet article linked above is lauding what is essentially propaganda, not education. I studied English at a university whose academics apparently actually cared about the material they taught as literature, not as propaganda, which is why they critiqued it even as they loved it. Apparently this is hard.

Actually, both the Columbia syllabus page and the Tablet article explicitly advocate critiquing the material and *not* teaching it as propaganda.

Columbia Lit Hum page:

‘Our Lit Hum readings asks us to explore radically different moral universes. … Here’s a few of the many questions raised in our Lit Hum readings: How do the power and agency of human beings differ? Why are some people (e.g., women, servants) denied agency? … In asking us to consider these sorts of questions, Lit Hum encourages us to compare our own assumptions and values to the radically different ones expressed in our readings.’

Tablet article:

‘It’s hard for me to imagine that any of the 60-odd preceptors, faculty, and graduate students who teach the various 22-student sections of the Core command the uncritical ingestion of sacred texts. (I teach sections of another Core course, Contemporary Western Civilization, myself, I must disclose. I don’t teach that way.)’

‘… There’s another way of looking at the annals of slaughter and rape that thread through the history of civilization—this civilization or any other. It is this: A record of civilization that lacks such accounts is a lie. “There is no document of civilization,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” … Brutalities cry for attention. Attention to the appalling causes disturbance. Deal with it.’

You, on the other hand, aren’t advocating reading and critiquing, you are advocating (@88, 160, 181) not reading the stuff at all, because its values are all wrong anyway.

Faustusnotes @ 88

>Robinson Crusoe, really? It’s not even the world’s first novel, it’s just a naff book about a racist dude.

You may disagree with the opinion that Robinson Crusoe is culturally and ideologically significant, but if you don’t know *why* it has been considered to be that, well, I’ll just have to recommend reading a bit more about the issue.

Faustusnotes:

I’m old enough to have lived through the original canon wars back in the 80s/90s. At the time I wasn’t much impressed with the conservative arguments in large part because, while claimed to just love the Great Books, they seemed more interested in putting them up on pedestals and praising them rather than actually engaging with them. St. Johns College, which after all has what should be the ideal conservative curriculum, isn’t exactly notorious for producing conservatives.

But your own view appears to be that the sole value of older works is as an occasion to pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves for the grand achievement of having been born in the late 20th century, instead of the 1rst or the 12th or the 17th. That doesn’t count as thinking any any more than the blind worship recommended by the conservative culture warriors does. Quite a few people who opposed slavery, advocated for the emancipation of women & etc., were inspired by their understanding of the bible, or the oratories of republican Rome. But hey, no reason to engage with those things at all right? Because nothing is complicated, and righteousness began on the day that we, in particular, were born.

If one hopes to help students understand Muslim culture, a good place to start might be reading parts of the Koran. If one hopes to understand the culture of large parts of Asia, a good place to start might be reading Buddhist, Hindu, and Confucian texts in translation and perhaps the original. That’s certainly how I was taught and how I teach.

A great way to not understand Muslim culture would be to refuse to read the Koran and understand how the text shapes and shaped the development of a great many nations.

Teaching students that they don’t need to learn the history of Christianity (which existed for 3 – 5 centuries in a variety of forms without a standardized text) is equally loopy. One would think that the links between relics, pilgrimage, and local and regional economies, (not to mention Chaucer) might matter.

One doesn’t read or teach Ovid, or Homer for that matter, so that we can emulate the gods or the mortals described in the texts. Rather, we teach these texts in order to help students understand how these tales shaped Roman culture, compare with other mythic tales, borrowed from the literature of Asian cultures, and continue to have a relevance today. Or not. And then there are all those meaningless figures like Plato, Pythagorous, and Pelagius.

I’m confident 70-90 percent of instructors make this clear to first-year students. If we hope to understand ourselves, understanding the ideas and individuals that shaped our world might be a good place to start. And, yes, looking for the voices of women and ‘others’ in all this might be the most interesting and important part of the undertaking.

Re 241 and 250 – of course, one of our priorities should be to avoid things that are likely to make some or most people in the audience uncomfortable, and that’s part of most teachers’ common sense. For instance, I’m sure that most teachers would, by default, have the common sense not to include graphic accounts of rape in their classes unless the discipline obviously presupposes it (in which case the student is there at his/her own risk). However, there is a balance to be stricken between not making people uncomfortable and making your point. Calling this a ‘safe space’ tips it too much towards the former at the expense of the latter. Completely safe from discomfort you can’t and won’t be.

Let me quote the students’ article:

‘Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.’
…

‘This year, we explored possible interventions in Core classrooms, where transgressions concerning student identities are common. Beyond the texts themselves, class discussions can disregard the impacts that the Western canon has had and continues to have on marginalized groups.’
…

‘Repeatedly, we heard from students who demonstrated that having difficult experiences in a Lit Hum or Contemporary Civilization class may actually be part of the norm. ‘
…

‘Students need to feel safe in the classroom, and that requires a learning environment that recognizes the multiplicity of their identities.’

This is clearly a demand for more politically congenial lecture content masking as a demand for sensitive consideration for individual emotional and mental comfort. Either the lecture content is true, relevant and fairly presented, or it’s not. It should be true, relevant and fairly presented regardless of the identity of the audience. To what extent students should be able to decide whether the lecture content is true, relevant and fairly presented may be debated. However, framing the issue as a medical one or one of emotional well-being – ‘help, these texts are marginalising my identity, so I can’t read and discuss them!’ – is not an appropriate approach. It is, as others have pointed out, a two-step, since the treatment of the much smaller group of instances of true medical trauma and triggers – one that is partly up to the teachers’ common sense and partly unpredictable – is extended to any kind of discomfort.

J-D actually from the viewpoint of a kid who was barely able to get to university and living hand-to-mouth to make it, even the way the tensions in the story resolve – she inherits money – was a big slap in the face to me, sitting there reading a story about a class I don’t understand from a time I don’t understand, expected to appreciate in some sense her struggle to be herself, only to find that she doesn’t have to struggle at all because rich uncle! I guess in modern parlance you would say it was “triggering”, though at the time I didn’t know that word and probably couldn’t have explained exactly why I was so angry (I did really enjoy the book up until then, and I was siding with her, so maybe that was part of it). It’s not as vicious and cynical and abusive as the end of The Breakfast Club or Titanic, but it’s still pretty nasty. And that aspect of the story was missed by the (otherwise generally good) teachers, just as a lot of critique of Harry Potter misses the fact that he was born rich and got everything handed to him on a platter.

Foundling, I don’t read those pleas as pleas not to teach the material, but as pleas to take into account the background of the students and the possibility that the material isn’t suited to their background. I’m not sure why you’re reading a sinister sub-text to it.

Although again it should be pointed out – the canon is large and diverse, and a choice to exclude one book and include another doesn’t mean that you are censoring or omitting some essential thing, you’re just making a choice. Is there a reason student identity shouldn’t be incorporated into the basis of that decision?

faustusnotes, that’s a good point (about Jane Eyre) which I had never previously considered and I’m grateful to you for drawing it to my attention. I still think your reference to slavery was inaccurate, but I now understand that not to affect the main point you were making.

It makes me curious to understand your points about Titanic (which I have never seen, although I’ve heard about it and seen a few clips) and The Breakfast Club (which I think I did see once, or most of it, and never understood why it gets the positive evaluations it does — I just got nothing out of it, and as far as I recall my reaction to the ending was that it was silly, but not particularly sillier than the film as a whole).

Here you go J-D, my blog post criticizing both.

Foundling exactly where is the plea to drop teh course material? I just see a plea for better teaching.

I haven’t seen anyone here concede the possibility that these courses are not being taught in the way you think they should be. I see lots of “I assume that” and “no doubt …” but is it true? Or is the course material being taught exactly as the students suggest it is – by stuck up prigs who think we should all get some Ovid up us?

Henry,

“I have unmoderated a comment where she complains about her treatment, while leaving two further comments, where she continues the controversy – in moderation. We do have rules about defamatory comments, and we have these rules for a reason. I also think that there’s a problem with comments which make non-defamatory claims about people’s sexual or personal lives that has consequences for their privacy. I understand that ZM believes that certain individuals have written about her, and that she has found that people aren’t prepared to publish what she sees as her side of this controversy. However, this just isn’t an appropriate place to litigate these complaints. I (and other members of CT) don’t know these people, and can’t adjudicate, even if it were our place to adjudicate in the first place. To be clear – we have had many trolls, jerks, narcissists etc over the years, and I absolutely don’t believe that ZM is one of these, or should be lumped in with them. However, if she continues to publish comments related to this particular controversy on my posts, or other comments of a similar nature, I will have to delete them.”

Thanks for explaining your decision Henry. I’m sorry I didn’t know you were travelling and not in a position to moderate the threads. I won’t comment about this issue on your threads again.

I would appreciate a comment or email if its possible clarifying for me if this applies to Crooked Timber threads generally or only to your threads.

I do disagree with your view about privacy being being invaded in this case, since the details are pertinent to the incidents, but I am fine with not arguing about this any further on your threads so I won’t argue anymore about that.

If its okay I just wanted to let other CT commenters know I have written to a number of media outlets in Australia, the UK, and the USA about what has happened, and also to let people know that I was cyber stalked by indie bands on Crooked Timber and indie bands plagiarised my comments in songs and film clips. I think I was actively cyber stalked by David Berman under 2 or more pseudonyms here after in 2014 he published Crooked Timber on his Menthol Mountains blogroll.

If the press does publish my complaints about these indie bands Crooked Timber will be in the media coverage.

Val,

“‘So now we will read part of Ovid that is describing a rape, but we are not interested in your emotional response, your demand that we condemn the rape (because no matter what campus policy says, we actually don’t think it’s that important compared to the importance of Ovid as high literature/historical record/…)’”

I don’t think Ovid in general depicts rape favourably. The women tend to turn into plants after being raped which is a critique of rape I think.

Ovid looks at this from a meta view as well in the story of Syrinx. This isn’t one of the more famous stories. I read it in relation to a John Ashbery poem Syringa which is one of his best poems and indirectly refers to the myth of Syrinx. I don’t know what personal event it refers to in Ashbury’s life the poem basically says whatever it was was couldn’t be turned into a poem.

Syrinx is a nymph escaping Pan who to escape him turns into reeds. Pan then makes a pipe from her after she escaped him and makes music from her.

I presume Ovid noticed the links to some of his work and this story of Syrinx when he wrote his Metamorphoses.

Culturally in Classical Greece when women were raped by Gods it was meant to bring forth a hero as the progeny, I think this is in Hesiod or someone like that. Exactly what the Classical Greeks meant about women being raped by Gods I don’t really know. Sometimes the Gods possessed other people’s bodies, like you read Ceres possessed a maid in one account. I think Greek culture relating the rape of women by Gods to the birth of heroes is something that makes rape in Greek literature problematic for modern sensibilities even when the rape is treated as harmful to the woman by the author.

Meredith might be able to give a better explanation, since she works in classics I think.

Let’s discuss the place of women and others in western and Islamic cultures, but skip that tedious and utterly irrelevant scabby book known as Genesis.

F-me. Ignorance as a virtue.

In the last several years I’ve actually had to start teaching key passages in Exodus to make iconoclasm in modern culture more understandable.

Who’s Eve?

Kidneystones, I think this is the point I’m trying to get at here – that reading is a great thing and reading hard texts out of touch with our time is a great thing, but all too often when these texts are presented only in terms of their classical interpretation, they just turn off the reader. It’s not necessarily a question of offensive politics, though that often bubbles up, but also just being out of touch or plain weird. And the troubling thing about good writing is that it really does punch you in the guts, so if good writing is portraying something you really feel strongly about it is really hard to deal with.

I would like to see literature courses that take this into account and try to manage it, rather than pretending we should all just (as one person said above) “Deal with it”. I think this was easy to do when all the people teaching and reading were white men from the ruling class of colonial powers, because they don’t necessarily place themselves in the position of the other that is all too often subordinated in the text. But now that the student body has diversified, there are a bunch of people who may be the victims of the story, either literally (if it’s Aboriginal people reading Rabbit Proof Fence, for example) or in some metaphorical way that they can’t easily avoid (women in a rapey uni reading Ovid, for example).

Just to consider the latter for a moment, there’s a blog post doing the rounds at the moment about how to flirt with women wearing headphones, which is really creepy and all about pursuit pursuit pursuit. Young female students see that, then get the tactics it describes used on them, as they’re on their way to uni to read a story in Ovid about pretty similar themes. How can they not place themselves in a different position reading that story to the male author of that blog post when he reads it?

If the people in these positions then have these books thrown at them without regard for how they might be feeling when they read them, they’ll begin to think – as I partly did after that year of English lit – that the canon is just a musty old relic for rich white dudes, and that glorifying anything outside of modern genre fiction is just another propaganda strategy to keep them in their place.

As teachers we can either teach around this or ignore it. It’s up to us, and the students are pointing it out to us. But if we ignore it, we can’t expect these students to love the books as we do.

@ 272 ?? You, too?

How can reading a 3,000 year-old story make anyone ‘angry’?

Reluctant as I am to lecture my betters, I don’t see how anyone can claim to literacy while being utterly ignorant of a text just about everyone, including Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin knew well. Einstein, Freud, Jung. It’s bad enough when the evidently lazy make ignorance a virtue. You teach western civ and you haven’t even read the key passages of the text. Were I your student, I can’t help but feel I’d be very surprised and disappointed.

Really.

Does knowledge of the bible matter in modern Russian culture? That’s your area, I believe? I’m genuinely curious because my understanding is that in eastern European nations anti-communism, the church, and nationalism are closely bound up.

F-me. Really. I’m shocked.

I mean it’s like Homer, Horace, and Plato. We don’t get to ‘skip’ the bible, not those of us who claim minimal literacy. How does one read Tom Paine, or MLK without being at least somewhat familiar with their points of departure? The entire history of the anti-slavery movement from 1700 to 1850 is inextricably bound up in christianity, not to mention the civil rights movement.

Bad you!

Foundling, who is the other white dude in Genesis? Robinson Crusoe? What about the mad wife in Jane Eyre? I don’t remember a great many white dudes in the Tempest. Also note that I added a class distinction in my comment, which you have elided – often the victimization in the stories we read is of poor or weaker white men by stronger white men. As I mentioned above, as a (only slightly off-) white man from a poor background reading this stuff, I really felt like it wasn’t written about or for me. I could be wrong of course, but I think the more likely explanation is that most of the literature that has survived is literature about and for the glories and trials of rich powerful men. This may involve victimization but what happened to Jane Eyre is signally not the same thing as happened to the mad wife, and what went on between Macbeth and Macduff is obviously different to all the horrors their little tete-a-tete visited upon the men under their leadership.

If my class place were translated to those books back in time I would not be in the hero or enemy role. I would be one of the nameless hordes trampled into the dirt to help McDuff be noble, or whatever. I would have been the ugly, brutish guy or girl who didn’t get a name in the wedding scene of Jude the Obscure. But for most of the history of the academy, the people reading these books have always been able to place themselves in the role of McDuff or McBeth or Jane Eyre’s uncle. If you can’t recognize what that means for the reader’s relationship with the story, I strongly recommend you read up a little on what these students are trying to tell their teachers.

[J-D:] Speech in general is toward the non-rivalrous end of the spectrum, but the only scenario where speech is perfectly non-rivalrous is the soliloquy (at least, it’s the only one I can think of). Otherwise, there is always the potential for one person’s speaking to interfere with another person’s capacity to speak. What if an invited speaker is addressing a campus group and half the audience is talking loudly among themselves so that the other half can’t hear the speaker? are the interrupters interfering with freedom of speech, or exercising it? and if it’s both, doesn’t that illustrate how speech is rivalrous?

For the concept of free speech to mean anything, then there must also be free hearing. When a campus group invites a speaker to speak to them, there isn’t anything rivalrous about that. No one has to listen, and no one is deprived of their own ability to speak. Lousy manners preventing others hearing a speaker doesn’t make a non-rivalrous situation rivalrous.

Does that mean you want to stop heckling, then? how is that not a denial of freedom of speech? Hecklers are an excellent illustration of how speech is rivalrous.

Yes, absolutely. As I said above, for free speech to be meaningful requires freedom of hearing. In a situation where people are not compelled to hear, and aren’t deprived the ability to make their point somewhere else, or at some other time, the situation isn’t rivalrous simply because hecklers wish to destroy others’ ability to speak and hear.

Your suggestion that stopping heckling somehow violates the hecklers’ freedom of speech, and that the presence of hecklers makes speech rivalrous falls apart under inspection. Obviously, the heckler’s goal is to prevent speaking and hearing. But their are other ways of attaining that goal, e.g. pulling fire alarms (SJWs have done that).

The result was the same: destroying others’ opportunity to speak and hear. Is pulling a fire alarm to stop someone speaking an example of rivalrous speech? Are laws against that impositions on free speech?

If the answers are no and no, then invoking the concept of rivalrous speech is really just a rationalization for the heckler’s veto.

[Faustusnotes @248:] Hey skipper, you use the term SJW which means you are a regular breitbart reader and a gamer gate limpet, so please forgive me if I don’t believe you had “never heard of” Ben Shapiro.

Full disclosure: I have never read Breitbart. Ever. I do not play computer games, ever. I know that Gamergate was a thing, but beyond that, I haven’t a clue.

So, I don’t forgive you. Your lack of awareness that the acronym SJW is very widely used isn’t grounds to accuse me of lying. Which renders this:

In that case you are a fan of a movement that sends SWAT teams to the homes of feminist video game critics …

Completely baseless.

… you are presenting to us as a model victim of censorship a man who cheered those people on. This is a man who encouraged the use of the state to censor pornography, and the use of the armed state to threaten critics of right wing politics.

(Without any link to what he has said, I can scarcely judge the validity of your assertions. Never mind, for the purpose of discussion I’ll take it as read.)

He is a perfect example of censorship. The whole concept of free speech is destroyed if Mr. Shapiro has to run his opinions by SJWs, or anyone else, for approval. No matter what his opinions are.

You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t take your protestations seriously and don’t cry particularly many tears when a vicious supporter of violently enforced censorship is censored using a non violent version of his own strategy.

Again, I won’t forgive you. You have made at least a half dozen serious accusations here, and not substantiated one of them.

Stopping him from presenting at a university doesn’t censor him in any way – it simply stops the university from adding its good name to the list of organizations that have enabled his violent hate speech to continue.

Yes, it does, or the word has no meaning whatsoever. A campus organization inviting a speaker has no need to vet its choice with people who would have been a perfect fit in the Cultural Revolution.

So Hey Skipper, you think universities should be required to offer their facilities to everyone who wants to speak their? When is my turn? Have you had yours yet? Is there a list?

Or is it the case that the university makes a decision about who to invite and who not to invite, and all that happened to Ben Shapiro is that students agitated for their voice to be heard in making the list?

Is not being invited to speak at a university censorship? If not, how is being uninvited different?

[faustusnotes:] So Hey Skipper, you think universities should be required to offer their facilities to everyone who wants to speak their? When is my turn? Have you had yours yet? Is there a list?

If I recall correctly, it was a campus organization that arranged the event, not the university. SFAIK, universities that take public money are not allowed to engage in viewpoint discrimination.

What happened to Ben Shapiro was SJWs appointing themselves censors.

faustusnotes@277: ” I don’t remember a great many white dudes in the Tempest.”
It’s been a while since I last saw a performance of the Tempest, and I never studied it closely, but as I remember it the characters are Italians from Milan or Naples (whom I would take to be white), except for Ariel, a magical spirit of no particular race, a few classical European goddesses, and Caliban whose mother was from Algiers. Am I wrong?

fae means what?

Fairies and elves and stuff, Stephen

Faustusnotes: thanks, I didn’t know that.
There are indeed minor spirits as well as Ariel, who occasionally sing. But the main characters, apart from Ariel and Caliban, are:

Prospero, formerly Duke of Milan
Miranda, his daughter
Antonio, Prospero’s brother, now ruling in Milan
Alonso, King of Naples
Sebastian, his brother
Ferdinand, Alonso’s son
Adrian, Francisco and Gonzalo, Neapolitan courtiers
Trinculo, Alonso’s jester
Stephano, Alonso’s brother.

Not elves, not fairies, and definitely white.

Yes Stephen, and all rich nobles. Which was part of my point – these stories aren’t written for or about ordinary people (though I guess some of these dandies may have been the kardashians of their day) and when ordinary people read these stories they may feel a lack of empathy or interest in the petty struggles of rich people.

Imagine if all that is left for post-anthropocene humanity to read of this age is a couple of iPhone technical manuals and Kim kardashians Instagram. That’s how I feel when I read this stuff – how do I know this is the best that society had to offer, and how do I know it represents that society, and given this vagueness and the nature of the stories, why should I care? I expect the people who study these books to at least try to get it together to give me a deeper reason than just “it’s famous”. What if Shakespeare was the “days of our lives” of his day? Just fables about imagined rich people. Yet we are studying it as of it has relevance to modern people. As an 18 year old metal head from the edge of the desert, with no money, reading this stuff, I got kind of resentful about what my teachers were trying to foist on me. And I was there voluntarily – the equivalent of me in this Columbia course is there involuntarily. If you are going to make engineers sit through King Lear you could at least try to understand how a modern 18 year old might react to it…

differrnt contexts academic lurker. Remember we are talking about a compulsory course on the origins of culture here. Not your favorite superhero.

[Faustusnotes @288:] Hey skipper, no student organization has ever invited me to the uni to talk about tolkiens racial theories. I think I am being censored. What should I do?

Rethink the meaning of censorship.

Here is a pretty good definition: Censorship is the suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

[Anarcissie @290:] Educational institutions could hardly perform their mission of replicating the Established Order if they did not engage in viewpoint discrimination.

That’s as may be, but that isn’t relevant here. When it comes to the use of university facilities, the university may not engage in viewpoint discrimination.

[Collin Street @292:] You can’t in general expect to have people explain why you’re wrong to your satisfaction, because your inherent human fallibility means “your satisfactory understanding that you made an error” and “you made an error” do not always describe the same thing.

You have embedded a begged question.

[Rich Pulasky @294:]

Distinguishing between the legal meaning and the common meaning is important because hecklers can’t really censor people.

That is being too clever by half, and is confusing ends with means. The threat of mayhem causes a school do cancel an invitation — the speaker and listeners failed to get permission from the hecklers to talk and hear, they have been censored.

Whether the mayhem imposing the requirement to obtain the hecklers’ permission happens before or during an event, the consequence is the same: censorship through the heckler’s veto.

So, you are right, my use of the term “heckler’s veto” isn’t consistent with the legal definition; however, lawyers do not own the language. My usage was completely consistent with the heckler’s desired end, which is what matters.

“Not elves, not fairies, and definitely white.”

The idea that Italians count as white in the US is at best 60-65 years old. If you have to racialize everything they certainly didn’t count as ‘white’ in the sense of being ‘just like us’ for the audience at the time that Shakespeare was writing either. So for the purposes of your arguments about canon, for at least 3/4 of the time that we were teaching Shakespeare in the US, it wasn’t an example of what you think.

Collin Street, I mentioned you begged a question. Well, here it is:

Censorship on parade..

faustusnotes@295: congratulations on rapid and extensive moving of the goalposts.
You started by saying “there are few white dudes in the Tempest”
I have pointed out that most of the characters were, in fact, white by any reasonable criteria.
You respond by saying they were “all rich nobles. Which was part of my point – these stories aren’t written for or about ordinary people”
If you have ever actually seen a performance of the Tempest, which I much doubt, you will have noticed that Stephano and Trinculo, and the Master and Boatswain whom I forgot to mention, are not by any criterion rich nobles. Look at some other contemporary plays for further and stronger examples.
If you think that Shakespeare, and other commercial playwrights of the period, were “not writing for ordinary people” then your ignorance is probably invincible.

@ 304 When one attends a play, one rarely has the opportunity to read the text. The idea is to listen to the actors and watch the performance. Reading the text make sense only after the plays have been watched, usually more than once. In the same way one wouldn’t normally study a song, or a piece of music, or a painting, with experiencing the actual piece multiple times. Context helps, but is still no substitute for the actual experience – singing the song, for example, in karoake with friends, or alone, or simply in the shower.

The great benefit of watching plays on DVD is that one can watch and re-watch favorite/challenging scenes. Whether the text, setting, and costumes, has been modified is of far less importance than the passion, talent, and commitment of the actors involved. Nothing could be duller and less satisfying than reading recipe books, or even looking at pictures of food without tasting, or preparing, the dish.

None of this makes any sense to you, does it?

Kidneystones @275, 276

I see that you’ve devoted quite some effort to demolishing my credibility as an expert in … well, something … around these parts. Now, I think I have made it clear that I do consider some familiarity with the Bible to be appropriate for everyone and especially for intellectuals in the field of humanities. However, by familiarity I don’t mean reading, let alone remembering *every single goddamn page* of the thing, unless one specialises in Biblical studies or a similar field. One ought to have read the more important, well-known and frequently referenced parts – the key ones several times – and to have a decent general idea of the content of the rest. I won’t disclose my speciality is and to what extent it requires knowledge of the Bible, since I prefer to be (very) anonymous here.

And yes, even though it is a good thing to be familiar with such things, occasionally the alien morality of a text does become too exasperating and consequently one is no longer inclined to read the text just for pleasure, without being obliged to. However, I wouldn’t consider that an excuse not to read something considered sufficiently important or something on one’s syllabus. Similarly, I’ll admit that I had to stop reading Water Margin soon after one of the ‘good’ characters that we were supposed to sympathise with slaughtered an entire house full of innocent people, women, servants and all, just to take revenge on the head of the household – all of it described realistically, in very graphic detail. I think such things didn’t get at me as much when I was younger. Obviously, I wouldn’t have stopped if my field of study had actually *required* reading the thing.

Kidneystones, I have actually seen and read quite a few Shakespeares, live and in film and written and in comic form. Not only Shakespeare – the clue might be in my screen name and in the concept of my blog, though maybe your textual reading skills aren’t up to scratch. Your point here seems to have degraded to “you should read more.” I agree! This is true for everyone, even people as amazing as you who already know everything. Also my teacher wasn’t inadequate – as I mentioned above I thought my course was great and I learnt a lot. Perhaps in your English course you could have learnt to read?

Stephen I’m not shifting goalposts – I have multiple complaints and the invalidity of one doesn’t make them all wrong.

Phenomenal cat, its not perfect but you could try “statistics” by freedman and Pisani.

faustusnotes @277

>But for most of the history of the academy, the people reading these books have always been able to place themselves in the role of McDuff or McBeth or Jane Eyre’s uncle.

Actually, during most of history, those of lower status have enjoyed stories about those of higher rank and managed to see themselves in them, and to see the parallels between their own experiences and those of the princes and chieftains – indeed to see the latters’ experiences as glorified versions of their own. The common people sang ballads and watched plays about the fates of kings, chieftains and heroes of old. And even in academy, the overwhelming majority of the readers were actually far below the characters they read about. And while this human tendency has the unfortunate side effect of contradicting ‘class/identity consciousness’, that doesn’t mean that the parallels that these people see with their own experience are false or unimportant. Not everyone can be a princess, but everyone can be an Antigone. Denying this means rejecting most of the cultural wealth of humanity. I have absolutely no sympathy for students who claim that they can’t possibly understand or care about the tragedy of King Lear because he is a king and they aren’t, or because he is white and they aren’t, or because he is cis and they are trans, or whatever. Or, conversely, for a male student who can’t bring himself to care about, say, Antigone’s situation because he isn’t a woman. This is just intellectual laziness and reluctance to use one’s imagination, and those are not habits that should be pandered to, least of all in higher education.

>Foundling, who is the other white dude in Genesis?

Well, to make the most obvious point, white dudes – in fact, just people quite regardless of gender and colour – are exterminated en masse by a big dude in the sky on many occasions in Genesis. In fact, any misogyny that can be found in the text pales against the background of its general mis-anthropy. One can say with good reason that it’s a screed of rabid God-supremacism and virulent anti-mortal chauvinism; and therefore, strictly speaking, if you aren’t God, it’s not for you. :) But, as I’ve mentioned, I definitely don’t think that’s an excuse not to read it.

One more thing concerning ‘intellectual laziness and reluctance to use one’s imagination’ @ 313 – of course, it’s also the job of the teacher to help the student see the parallels with their experiences and the relevance of the story for themselves. If that hasn’t been achieved, that can be the fault of the teacher. However, it also requires willingness on the part of the student. In this context, dismissing texts because they are about ‘rich white dudes’ or complaining that they ‘contain material that marginalizes student identities’, which supposedly makes them ‘difficult to read and discuss’, does not move things in the right direction.

@ 309 Not a bit. Everest cannot crumble on a blog comment thread. My own credibility takes a fairly regular thumping. Tis all part of the fun. I noted, but should have stressed, that you attempted to ‘re-read’ Samuel II. This is the point. Filling in the gaps at any/every age cannot be anything but worthwhile.

The pity is that some/most believe that learning is the province of the young. I definitely do not count you in that number, for whatever little that may be worth. You may be horrified to learn I agree with a very great deal of what you add here, including the silliness of reading every goddam page. This is a something is (almost) always better than nothing problem. I visited the home page of the King’s College English department and there found both Milton and parts of the bible on the reading list.

We can’t ignore the dead white guys if we hope to study books because virtually all were written by dead white guys. So, if we’re cool with ignoring books, then we can dispense with the reading of dead white guys. This isn’t complicated, as you’ve noted. I very much like your comment about Antigone and the audience of the agora. The notion that poor people and the illiterate are unable to appreciate the arts is very wrong on multiple counts.

The historically uninformed evidently believe that the union jack flew over Britain forever and that the flag of St. George has ‘always’ been that of England. L’etat, c’est moi wasn’t an unfamiliar idea to anyone living at the time, no matter how many other contenders for the claim there might be. Macbeth is about negotiated kingship and given that 100 years of Plantagenet in-fighting effectively reduced the state to ruin, the notion of getting a good king on the throne was correctly equated with stability and peace. The coat of arms of the current monarch is a combination of the personal emblems of key families, not of any notion of a nation state, as you know.

@ 312 Sebastian H is quite correct to point to the dog-whistles, stereo-typing, and open race-baiting that make the plays so important and (doubtless) so enjoyable to audiences way back then. Ahem. The way things were and are in all the ugly glory.

Political context matters, of course, and the threat from the unreliable Italian/Venetian and the swarthy moor was not a fantasy trope to frighten the children and bigots, but a nationalist rallying cry. The great siege of Malta was part of modern history, not part of the past, and the threat of invasion and the loss of territorial integrity a very real threat – as the Irish, Welsh, and Scots could attest.

@ 311 I’ve suggested as kindly as I can suggested you arm yourself with some rudimentary familiarity with Samuel I (only 30 pages). Had you done so, you might have avoided making your ridiculous claims regarding a god-figure much more firmly grounded in your limited imagination, than in fact. I draw no conclusions from usernames and (dare I say it) have never felt any compelling reason to ‘visit your blog’ or learn much at all about you.

Val,

“As I’ve mentioned before I teach in a post graduate unit on climate change and public health. A student mentioned recently that it can be a bit depressing – when you realise the scale of the problem and how little we are doing to address it, it certainly can be. I said I would try to respond (it’s an online course so we have general discussion threads).”

I recommend the book Designing For Hope in terms of climate change. I had a class with one of the authors and she said she always makes sure to show her students or audience reasons for hope in relation to climate change and sustainability challenges.

There is also a good paper Frantz, Cynthia M., and Mayer, Stephan F (2009), “The Emergency of Climate Change: Why Are We Failing to Take Action?.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 9.1 (2009): 205-222.

Frantz and Mayer adapt Latane and Darley’s 1970 paper The Five-Stage Model of Helping to the climate change situation.

The Five Stage Model of Helping provides a framework for understanding how people become motivated to help in an emergency.

The Model consists of Stage One “Noticing The Event”; Stage Two “Interpreting The Event As An Emergency”; Stage Three “Feeling Personally Responsible To Act”; Stage Four “Knowing What To Do”; and Stage Five “Implementing The Required Acts”.

When applied to climate change this model can help structure the provision of information to encourage people towards helping behaviour.

Frantz and Mayer state that psychological research has found that for people to interpret fear communications as an emergency needing them to act, they “must [be] provide[d with] highly specific recommendations regarding the behaviour that needs to be performed in order to avoid the unwanted outcome” — providing recommendations is more likely to lead on to the other stages of helping, such as feeling personally responsible to act and knowing how to act.

The article also gives recommendations about personal and collective actions that could be appropriate to the climate change situation.

Kidneystones if you can’t be bothered finding anything out about me don’t waste my time telling me what you think I need.

F foundling I think you’re arguing against something other than what I said – perhaps I didn’t put it well. But it does seem we have drawn out your position in opposition to the student demands – you indicate a complete lack of understanding of what they are saying or any empathy (I can’t think of a better word, sorry) for the problem they are describing. I think this is why they have raised this issue – because teachers teach this stuff as if only this canonical way of reading these texts counts, and any other impressions or interpretations (which just happen to be brought to the class by people who historically aren’t allowed in) are invalid, incomprehensible or fantastic.

Once again I think you need to try and engage with this student campaign in a more open minded way, ask yourself why the complainants aren’t satisfied with your answers – is it because the campaigners are stupid or mendacious or could it be that your answers are glib and defensive?

ZM I enjoyed the tempest. I get this so much – give any kind of criticism of a book and people assume you hated it. Sigh…

kidneystones,

I think there would have been the circulation of important plays in London, either for other writers or particularly interested readers. The first folio of Shakespeare was printed in 1623, but there were quartos before then starting from 1593 and 1594 at least.

The plays are great to read, I don’t know how anyone could study the writing without reading them. You would have to go to the play about 10 times or something.

Ben Jonson published his own plays to be read in 1616 the year Shakespeare died. He was the first playwright to be published in expensive folio format, then Shakespeare’s plays were published in expensive folio format 7 years later.

You can easily write plays to be performed and also read.

@ 323 Thanks for the prompt reply and for your generally very positive contributions here. “You would have to go to the play about 10 times or something.”

This is quite close to my research area: audiences, economics, and cultural production, although for a different nation and time. In the 18th century have verbatim accounts confirming that going to the same show ten times is precisely what informed critics did. Indeed, it is this openly stated investment of time that adds authority to the critic’s view. So, in a very real sense you’re quite correct. A single viewing of a play probably meant that even attentive audience members missed much, some of the performance. This phenomena would be commonly acknowledged, at least by some, at the time, which tells us more about audiences. If we like something, we go back, which in turn means more money for the production company, and perhaps the playwright.

As you rightly point out, even at the Globe and the Rose, prices were low enough to admit the poor, allowing for multiple visits either alone, or with different sets of friends. The social dimension of the performance evidently involved a good amount of audience interaction. Then as now, artists frequently complained critics were clueless despite the best of intentions.

Thank you very much, too, for the Jonson link. This was new for me. I read one summary and one well-researched essay on Jonson’s 1616 folio https://episteme.revues.org/736 and will allow my original point to stand, at least until better evidence arrives

Jonson wrote his plays, masques, and other entertainments to be performed ,not read. Jonson’s decision to publish his works whilst still alive (a novelty), including his poems, seems to be far more to do with claims of intellectual property and to further his reputation, for self promotion. The income (in my view the most telling driver) an author hoped to earn would I expect confirm that Jonson earned far more when his plays were performed, no matter how many copies were published. The key is how many were purchased, not published. These numbers are, I expect, very difficult to obtain in the case of Jonson. The income challenge is complicated, of course, by the role patrons played in support for the arts.

Anyway, thanks very much for this. It’s well OT, but fascinating none-the-less. You’re right, there’s merit in reading the plays. But I stand by my original points – the playwrights wrote the works to have them performed, and reading the text is a very different experience from seeing the plays performed, ideally performed well.

Cheers!

@ 326 I generally agree with all this, with the caveat being that watching the plays on DVD, at least, is an essential part of the experience. I was very fortunate to have two good and one great teacher for Shakespeare. When attending one live performance at a famous production company one leaned closed to me and whispered ‘I hope you’ll tell everyone you know how bad this truly is.’ It was wonderful, and wonderfully liberating.

You’re quite right, too, to point to the role of grammar schools and book production generally. As a friend recently pointed out Shakespeare’s audience would be just as interested in Thomas Wyatt’s role in the life and loves of Henry VIII and other figures from England’s recent past, as in his posthumously published poetry. You likely know that Henry VIII wrote and performed music. Katherine Parr published on theology and Elizabeth I was famously trained in rhetoric, traditionally exclusive to males. Audiences would be keen to jump into a well-told story, but many would also be attuned to modern resonances. In my view, it’s a highly literate public, except among those too poor to escape a world of constant work. Shakespeare was writing for all of us.

Must go, thanks!

J-D:

This is were you trash the whole concept of free speech:

For a proper evaluation of a situation where somebody prevents (or attempts to prevent) somebody else from speaking, the details of the situation need to be considered …

Beware passive voice. Need to be considered by whom? Rewrite that in active voice and identify the subject.

You can’t, not without rendering free speech mute.

Also, you have blurred the point I’ve been trying to make. In order for speech to be considered free, there must be unimpeded communication between speaker and listener without any prior restraint. When SJWs disrupt presentations, they have demanded prior restraint: comply with our demands, or we will shut you down.

That is censorship. That vocal cords may be employed doesn’t turn it from censorship into free speech.

Similarly, it has happened that student newspapers have published things that have angered SJWs. In response, they have taken as many copies of the offending publication as they could get their hands on.

If heckling in pursuit of censorship is free speech, then trashing newspapers in pursuit of censorship is freedom of the press.

Sounds Newspeaky, doesn’t it?

” it also can’t be taken for granted that their [ancient Greek] values are *always* inferior to ours”

But they are *always* inferior to ours (or at least no better), because we are judging from our moral framework. That is, the ancients had one moral framework; we have another. Since we are judging from our own, and moral frameworks consider their own moral judgments superior to those made in every other moral framework, the ancients’ moral judgments are necessarily inferior.

Here is my framing of this discussion. The canon causes problems because one of the necessary conditions to being part of the canon is that the work has persisted over a long time. This means that classical works (those which belong to the canon) have been written long ago, when a value system very different from ours was in place. This causes problems for those who are unable to accept the existence of different moral frameworks – who believe their own moral judgments are absolute and universal. Confrontation with different values, by those who are intolerant of other frameworks (even if their own framework includes tolerance of others) is always a shock.

Within the current elite American moral framework one is supposed to be tolerant, but like most frameworks it is intolerant of other frameworks.

This goes back to something which Ronan said very wisely far up in this thread: “a new ruling class creating new norms.” This new framework of norms and values which has appeared in America is just the latest form of American (more wildely, Anglo-Saxon) cultural imperialism, in that the US expects every other society in the world to adapt the same framework and make the same judgments. Just look at how many articles the NYT has devoted to the burkini conflict in France (six? seven?), all from the same “it’s obviously wrong to ban the burkini” perspective.

Re the issue of plays meant to be performed, not read. There is the term “closet drama.”
Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Byron’s Manfred. Shelley’s The Cenci. Goethe’s Faust.

stevenjohnson 09.02.16 at 4:29 pm
Re the issue of plays meant to be performed, not read. There is the term “closet drama.”
Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Byron’s Manfred. Shelley’s The Cenci. Goethe’s Faust.

How elitist of you to expect any of us to know that! (BTW, The Cenci is sometimes performed, but Prometheus Unbound almost never.)

Anarcissie 333: “…if a university permits the Grand Klaxon (or whatever he’s called) of the Klan to speak at the debating society it’s as if they’ve legitimated the Klan somehow throughout the community of which they are the intellectual heart. ”

No, it isn’t legitimatizing, at least for a reasonable understanding of that word. If the Klan leader speaks, then people have a chance to hear and understand how he and people like him think, and perhaps how to respond; this exercise in critical thinking and debate would be educational. Agreement is not required or even implied.

ZM@319: tend to agree with you, but when you write that the Tempest “refers to early colonialism in the Americas critically” I do wonder. It refers to the shipwreck on an unnamed and unlocated island of people in a ship from Naples, who meet an enchanter and his daughter from Milan who had reached the island after being set adrift from Italy in a small boat, and who have a servant who is the son of a witch from Algiers. All of these are consistent with the play being set somewhere in the Mediterranean. None are consistent with it being set anywhere in the Americas.
True, the play does include the phrase “Oh brave new world”. That doesn’t mean it was set in the New World, does it?

Anarcissie@341:
Putting Klan members and Nazis aside for a moment, I think it’s still true that starting with “We’re presumptively endorsing the views of anyone we invite to speak” and using that as a guide for who is allowed to speak on campus is a pretty terrible idea.

One can both believe that a university is a place where a wide range of views, including views we may disagree with strongly, should be allowed a hearing and allow that some hypothetical speakers are so far beyond the pale that they have no business getting a platform on campus.

[Anarcissie:] No, everything that goes on at universities facilities with official sanction is part of what they do, and what they do is almost never independent of their role in the state …

I think you are taking my point further than it was meant to go.

So far as I know, and I fully acknowledge that I am not a lawyer, is that Universities may not engage in viewpoint discrimination in sanctioning campus groups, or the use of their facilities. That means if the university is going to grant official status to the Campus Crusade for Christ, then they have to do the same for an Islamic or Mormon group. The same with their facilities; they may not withhold facilities from one group, while allowing others to use them.

… but if a university permits the Grand Klaxon (or whatever he’s called) of the Klan to speak at the debating society it’s as if they’ve legitimated the Klan somehow throughout the community of which they are the intellectual heart.

Is it? Are there university policies that exercise prior restraint on Campus groups? (These are honest questions, BTW — I really don’t know.) If a campus organization asks a Grand Foghorn to speak, it isn’t at all clear to me that the group itself has legitimated the Foghorn, never mind the university.

It is entirely possible that universities have such restraints, even though that sounds to me like presenting serious 1A issues. Not that universities let that stop them; lord knows enough have grotesque speech codes.

Hey Skipper 09.02.16 at 9:58 am
J-D:

This is were you trash the whole concept of free speech:

For a proper evaluation of a situation where somebody prevents (or attempts to prevent) somebody else from speaking, the details of the situation need to be considered …

Beware passive voice. Need to be considered by whom? Rewrite that in active voice and identify the subject.

But nothing could be easier!

If you want to properly evaluate a situation where somebody prevents (or attempts to prevent) somebody else from speaking, you need to consider the details of the situation; if I want to properly evaluate a situation where somebody prevents (or attempts to prevent) somebody else from speaking, I need to consider the details of the situation; if any person want to properly evaluate a situation where somebody prevents (or attempts to prevent) somebody else from speaking, that person need to consider the details of the situation.

What is the alternative? How can any person properly evaluate such a situation without considering the details of the situation?

Maybe that’s ordinarily the case in some contexts, but it certainly is not in the context of a university, which is – or at least should be – understood as a place where the consideration of a broad range of views and ideas is one of it’s central missions.

Sure. And for normally controversial topics this general environment-of-disclaimer is probably sufficient. But common sense suggests that you take extra care with particularly dangerous substances.

Collin Street: “…And it is a language error,…..”

If I’m following your three paragraphs of discourse on linguistics, pragmatics, and language error, you’re saying: people will think that sponsoring a speech implies endorsement of its contents.

Well, so what? If I’m the sponsor in that situation and I’m asked, I’ll correct such a mistake of interpretation. If I were to introduce such a speaker, I’d probably explain the circumstances, particularly if it matters to me what mistaken people think. In general, I’d prefer debates of controversial topics to unchallenged speakers on those topics, regardless of the topic, in which case the lack of endorsement is clearer.

If a horrible opinion has weak, powerless support, then hearing about it is harmless. If the horrible opinion has enough support to be dangerous, then all the more reason to understand it, debate it, know how to argue against it with people who are on the fence. In neither case is “no platforming” necessary, although an airing of a horrible opinion with weak support would be uninteresting, so why bother.

I don’t think ANYONE actually believes that the mere fact that a speaker was permitted to speak at a university means the university endorses the things they’re saying, or that the fact that a university specifically invites a speaker to speak on one topic means that the university endorses everything else the speaker has to say about other topics. I think everyone understands that a university’s mission and the reality of day to day university practice isn’t compatible with either of those ideas. I think its convenient to pretend to believe otherwise for purposes of public shaming and political protest, but I don’t think anyone actually believes it.

Certainly no one thinks that about themselves, their own speech, and their own university’s stance towards it. Its something people only ever say about others.

I can maybe get on board with the idea that inviting someone to be a commencement speaker implies “this person is, broadly speaking, admirable,” and I can support a few of the commencement speaker protests I’ve seen. I’m not sure they should be listened to very often, because “pick someone that no political faction on our campus will object to” is a pretty tough call. So maybe “they speak and people who hate them say why” is a valid compromise. But even then I think we all understand that the people making these decisions are referring to the primary display of the speaker’s public persona, not literally everything about their life or views.

Universities that allow protests to interfere with speaker invites when the invite is, in practical function, part of a student group’s activities, are vile and should be treated as less than true universities. That’s “creepy right wing Christian pseudo university with credits that don’t transfer anywhere real” behavior.

205 (fn): “But hey skipper, in the example the professor cited the students didn’t use a hecklers veto – they asked the university to withdraw a speaker invitation. The university didn’t.”

206 (HS): “That the students were unsuccessful does not mean they weren’t attempting to use the hecklers’ veto. The students’ goal was to exercise their dominion over others thoughts.”

343 (HS): “”Yes, indeed, he advocates limits on pornography. And it would indeed be censorship if what he advocates came to fruition. So what?”

The principle seems to be something like: it is not right to interfere with (censor) Shapiro’s attempt (so far unsuccessful) to exercise dominion over other’s rights. But for some reason this principle does not equally apply to those students who unsuccesfully objected to his invitation to promulgate his views. They it seems must remain quiet, although their tuition money may be being used to support a cause they disagree with, whereas he must be allowed to speak.

Which is to say, if someone asked me to write a computer program to apply this principle automatically to every possible case, I would feel unable to do so. (This has happened to me before.) I would have to start by advocating that the students be allowed to give their objections and Shapiro be allowed to speak – that is a principle I could program (in principle).

Perhaps the principle is: everybody can say what they want except Social Justice Warriors, but for that program I would need a usable definition of Social Justice Warrior. My naive view is that Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Mandela were Social Justice Warriors, i.e., they fought for social justice, primarily with words, against considerable opposition which considered them radical cranks.

Here, let’s try it this way.

When you promote a speech, you do so because you want the contents of the speech to be said. When the contents of the speech is, for example, “black people should be treated as subhuman”, then — a fortiori / subbing in — promoting that speech is to promote circulation of the idea, no?

“Wanting it to be said that black people should be treated as subhuman” is of course not precisely the same thing as “Wanting to treat black people as subhuman”, but, y’know? They can both get fucked.

[“I think the hill I’ll die on is, ‘we need more racist statements made!~” is a pretty charming perspective, all up]

Stephen,

“ZM@319: tend to agree with you, but when you write that the Tempest “refers to early colonialism in the Americas critically” I do wonder. It refers to the shipwreck on an unnamed and unlocated island of people in a ship from Naples, who meet an enchanter and his daughter from Milan who had reached the island after being set adrift from Italy in a small boat, and who have a servant who is the son of a witch from Algiers. All of these are consistent with the play being set somewhere in the Mediterranean. None are consistent with it being set anywhere in the Americas.
True, the play does include the phrase “Oh brave new world”. That doesn’t mean it was set in the New World, does it?”

The island is an allegorical representation of America. The early colonisation of America was the current events the play is referring to — this is made clear by the reference to On Cannibals by Montiagne. Caliban could refer to either or both indigenous Americans and Africans who were enslaved — I am not too sure of dates of when slavery of Africans began in the Americas by European powers…. The island of the play isn’t “set” anywhere real — this is why there is a discussion of Utopianism as well in the play. I guess the reference to brave new world was probably a reference to the New World too. These are the current events being allegorised in the play.

yes i know, but I guess it must be another reference to the play being an allegory about America, since its rather a coincidence otherwise, don’t you think?

When the U. of Chicago is talking about “controversial speakers”, they’re probably talking about the politically controversial, rather than the scientifically controversial (though it’s possible to do both in the same paper if you try hard). No-one is going to organize a protest march if I say (e.g.) no-one has yet produced a working quantum computer with more than 3 qbits, and this continuing failure amounts to an experimental refutation of quantum theory; although the physicists might heckle.

When we’re selecting papers for conference publication, sometimes we give priority to the papers whose referees reports have high variance. If all the referees think the author is an idiot, then yeah, the programme chair will agree he’s an idiot and the paper will go into the reject bin. On the other hand, if half the referees think he’s a complete idiot and the other half think it’s a great paper — and still think that after being asked to reread it, in case they simply weren’t paying attention the first time they refereed it — then that suggests acceptance (at least for a conference paper rather than top tier journal) as the exact nature of the disagreement is probably interesting and worth some further discussion.

“Controversial” in the U Chicago statement probably really does mean high variance, rather than “everyone agrees the speaker is an idiot”.

It’s not so clear to me that this works well as a policy for selecting the politically controversial, rather than the scientifically controversial. If the proposed speaker is e.g. a racist comedian, and the source of the variance in your students’ opinion of him is mostly down to the variance in the students’ ethnicities and hence tendency to be offended (only some the of white guys find the jokes funny) then the nature of the disagreement is fairly obvious, and actually hearing the guy speak probably isn’t going to make anyone wiser.

Okay Hey Skipper, let’s try this. Crooked Timber has a functioning blog where they can broadcast their opinions widely. I write a letter to tumblr asking them to host CT as well – I want CT to be able to engage with the tumblr community. So tumblr open it up to a vote, and because tumblr is overrun with “SJWs” (the quotes are necessary; you say you’ve never encountered anyone who tries to censor who isn’t an “SJW”, but you have already admitted Shapiro is into censorship – are you not keeping track? The scare quotes remain until you can offer Shapiro the same venom you offer the scare-quotees) the SJWs vote against CT being allowed on tumblr.

So, CT have been censored? Even though they already have a perfectly good blog?

The same applies. Shapiro has a paying gig at breitbart where he can say what he wants. Someone wanted him to get extra speech opportunities at no cost to him, and a bunch of people objected. You now claim he is being censored. Does my example show how stupid your idea is? Or are we just going to go round and around with you demanding that anyone who wants to speak should be able to speak anywhere they want, provided it is someone you like?

‘is entirely correct.’ Here’s Bernie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5ZB8Lg1tcA

Watch just the first five minutes and think what might have happened had fix not been in.

[faustusnotes:] And really embarrassing for people like kidneystones and Hey Skipper if they think a person like that has anything worthwhile to say.

If I ever am stumped for a good example of an ad hominem, I’ll come back to this.

(NB: you are a perfect example of why the concept of free speech and prior restraint are completely at odds.)

This is not a matter of free speech, but skewed incentives. In the contemporary world, where it’s ” denounce or be denounced”, the inventive structure means you have to get your denunciation in first so as to undermine your opposing tribes inevitable denouncing. We don’t need free speech, we need different incentives. Instead of public denunciations we should encourage quiet contemplation and a return to keeping journals.

ZM: I think what you may mean is, you are convinced that the Tempest (set in the Mediterranean, or are you disputing that?) must be an allegory of the colonisation of America because you have seen performances that took that angle.

There was a strikingly good performance of Macbeth by Zulu actors. Its excellence did not persuade me that the Scotch play is in fact, or was ever intended to be, about pre-colonial South Africa.

You mention that the Tempest has a reference to Montaigne, who is generally agreed to have been read at least in translation by Shakespeare. As I said, I’ve never studied the play in detail, but I would be very grateful if you could provide that reference.

Stephen,

No, I mean the text of the play does refer to the colonization of the Americas. I have studied the play.

This article gives the reference to Montaigne, I haven’t read it, I don’t think I would whole agree with the article from scanning the first couple of paragraphs, but it gives the reference to Montaigne:

The characterization of Ariel and Caliban in The Tempest is significant in relation to Montaigne’s essay, which was one of Shakespeare’s main inspirations for the work. In “On Cannibals” and in The Tempest, both Montaigne and Shakespeare explore the relationship between human nature and modern civilization.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/lithum/gallo/tempest.html

Hey Skipper

I see no reason to agree that it is always wrong to prevent somebody from speaking, and what’s more I bet you don’t believe that either. For example, I get the impression you think it’s okay to try to prevent hecklers from speaking. But there’s not just that. If somebody is about to give orders for a murder, is it wrong to try to prevent them from speaking? If somebody is about to reveal to the secret police the hiding place of the dissidents they’re seeking, is it wrong to try to prevent them from speaking? More mundanely, if somebody is unwittingly about to reveal the surprise twist in a story to people who you know want to find it out for themselves, is it wrong to try to prevent them from speaking?

[Collin Street:] People have been telling you for multiple days that they don’t believe that free speech has or can have any meaning in the real world. </blockquote

Yes, they have been telling me for days that they cannot distinguish between means and ends, or assert as true without bothering to make the case that speech is rivalrous, therefore we get to decide who talks. Free speech does, indeed, have a meaning. Reality may not always approach the ideal, but it is trivial to define what it is, and easy to see that, in in the example I cited, or any one of the seemingly endless series of SJWs deciding they are entitled to decide what the rest of us may listen to, that the real and ideal were darn close.

And then, with

If you’re not going to learn, could you at least fuck off?

you get right to the heart of the problem, the Progressive tautology: the thoughts Progressives think are true because Progressives think them. Therefore, it is everyone else who needs to fuck off. If you ever are puzzled as to why Progressives are in such bad odor with so many people, there is your answer, right there.

It apparently hasn’t occurred to you that your argument is based on a begged question. I noted that above. Have you figured it out?

[J-D:] I see no reason to agree that it is always wrong to prevent somebody from speaking, and what’s more I bet you don’t believe that either. For example, I get the impression you think it’s okay to try to prevent hecklers from speaking.

Please do me a favor, and instead of telling me your impression of what I think, quote what I actually said.

Which is: heckling is a means of censorship. Hecklers aren’t speaking, they are heckling. Heckling is a cause, the intended effect of which is to stop speakers talking, and the audience hearing. Heckling is using vocal cords , or air horns (are air horns speech?) to attain what others might do by blocking doors, pulling fire alarms, or threatening violence. Blocking doors isn’t speech, nor is pulling fire alarms, or threatening violence. They are all means of censorship.

Hecklers are perfectly free to speak. They can set up their own meeting space, invite speakers, publicize their event, and talk to whoever shows up.

What they won’t have to worry about is getting censored.

But there’s not just that. If somebody is about to give orders for a murder, is it wrong to try to prevent them from speaking? If somebody is about to reveal to the secret police the hiding place of the dissidents they’re seeking, is it wrong to try to prevent them from speaking?

Is the subject of the UoC letter, or the widespread incidents of attempted and successful SJW censorship, even remotely related to any of that? Is there nothing in law that addresses these irrelevant hypos that distinguishes between them and all other speech?

Free speech does, indeed, have a meaning.

People have been telling you for multiple days that they don’t believe that free speech has or can have any meaning in the real world. Arguments of the form, “if free speech has meaning, X must happen” have no sway on people who don’t think that free speech can have meaning. How would they?

You may well think that free speech has a meaning, but you aren’t writing to convince yourself, you’re writing to convince other people who think other things. To convince a person, you need to root your deductive chain in conclusions and premises they have.

If you’re not going to learn, could you at least fuck off?

According to Colin Street and FN, ‘free-speech’ advocates should not be prevented from blowing whistles to disrupt they hymns

I mean, here I am talking about a rejection of “free speech” precisely because we need a method to ensure people can actually speak without being disrupted and apparently this turns into “disruption of the speech of others is free speech that needs to be supported” when it passes through the walls of ks’s head.

Fuck sake.

Kiwanda, there never is a situation where ‘the only way to stop the ticking time bomb nuke from destroying Des Moines is to silence the terrorist by torturing them into giving a gazillion samoleons to have sex with someone who wouldn’t do it for a penny less’; but there really are situations where somebody is trying to give orders for a murder, or where something somebody says reveals to the secret police the location of the dissidents they’re seeking, or where something somebody says reveals the surprise twist in a story to people who want to find it out for themselves.

Hey Skipper

Of course heckling is speech. ‘Hecklers are speaking’ and ‘hecklers are heckling’ are not mutually exclusive propositions, they are two different but equally accurate descriptions of the same situation. Likewise, ‘hecklers are speaking’ and ‘hecklers are trying to prevent the audience from hearing the speaker’ are not mutually exclusive propositions, they are two different but equally accurate descriptions of the same situation. As I pointed out previously, you can’t exclude heckling from the category of speech because it has an intended effect, since most if not all speech has an intended effect; if you exclude from the category of speech any kind of speech which has an intended effect, then your notion of freedom of speech becomes nearly or entirely empty.

I agree that it’s true that people prevented from heckling may still have the opportunity to speak at another place or time, but that is true of everybody or nearly everybody who is prevented from speaking, including the people in the examples you have mentioned yourself: they haven’t been completely prevented from speaking anywhere at any time, only prevented from speaking at a particular place at a particular time. That’s not enough to settle the question of whether it’s okay to prevent a particular individual from speaking on a particular occasion, whether that person is a heckler or anybody else. Right here, right now, a heckler is attempting to speak: is it okay to prevent that heckler from speaking right here and right now?

There is no law against saying something that reveals the surprise twist in a story to people who want to find it out for themselves. Where secret police exist, the law is usually on their side: it is typically not disclosure of the location of the dissidents they are seeking which is forbidden by law, but rather concealment. These examples are not directly relevant to the specific case previously under discussion; but they are directly relevant to the issue of whether there is a valid general principle that it is wrong in every case to prevent people from speaking. After all, ‘it is wrong in every case to prevent people from speaking except when what they are doing is a criminal offence’ is not the same thing as ‘it is wrong in every case to prevent people from speaking’ (and ‘it is wrong in every case to prevent people from speaking except when what they are doing is heckling’ is different again).

Hey Skipper 09.04.16 at 9:39 am
[J-D:] Of course heckling is speech. ‘Hecklers are speaking’ and ‘hecklers are heckling’ are not mutually exclusive propositions, they are two different but equally accurate descriptions of the same situation.

No. Hecklers are speaking is not an equally accurate description of the situation. That is why the word is “heckling” and not “speaking”.

No; both more specific and more general descriptions can be equally accurate. For example, ‘I am a human’, ‘I am a primate’, ‘I am a mammal’, ‘I am a chordate’, ‘I am a deuterostome’, and ‘I am a eukaryote’ are all equally accurate statements.

Similarly: people who are heckling are speaking; people who are gossiping are speaking; people who are lecturing are speaking; people who are orating are speaking; people who are preaching are speaking; people who are scolding are speaking; people who are soliloquising are speaking. The more general description is less specific, by definition, but that doesn’t make it inaccurate.

There are reasons why we have more specific terms, but not to exclude the applicability of more general ones.

are all at wildly different levels of detail. Heckler, speaker, and listener are not.

So you’re still not learning. Arguments from your premises will convince you: to convince others you need to provide arguments from their premises.

J-D has said that he regards heckler as a subset of speaker. If you want to engage with him you need to either treat heckler as a subset of speaker, or — starting from J-D’s premises, not your own — convince him that even within his analytical framework they have to be treated differently.

Even if you think J-D is wrong you still need to start within his perspective if you want to convince him. Starting from premises J-D disagrees with will not build an argument that J-D will accept.

You keep on fucking doing this. You keep on acting as if your premises were reasonable starting points for people who disagree with you; you keep on not realising that people’s different conclusions arise out of differing knowledges and premises; you keep on treating disagreement as superficial, almost perverse, that everyone fundamentally shares your perspective and disagreement only introduced, almost perversely, at the last minute as if people-not-you balked at the logic of the true [==, pragmatically, your own] conclusions.

You need to stop. Not if you want to be taken seriously — it’s far too late for that — but if you want to not disrupt the conversation like those hecklers you want to gag.

Or you could just fuck off.

@389 Obviously. The question is why? One possible answer could be that getting people to wonder how many angels can actually dance on the head of a pin is a great way to avoid the reality of ‘Be quiet.’ ”Who the fuck hired you? You’re disgusting! You shouldn’t sleep at night.’

And lest anyone wonder whether this little bit of ‘heckling’ was directed with some ‘justification’ at a trouble-maker, or a troll, the target was a house ‘master’ at Yale who wrongly believed a university could a/tolerate a party with costumes. b/that if it couldn’t, he should at least try to explain why he thought it should.

Anyone who’s been in boot camp has likely been on the receiving end of much more unpleasant tirades. It kind of goes with the territory. Few, however, believe that any administrator, or teacher, or university employee, or student, or guest at a university should ever be subject to this sort of abuse. That’s what’s going on here and there and it’s working, in some cases.

http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/06/yale-student-shrieks-at-prof-for-denying-her-safe-space-video/

It’s intimidation and manipulation combined with bad faith argumentation. It works with the guilty and easily cowed. And the more the weak/well-meaning comply, the more unreasonable and insistent the demands become.

As folks noted up-thread, donors and alums aren’t having any of it. Who would?

Afterthought. The first recorded use of “canibales” to mean American man-eaters dates from 1492. There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare necessarily took his altered version of the name from Montaigne.

Collin Street: “When you promote a speech, you do so because you want the contents of the speech to be said.”

me: “This is more-or-less tautologous. Of course, wanting the contents to be said is not the same as agreeing with those contents.”

Collin Street: “All deductive reasoning is, that’s how it works.”, followed by a turgid explanation of what deductive reasoning is. I think in a legal setting such a reply is called “nonresponsive”.

Since we’ve already been treated to a lengthy exposition invoking linguistic philosophy to make a simple social claim, and a tutorial on how to make a persuasive argument, I look forward to another lesson, perhaps on how a bill becomes law, or how to make french toast.

Hardly an uncritical fan of O.W. Holmes Jr., but this discussion is almost enough to lead one to suggest that every entering first-year student be required to read his dissent in Abrams and write an essay on why its basic position should (or should not) apply in a university setting.

@LFC

Or even that antiquated Ovidian, John Milton, his Areopagitica.

I think maybe he meant “analytic”?

Hmm — I am stuck in comment limbo. To repeat: “analysis” doesn’t mean drawing out but dissolving (for example the bonds that tie things together) or just plain untying. This may not make a difference to his point, but “analytic” is not tautologously the same as tautologous, not can tautology</i< be analyzed into meaning analytic, and neither mean “drawing out,” which would be, maybe, the extensional listing of the elements of a set intensionally described.

Hey Skipper 09.04.16 at 10:53 am
…
Please explain how it is that air horns and fire alarms aren’t speech, but heckling is, when the goal of all three is the same.

I understand the word ‘speech’ to mean ‘the act of using the voice to form words’. I didn’t previously think it was necessary to state this explicitly. Notice that, as previously mentioned, the goal of the act is no part of the definition, as I understand it.

Hecklers are using their voices to form words. Air horns and fire alarms aren’t.

How do you understand the meaning of the word ‘speech’? And if your understanding of it is different from mine, what do you think we should do about that?

Sebastian H 09.04.16 at 2:48 pm
J-D appears to be arguing that anything which potentially allows us to understand the thoughts of the hecklers counts as communication which is therefore to be analyzed as performative speech.

I didn’t write anything like that, and I didn’t mean anything like that, and I’m curious to know how I created that apperance, because I certainly didn’t want to.

Therefore murdering a speaker, since it communicates a desire for them to stop speaking, counts as speech. Under this analysis essentially every act possible by human beings counts as speech. One of the problems with defining ‘speech’ so broadly is that it doesn’t allow you to do anything analytically interesting with the definition.

Probably; but then, I didn’t do that.

So by the power of academic stipulation you have rendered the discussion meaningless. Your stipulation may make no sense, but if we are forced to take it seriously it renders the discussion moot.

Not my stipulation.

But normal people don’t mean ‘speech’ to be “every method by which an outsider can discern things about the actors internal state”. They mean something else. Something which we aren’t getting any closer to understanding by seriously considering that they might mean that.

I think ordinary people use ‘speech’ to mean ‘the act of using the voice to form words’, which is how I’ve been using it. How do you think ordinary people use the term, or how do you use it yourself?

J-D, shouting someone down very specifically doesn’t require that the shouting have any content (nonsense words and whistling or clapping works just as well).

The idea is to drown them out. Yelling “Shut Up, Shut Up” is vocal communication, but not ‘speech’ in the sense of ‘free speech’. Just like loving a piece of art isn’t ‘love’ in the sense of loving your kids even though we use the same words.

[J-D:] Hecklers are using their voices to form words. Air horns and fire alarms aren’t.

Okay, fine. How explain how the difference is important.

Sebastian_H 09.04.16 at 11:01 pm

J-D, shouting someone down very specifically doesn’t require that the shouting have any content (nonsense words and whistling or clapping works just as well).

The idea is to drown them out. Yelling “Shut Up, Shut Up” is vocal communication, but not ‘speech’ in the sense of ‘free speech’. Just like loving a piece of art isn’t ‘love’ in the sense of loving your kids even though we use the same words.

Well, I’ve explained, explicitly, that I’m using the word ‘speech’ to mean ‘the act of using the voice to form words’, without the goal or purpose of the act forming any part of the definition. I believe this to be way people ordinarily use the word.

I have already asked you to explain what other sense of the word you are using, or which you think people ordinarily use; you haven’t answered that question.

Hey Skipper 09.04.16 at 11:08 pm

[J-D:] Hecklers are using their voices to form words. Air horns and fire alarms aren’t.

Okay, fine. How explain how the difference is important.

If we are discussing the subject of speech, and if ‘speech’ is being used to mean ‘the act of using the voice to form words’, then it’s important whether something falls within the category of ‘using the voice to form words’. If you’re not discussing the subject of speech, what subject are you discussing? if you’re not using the word ‘speech’ to mean ‘the act of using the voice to form words’, what are you using it to mean?

@399, 400
he (obviously and correctly) meant ‘deduction’

Sebastian H 09.05.16 at 12:35 am

J-D, do you believe there is a pertinent difference between shouting someone down with words, trying to cover up their speech with whistles, or shouting someone down with nonsense words? If so could you please explain what you think that difference is AND why you think that difference is important.

The AND part is really important. I can come up with dozens of ‘differences’ on almost any topic, but that doesn’t make them pertinent differences. It isn’t clear what difference your distinctions are supposed to make.

It’s pertinent and important if the topic of discussion is related to speech and if we are using the word ‘speech’ to mean ‘the act of using the voice to form words’.

Is the topic of discussion related to speech? Are you using the term ‘speech’ to mean ‘the act of using the voice to form words’?

It may be that you want to say that because vocalizing using one’s throat is ‘speech’ that shouting someone down with specific understandable words should be protected but shouting them down with incoherent screaming shouldn’t. But if that is your position just say so and defend it. Or maybe your position is that both should be protected because there is something godly about the larynx but that airhorns shouldn’t be protected. Fine. Say so. Don’t retreat to “I want to make distinctions about whether or not vocal utterances are ‘speech'”.

I haven’t read the extensive literature LFC refers to, but my guess is that what people are ostensibly talking about here is ‘freedom of expression’ as discussed in Wikipedia and various human rights instruments. You could express your opinion in different ways, not all of which are speech. However the conflict seems to be the old chestnut: where does my right to freedom of expression end, and your right not to be harmed begin? It’s not of its nature a simple question and can’t be decided out of context (social and historical).

However, as often seems to be the case at CT, there seem to other arguments going on here, one being ‘kids today are disobedient/disrespectful/etc’ (often referred to here as ‘get those kids off my lawn’ I think); another, more sinister one being ‘since we let those women and blacks into the university there’s been nothing but trouble’.

I see that you don’t appear to want to say anything in particular. Ok.

kidneystones 09.05.16 at 3:14 am
@ 419 You noticed.

That’s the Nelsonian kind of noticing, with the telescope to the blind eye.

Sebastian H 09.05.16 at 3:07 am
I see that you don’t appear to want to say anything in particular. Ok.

If that’s what you see, it’s because you’re not looking properly, which is hardly my fault. I do have something in particular to say — maybe more than one thing, but at any rate at least one thing. In case you missed it (it appears you did miss it), I quote from one of my earlier comments:

If you want to properly evaluate a situation where somebody prevents (or attempts to prevent) somebody else from speaking, you need to consider the details of the situation; if I want to properly evaluate a situation where somebody prevents (or attempts to prevent) somebody else from speaking, I need to consider the details of the situation; if any person want to properly evaluate a situation where somebody prevents (or attempts to prevent) somebody else from speaking, that person needs to consider the details of the situation.

On the other hand, I notice that you are not answering my questions. If I answer your questions, but you don’t answer mine, what sort of conclusion might that suggest?

F. Foundling 09.05.16 at 12:46 am
Does ‘free speech’ mean ‘the freedom to use the voice to form words’, or ‘the freedom to express one’s opinions (in words)’? Those beset by nagging doubts on the matter might want to look up ‘free speech’ up in the OED or on Wikipedia.

I have consulted both the OED and Wikipedia. In the OED I read that ‘free’ has a specific use when applied to ‘speech’, namely, ‘characterised by liberty in expression of sentiments or opinions; uttered or expressed without reserve; frank, plain-spoken’, and it illustrates this use by five or six citations, of which the most recent is ‘Men were rather free of expression with each other in the days of the Regency’. I don’t find that gets this discussion anywhere.
Wikipedia tells me that ‘freedom of speech’ or ‘freedom of expression’ means ‘the right to articulate one’s opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship’. Unless Ben Shapiro has been subjected to government retaliation or censorship (and nobody has told me that he has been), his freedom of speech in that specific sense defined by Wikipedia has not been infringed.

Stephen,

“How do you wish to get round the facts that Caliban is the son of a witch from non-American Algiers, and the whole play is plainly set in the Mediterranean?”

The rather famous writing devices of metaphor, allusion, referencing, allegory, and so on.

“ZM: sorry, but no. You wrote “The early colonisation of America was the current events the play is referring to — this is made clear by the reference to On Cannibals by Montiagne.” I cannot see how that makes sense unless the text of the Tempest does in fact refer to Montaigne’s well-known essay On Cannibals.”

Sorry, but yes — the text of The Tempest does refer to Montaigne’s On Cannibals, I have studied The Tempest two times. It remains one of Shakespeare’s most interesting plays for me.

“You now refer me to O’Toole’s article, which points out that Caliban is a name not at all distant from Cannibal (which nobody disputes), but adds that Montaigne takes on the whole a favourable view of cannibals, and Shakespeare does not take a favourable view of Caliban. I can see no evidence that the text of the Tempest makes any reference at all to Montaigne, or is influenced by his essay.”

You are misrepresenting the O’Toole article. Shakespeare clearly does not have to agree wholeheartedly with Montaigne’s On Cannibals to refer to the essay in his play. A critique can also be a reference. The Tempest clearly engages with On Cannibals.

O’Toole’s essay says:

“In “On Cannibals” and in The Tempest, both Montaigne and Shakespeare explore the relationship between human nature and modern civilization. ”

“Ariel and Caliban can both be viewed as the “colonized subjects” of Prospero, and the differing attitudes of these subjects towards their master is indicative of the differing ways in which human nature responds to modern civilization. ”

“It is Prospero’s art which controls both Ariel and Caliban, binding them to his authority as their master. Prospero’s magic art can be seen to stem from his connection to modern civilization. One can see how he utilizes his art, akin to modern technology, in order to suppress and subjugate. ”

“Montaigne exalts the cannibals for having maintained a civilization so natural and unartificial, but Shakespeare asserts that when exposed to modern civilization, the cannibals become no different than the Europeans. The moderns employ their magic powers – intelligence, technology, and liquor – to subjugate and oppress the cannibals. Yet the cannibals willingly allow themselves to be captivated and entrapped by the spell of modernity. Whereas Montaigne praises the cannibals and places blame on modern Europeans, Shakespeare asserts that neither the cannibals nor the Europeans deserve praise – save for a few rare individuals, they are both equally pathetic.”

I have already made the point that Shakespeare’s attitudes to hybridity in The Tempest is problematic for modern readers, and that his interest in the artificial, the natural, and hybridity is also in play in the other late “problem play” The Winter’s Tale. Further this was a longer dialogue in English literature which you can see in other works, such as the treatment of the myth of Orpheus in Sir Orfeo where Herodis is kidnapped while under a grafted (ympe) tree.

A quick google search can provide you with several other articles about Shakespeare’s engagement with Montaigne’s On Cannibals in The Tempest.

Is there some reason you are disputing this well known fact with me without doing a google search?

See, for e.g.:

Montaigne’s “Cannibals” and The Tempest Revisited by Kenji Go

The Tempest: Montaigne “On Cannibals” by Michael Best

Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare’s debt to Montaigne – The Telegraph

Shakespeare on Global Colonialism – Cedar Crest College

Virtue, vice, and compassion in Montaigne and The Tempest by A Kirsch

Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest by H Berger

“Afterthought. The first recorded use of “canibales” to mean American man-eaters dates from 1492. There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare necessarily took his altered version of the name from Montaigne.”

The fact that The Tempest clearly refers to and engages with On Cannibals is a pretty good reason to think that Shakespeare was conscious of the similarities. I mean come on, he was a genius, its not likely to have been a sheer coincidence, right?

Val,

“…but my guess is that what people are ostensibly talking about here is ‘freedom of expression’ as discussed in Wikipedia and various human rights instruments. You could express your opinion in different ways, not all of which are speech. However the conflict seems to be the old chestnut: where does my right to freedom of expression end, and your right not to be harmed begin? It’s not of its nature a simple question and can’t be decided out of context (social and historical).”

There a quite a lot of exceptions to the First Amendment in the USA.

This article written for Congress provides a good general overview of the situation in the USA : Freedom of Speech and Press: Exceptions to the First Amendment by Kathleen Ann Ruane, Legislative Attorney, September 8, 2014

“For example, the Court has decided that the First Amendment provides no protection for obscenity, child pornography, or speech that constitutes what has become widely known as “fighting words.”

The Court has also decided that the First Amendment provides less than full protection to commercial speech, defamation (libel and slander), speech that may be harmful to children, speech broadcast on radio and television (as opposed to speech transmitted via cable or the Internet), and public employees’ speech.

Even speech that enjoys the most extensive First Amendment protection may be subject to “regulations of the time, place, and manner of expression which are content-neutral, are narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest, and leave open ample alternative channels of communication.”

Furthermore, even speech that enjoys the most extensive First Amendment protection may be restricted on the basis of its content if the restriction passes “strict scrutiny” (i.e., if the government shows that the restriction serves “to promote a compelling interest” and is “the least restrictive means to further the articulated interest”).
…
The fundamental question in obscenity cases is whether the speech at issue actually constitutes obscenity. This determination is by no means a simple one. Obscenity is not synonymous with pornography, as most pornography is not legally obscene. Most pornography, in fact, is protected by the First Amendment. To be obscene, pornography must, at a minimum, “depict or describe patently offensive ‘hard core’ sexual conduct.”
…
So-called “fighting words” also lay beyond the pale of First Amendment protection.19 The “fighting words” doctrine began in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, where the Court held that fighting words, by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace and may be punished consistent with the First Amendment.

In Chaplinsky, the Court upheld a statute which prohibited a person from addressing “any offensive, derisive or annoying word to any other person who is lawfully in any street or other public place,” calling “him by any offensive or derisive name,” or making “any noise or exclamation in his presence and hearing with the intent to deride, offend or annoy him, or to prevent him from pursuing his lawful business or occupation.”
…
This category of proscribable speech requires the threat of an immediate breach of peace in order to be punishable. In Cohen v. California, the Supreme Court held that words on a t-shirt that contained an expletive were not directed at a person in particular and could not be said to incite an immediate breach of the peace.
…
There are two ways in which the government may attempt to restrict speech.

The more common way is to make a particular category of speech, such as obscenity or defamation, subject to criminal prosecution or civil suit, and then, if someone engages in the proscribed category of speech, to hold a trial and impose sanctions if appropriate.

The second way is by prior restraint, which may occur in two ways. First, a statute may require that a person submit the speech that he wishes to disseminate—a movie, for example—to a governmental body for a license to disseminate it—e.g., to show the movie.
Second, a court may issue a temporary restraining order or an injunction against engaging in particular speech—publishing the Pentagon Papers, for example.”

https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/95-815.pdf

Intellectual carping over the exact placement of the line may be exciting some of the time, but none of the cases actually discussed are anywhere near any of the important border-drawing issues like ‘direct incitement of immediate violence’ or ‘revelation of truly dangerous world-shattering secrets’.

And are the actual hecklers in the actual cases discussed anywhere near any of those important border-drawing issues?

I took a few days out from this thread because certain key words were appearing which I thought might lead to certain internet crazies congregating, and that might lead to them attacking me (or others here) at their work. This has happened to me before – I have had climate change denialists put pictures of my family on the web and send me threatening emails at my work. as a result I have had to ask certain blogs to remove all my posts and have also stopped commenting at all on climate related blogs (even those run by scientists) becuase of the frenzied behavior of that crew. I am of course far better off than many other left wing people, primarily women, who we have seen driven off of the Internet and out of public debate with tape and death threats. Strangely enough the free speech warriors of the right are silent on this topic – Shapiro tolerated it when he was at breitbart where those who utilize these tactics or encourage them were active; many others like Limbaugh encourage violence. Meanwhile of course despite being shut down at a campus Shapiro still has a voice, which he continues to use to advocate for censorship and has not raised against (for example) those people who drive feminists off the internet.

Above, kidneystones references cheeto Jesus’s attendance at a black church, with the rhetorical “should SJWs shit it down” routine. He doesn’t mention that trump vetoed the questions that would be asked – that is, he went through his interviewers speech and struck out parts of it. Is this not censorship? He also only read pre prepared answers, gave a scripted speech at the end and took no audience questions. So tell me, had hecklers shut down this moment, would trump’s speech have been restricted at all? He could put the q&a on his website, hire an actor to ask him the questions, and phone into Fox News to read his closing speech. No aspect of that event would have been changed by his being gagged. Meanwhile, he has constant, huge amounts of free media from all the major networks, his own website, Twitter, Facebook and a bunch of surrogates with their own communication networks. It is not possible, we have all noticed, to shut this man up. Yet if someone shuts down a single one of these avenues for even a day we hear cries of censorship.

Which brings me back to a question I asked of hey skipper above that he hasn’t answered – is someone’s speech censored if they have other equally good (or better) avenues for the same thing? In the case of Shapiro, is the issue that he didn’t get to interact with the audience? If that is the issue, then surely trump censored the black church’s audience. Is it that he didn’t get to do a q&a? He could have set one up through his breitbart site. How is it possible to say that someone’s speech is censored of nothing about his or her ability to broadcast their ideas has changed?

And young black voters are listening. ‘She’s corrupt and he’s a racist.’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/us/politics/young-blacks-voice-skepticism-on-hillary-clinton-worrying-democrats.html?_r=0

That’s inducing a strong level of panic in some circles. Where’s my safe space?

No hey skipper, trump censored the priest. He stopped the priest asking certain questions – got a list beforehand and told him he couldn’t say some of it. If a govt did that to a tv interviewer it would be censorship. So is what trump did. This is very different to being asked a question and refusing to answer, which is a powerful form of speech by the priest.

Your choice of the word “relegated” is interesting here. So in my example, if ct ask tumblr to repost the contents of this blog and tumblr say no, ct have been censored?

J-D
Well, from what I can discern I think the general tendencies of yr position and that famous opinion prob. do go in different directions. Basically the key paragraphs from that dissent have to do w the virtue of letting as many ideas as possible compete in ‘the marketplace of ideas’ — now there are plenty of things that can be said in criticism of the ‘marketplace of ideas’ metaphor, but if there is any setting where it might seem to work, one wd suppose a campus setting comes close.

The content of the communication matters, at least in the U.S. First Amendment context (which yes, is a parochial lens, sorry), because as has been pointed out upthread by others, not all communication is speech for First Am. purposes. But the pamphlets in Abrams were political opinion, which is right at the core of the First Am., which has been made v clear as the jurisprudence has developed. It’s important to note the date of the Holmes opinion — 1919 — which is really at or near the beginning of modern First Am jurisprudence; that’s one reason why it’s famous, though it’s mostly famous for its eloquence. There’s a ‘popular’ book from just a few yrs ago spec. about this opinion, btw. I’ll try to retrieve the title later.

[Faustusnotes: ] … trump censored the priest.. He stopped the priest asking certain questions – got a list beforehand and told him he couldn’t say some of it. If a govt did that to a tv interviewer it would be censorship. So is what trump did.

You are missing a fundamental point, as illustrated by “He stopped … ” and “If a govt did that …”

Free speech is the unhindered communication between speaker and listener without the need for third party approval.

There is nothing in the concept of free speech that compels speaking or listening; speakers or listeners are free to make that decision for themselves.

Which is why Trump declining to take questions isn’t censorship, but if the gov’t prevented him taking questions, it would be.

Hey skipper, when the preacher asks trump questions he is not speaking to trump big to his congregation and to the people filming it and watching the film. When trump Ver’s what he can say to his audience he is interfering with that communication. He has to, because otherwise the preacher would say something trump doesn’t want the audience to hear. Why do you think trump is there, and why do you think the preacher wants to ask him questions?

Sebastian H 09.06.16 at 12:38 pm
“I do not attempt to judge cases in which people were prevented from speaking without considering what they were trying to say and the reasons given for trying to prevent them.”

Fantastic. It would be nice if you would actually do that instead of talking about doing that. Which views do you believe need to be censored?

You write that it would be nice if I actually did ‘that’ instead of talking about doing ‘that’, but I don’t understand what the word ‘that’ is being used to refer to.

This is so mind-boggling that I can’t quite believe it.

18 million for Bill as an ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for profit university.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-bill-clintons-nearly-18-million-job-as-honorary-chancellor-of-a-for-profit-college/2016/09/05/8496db42-655b-11e6-be4e-23fc4d4d12b4_story.html

Via the wapo. I watched Hillary’s latest coughing fit. This is getting positively otherworldly.

Which views do you believe need to be censored?

See, the thing about a conceptual error is that it’s something that’s invisible within the conceptual framework; only in the interface between the perception and outside reality will it be revealed.

[the only errors that can be revealed by introspection are the ones that generate system-internal inconsistencies; only a few errors are like that and even in these cases the inconsistencies are hard to spot]

Which means that insisting that everyone frame things in terms of your conceptual framework — and “answer the question I asked” will act this way — is a pretty much 100% rock-solid guarantee of blinding you to any conceptual errors you might have made. If you have made a conceptual error, realistically the only way you’ll find out is if you let your conversational partner pick their own framing rather than forcing them into your own.

[but if you haven’t made a conceptual error, letting people chose their own framings will slow down your ability to process their input and understand their perspectives. There’s no 100% best path, although “be flexible” comes close.]

I just set my clock so my alarm can censor my sleep.

Nighty-night

All we need now is nurse ratchet.

Collin, again you’re getting rather abstract and not really saying anything. Can you apply the criteria (whatever it is) to any of the cases at hand and explain why they should have been censored/kept from talking/shouted down/whatever you’re calling it?

Kiwanda:
“shouting fire” comes from Schenk (1919). the ref here was to the dissent in Abrams, later that same year.

Sebastian H 09.06.16 at 12:38 pm
“I do not attempt to judge cases in which people were prevented from speaking without considering what they were trying to say and the reasons given for trying to prevent them.”

Fantastic. It would be nice if you would actually do that instead of talking about doing that. Which views do you believe need to be censored?

The answer to your question is ‘It depends on who wants to do the censoring, and on whom and what they want to censor, and on where and when and how and why’. You give me those details and I’ll give you my opinion. It’s exactly my point that without detailed information I can’t form a judgement.

Kiwanda 09.06.16 at 4:26 pm
J-D: “Maybe some people think that because there is virtue in having as many ideas as possible competing in the marketplace of ideas, it is appropriate to pass judgement on cases in which people are preventing other people from speaking without knowledge of what they were being prevented from saying and the reasons for preventing them.”

No, no one thinks that, at least here.

If you tell me you don’t think that, I accept your assurances. But it did appear to me as if some other people were making that assertion. It did appear to me that Hey Skipper, in particular, was judging to be wrong the behaviour of people who were preventing other people from speaking without reference to what they were being prevented from saying and the reasons for preventing them (and perhaps inviting other people to agree with that judgement). I could have misunderstood. If Hey Skipper also explicitly disavows that view, I will accept those assurances also.

“But the judgement of Justice Holmes does not stand for that proposition.”

Is this “falsely shouting fire in a theater “? Please tell me it’s not “falsely shouting fire in a theater “.

No, this is not ‘falsely shouting fire in a theater’; it is not ‘falsely shouting fire in a theater’. So what is this, and what is it?

LFC: ““shouting fire” comes from Schenk (1919). the ref here was to the dissent in Abrams, later that same year.”

Ah, great, happy to hear.

J-D: “If you tell me you don’t think that, I accept your assurances. But it did appear to me as if some other people were making that assertion.”

I’m reasonably confident that no one here agrees with an assertion so grandly general as to approach vacuity. I’m puzzled why you seem to think it’s a significant point. As I hinted above, and Sebastian H. mentioned explicitly, your apparent desire to have this concession on there being no utterly absolute, unqualified, universal, right to speak is analogous to those who try to extract the admission that there might be, somewhere, sometime, somehow, a circumstance where torture was morally justified.

“In context, that appeared to me, and still appears to me, to be confirmation that Hey Skipper thinks that those specific actual attempts at preventing speakers from speaking can be judged to be wrong regardless of what it was the speakers were trying to say and why people were trying to prevent them from saying those things.”

You’re misunderstanding. It isn’t that it is THEORETICALLY impossible that they might say things that could cause one to invoke an exception to the free speech concept. It just isn’t likely. Because it isn’t likely, those who want to shout them down should have a damn good reason. Which they don’t. If they did we would have heard about it. Maybe even from you. But they don’t. And the presumption is/ought to be strong enough that the burden is on them. So when you keep invoking the theoretical possibility that there might be a good enough reason, while continuing to avoid actually saying what such reason is, you give the impression of not really caring about free speech but being afraid to own up to it. That may not be your actual intention, but that is what youre communicating.

[J-D:] It did appear to me that Hey Skipper, in particular, was judging to be wrong the behaviour of people who were preventing other people from speaking without reference to what they were being prevented from saying and the reasons for preventing them (and perhaps inviting other people to agree with that judgement).

✅

I can’t judge whether their reasons are good or bad without knowing what those reasons are.

More accurately, I think, you cannot judge whether you agree with their reasons, without knowing what they are.

Their actions, however, are wrong, no matter what their reasons are, or how much you approve of them.

Kiwanda, you can now observe that Hey Skipper confirms my interpretation; the thing that you thought nobody here was asserting turns out to be just what Hey Skipper was asserting.

Sebastian H, you took the view that people would need a ‘damn good reason’ for preventing a speaker from giving a speech; you may observe that this is not the position of Hey Skipper, who asserts that no reason can possibly be good enough for doing that.

Hey Skipper 09.07.16 at 6:55 am

I can’t judge whether their reasons are good or bad without knowing what those reasons are.

More accurately, I think, you cannot judge whether you agree with their reasons, without knowing what they are.

Both, I should say; or, to put it in yet another way, more succinctly, I can’t judge reasons without knowing what they are. Can you judge people’s reasons without knowing what they are? or do you never judge people’s reasons at all?

or do you never judge people’s reasons at all?

All right-wing activists, without exception, display signs of empathy impairment.

[J-D:] I care about their reasons because I am unable to decide whether what they did is a problem without knowing what the reasons for it were. I observe that you can; that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t.

If you care about free speech, then their actions are a problem by definition.

If you don’t, and that seems to be the case, then you stand with them in awarding yourself the power over deciding what others may say, hear, write, and read.

That link to Wikipedia contains, I would think, plenty of examples why that is a problem.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution says ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …’. It does not say ‘Nobody shall abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press’ …

There are two serious problems with this.

First, many constitutional restrictions extend to any entity accepting government money. Liberty University, for example, accepts no federal funds, and is free to do as much viewpoint discrimination as it chooses. But UoC does accept government funding, and therefore is as much barred from exercising, or tolerating, viewpoint discrimination as as Congress. As far as this thread is concerned, your comment is true, but irrelevant.

Secondly, 1A jurisprudence has created a civil culture that values almost completely unbridled speech. Should universities tolerate, or, worse, encourage censorship, then civil society is likely to value free speech less. Which, so long as it is progressives deciding what others may think, is just peachy. But what about when the air horn is in the other hand?

Should Trump win, and the zeitgeist get rather less tolerant of progressive ideas, any tolerance of progressive censorship is going to put progressives on very thin ice indeed when they start appealing to free speech.

What’s more, the Supreme Court, like me, and unlike you, cares about the reasons the government gives for attempting to abridge the freedom of speech; the Supreme Court does not try to decide First Amendment cases without investigating the reasons for the laws under scrutiny.

You have this backwards. SCOTUS has clearly stated there are almost no reasons where abridgment is justified. Which is why virtually every time it is tried, it gets slapped down stat.

Here is an item at Popehat, a legal blog that frequently writes on 1A issues, pretty clearly explains why reasons don’t matter.

As noted in one of the links from that post:

It has long been settled law that the First Amendment is binding on public universities
such as UWS. See Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169, 180 (1972) (“[T]he precedents of this
Court leave no room for the view that, because of the acknowledged need for order, First
Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses than in the
community at large. Quite to the contrary, ‘the vigilant protection of constitutional
freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.’”)

“I can’t judge reasons without knowing what they are. Can you judge people’s reasons without knowing what they are? or do you never judge people’s reasons at all?”
You are over universalizing. In real world applications you often won’t have access to people’s reasons. Worse, often their stated reasons will have a strong appearance of not being their real reasons. You can’t be paralyzed by that in certain areas because if you are, that which you want to protect can’t be protected. Free speech is such an area. You have to build the free speech protecting norms because if you are paralyzed any time someone doesn’t clearly state the reasons for wanting to prohibit the particular speech you just play into their hands every time. That is how you are coming across in this discussion.

Of course I judge reasons at all. in areas like free speech and murder there are indeed theoretical reasons which would cause me to judge against my normal judgment about the activities. But I don’t have to assume you have a valid self defense claim if you kill someone. If you have one I can be fairly sure you will raise it most of the time. If you fail to raise it, it isn’t silly of me to assume it isn’t there. Is it a logical impossibility? No. Are there zero cases? No. But is it worth setting policy based on “won’t raise the self defense claims”? No.

Tying it back here–the number of valid reasons needed to shout down a speaker at a university or political rally or general talk are very narrow. Almost vanishingly unlikely. So for policy purposes I don’t generally need to know what the hecklers think. Their reasons won’t even be close to the line. If they really are so bad as “incitement to murder” I trust that the hecklers will mention something of that gravity. When they don’t, I do not need to be paralyzed in judging their interference with free speech to be wrong. I can revise my judgment later if they present compelling but highly unlikely unmentioned facts. I am not required to assume unlikely facts in their favor–especially when I’m not asking anything serious happen to them.

No one is claiming that there are never exemptions, just that they are narrow. I think that if a campus Republican group invites a Republican, like Ben Shapiro, to speak at their event, where no one is compelled to go there, that they have a right to talk without being shouted down or prevented from communicating. It’s fine to protest their visit or organize an alternative venue; but not if it prevents the people who asked them to come from hearing their message.

It sounds to me as if you’d be completely fine with preventing them from speaking, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. If so, be careful what you wish for: your views on Christianity, for example, are intensely unpopular here in the US, and you could easily find yourself on the wrong side of the speech suppression business if the approach that you seem to be advocating ever got normalized.

Ha! Seems I’m doing a good job of suppressing my own speech there … “Why should I”, obviously.

If by revenge porn you mean publishing private intimate pics and video that was supposed to remain between the parties, yes limiting that is fine. I’m at a bit of a loss as to how that relates to shouting down public speakers but there’s your answer from me.

The “safe spaces” debate reminds me of the hysterical farce now playing out in France about banning women from wearing the frightening Burkini. For some women, clearly there is a need for a “safe space” in form of a swim suit that doesn’t expose their body. That demand for a safe space is met with hysterical (I said that already) rejection by the dominant culture (even though it doesn’t require anything of society other than keeping out of other people’s wardrobes, literally). Exposing the body is essential to the glorious French enlightenment culture and refusing to do so is “a provocation” (PM Manuel Valls) not to mention a sign of terrorist sympathies. Just a tiny gesture of questioning the dominant culture is seen as a threat to public order. Those who wish to paternalistically impose their views on the rest of society portray themselves as defenders of enlightement values and accuse minorities of intolerance.

I think this comparison would make for a great social science seminar.

@469 If a speaker at some University organized her speech around revenge porn or the private details of the life of an audience member (or a random person), then yes, I believe that person should be stopped, and by heckling if necessary.

That situation is vanishingly rare, though in fairness to your hypothetical, I remember that Alan Dershowitz had a document on his professional website (maybe at Harvard?) in which he suggested that Normal Finkelstein’s mother had resorted to dirty tricks to survive extermination camps, and Norman Finkelstein contacted the web manager (unsuccessfully, as it happened) in order to have it disappear from the website, even asking (according to his rendition of the discussion) if it was OK to publish on the official website of said institution that the mother of someone else was a whore.

faustusnotes: “I already told you I have been on the wrong side of the (privatized) speech suppression business. It was nasty, very nasty. [Why should I] have sympathy for people like Shapiro who support it, and why should I support their right to advocate more of it?”

I see, so you do not support the right to speak of those who would do so in favor of the suppression of speech. Would you speak in support of the suppression of the speech of those who would favor the suppression of speech? Probably you would suppress such a speech.

Or maybe, Ben Shapiro’s right to speak should be supported independent of its content.

(J-D: here I’m regarding the discussion as occurring in the context of political speech; I do not support Ben Shapiro’s unqualified right to utter any commercial speech he wants, or slander, or anything intended and likely to incite an immediate breech of the peace, or copyright violation, or violation of a nondisclosure agreement, or revealing classified information, or speech so loud as to damage the hearing of those present, or speech likely bring on an invasion by aliens, or magical spells bringing forth demons, or jokes that kill those that hear them, or the ending of Game of Thrones, or anything related to Harambe, Lena Dunham, or Milo Yiannopoulos. In case you were concerned. )

Kiwanda and hey skipper, I have several times mentioned here having pictures of my family posted online by people who disagree with me, and being threatened at my work. These are both forms of speech, and I want to know if you think I should stand by and let that happen? Is someone’s right to speech more Important than my safety? I don’t usually personalize debates like this but in this case I want you to say explicitly exactly what price you think I should have paid for your principles.

Once we have established that we can begin discussing the more abstract issue (to me, if not to you) of what price others should pay for your principles.

Revenge porn is not best described as an invasion of privacy. That’s a cheap excuse to avoid the fact that preventing it is censorship. The porn often involves two people who consented to let the other person own the images/video. You may not like to admit it but this is a speech issue for whichever person decides to get vengeful. If that bothers you consider this variant: a sex worker has a website advertising her services that is public but she is confident her family don’t know about. An ex decides to start telling all her friends and family about this. The pics on the site have the face blurred out but are still pics of her. By your exacting standards can she censor her ex’s speech? Consider that something like this (an explicit diary about a journalist) is how gamergate started, so your answer to this question potentially crushes a whole movement. Think carefully!

My original response to Sebastian was comment number (currently) 445.

I think that with the internet and other technologies making publishing and distribution more accessible there is some need for the governments to do some education on existing laws about speech and expression.

Also I think justice should be more accessible for people where there are violations of law relating to speech and expression.

I don’t think the justice system has kept up with the new technologies very well.

Most of the time people act according to the law, but I think that in the online environment or some publishing contexts people’s conduct is outside of what is legal.

But its really hard to do anything about this when your legal rights are infringed on; police and court resources are really lacking to allow people to get justice for violations of criminal or civil law pertaining to speech and expression in my experience.

I think the current resources might have been okay about 30 or 40 years ago, but technology has come so far since then, and so has access to publishing, and while most people follow normal behaviour which is within the law, some people use the new technologies or online environment to act in ways which are outside of normal standards and against the law as well.

More distracting crap from the usual sources. The issue of safe spaces on university campuses is pretty cut and dried. Safe spaces are allowed and serve as useful purpose for both academics and students as the OP and almost all comments confirm. Respect for one set of safe spaces means respect for all.

That means we don’t get to invade the space spaces of others: offices, classrooms, club rooms and deny others the protections we insist exist for ourselves. Marc up thread made this clear: the golden rule applies. That’s exactly the soup Bernie served up at Liberty and the bible crowd to their immense credit took it straight on the chin without so much as a whimper.

Only a very few believe that suppression of political speech on university campuses should be the norm. Those who do have been rightly flayed for hiding out behind pronouns and demonstrative adjectives both lacking clear antecedents, and/or moving the discussion so far from the original discussion as to be effectively meaningless.

Had to giggle reading one clown demanding that critics apologize for the internet.

Our alarm clocks didn’t censor sleep this morning. Who’s going to answer for that?

Henry made some excellent points in the OP. After that, meh, other than the Shakespeare drift.

LFC’s suggestion that all students be required to read and comment upon Holmes and his dissent is the best I’ve read anywhere in a long time.

Goddamn autocorrect

On the contrary Z, these cases are very relevant to free expression on university campuses – all the cases cited in comments include people related to a movement that deploys these strategies to prevent women speaking. Above someone posted footage of a Milo Yiannopolous speech being disrupted at a university. What is Milo famous for? And what are his victims famous for? Being forced to cancel their university campus speeches because of death and rape threats, and being forced out of journalism jobs or internet speech by the same movement. That movement is very active on campuses and Milo leads it, yet somehow it’s the attempts by his victims to shut down his speech that are being portrayed as the problem here. The man and his movement openly advocate violence, but the preferred position here is that their speech is protected at any cost.

There is a dark movement at work in America now, which aims to silence women and black people through threats of violence, and which also takes great joy in insulting and degrading them. The leading lights of this movement are gathering around Trump, who is also known for his opposition to free speech for people who aren’t like him or who disagree with his movement. This movement is also connected to the KKK and white nationalism. But the position put by many people here is that the Republic should be burnt down by these people rather than have them denied the right to speak by their victims at a single campus. That we shouldn’t even check the contents of their speech before determining that the people protesting it are wrong.

This is a very asymmetric situation, and in my opinion it’s no longer about some abstract issue of free speech – it’s about the ability of a certain group of people to seize power through violence, and a part of that is their ability to silence dissent in the media, and then to smear anyone who tries to protest their actions in any other way. This will have consequences, one of which will be the loss of any form of reasoned public discourse in America.

I think for many people commenting here this is all abstract, it won’t affect them. Instead it affects the people who can’t speak on college campuses, in magazines or on the internet because of threats of violence, which are coordinated and promulgated by a movement led by identifiable figures. For those people it’s not abstract and the limits on their speech are very real and concrete. When you decide that “free speech” as a principle is more important than their speech you are making a choice about whose speech is more important. You may not like that, but that’s what you’re doing.

And the speech you’re privileging is violent, misogynist hate speech.

“What is Milo famous for? And what are his victims famous for? Being forced to cancel their university campus speeches because of death and rape threats, and being forced out of journalism jobs or internet speech by the same movement. That movement is very active on campuses and Milo leads it”

Excellent. That’s a substantial charge. All that’s missing are names, dates, events. Which speakers to Milo specifically target and force to cancel speaking engagements because of death threats?

As for the internet. It is what it is. Milo is a self-promoting right-wing prankster cum entrepreneur.

We don’t need to be right, polite, or inoffensive. You live in a world happy to gag and chain all who don’t share your world view. Milo happens not to, and he levels his contempt for you and your ‘values’ with both barrels. If you don’t like him, feel free to change channels.

The internet is a great big space and you can certainly find more productive uses for your time.

As for the crybabies at De Paul, they managed to ban chalk graffiti at De Paul because they consider ‘Trump Train 2016’ to constitute hate speech. And that was before Milo showed up to speak to college Republicans. F-me.

Marc 477: I observe that you have made a bunch of unfounded claims at 116 and when challenged by faustusnotes (118) have completely failed to substantiate them. How does that map on demands to be taken seriously at CT must, I guess, remain mysterious.

Hey skipper et al appear to be completely ignorant of the major movements in campus censorship over the past two years. I guess that is why you can say such silly things as “only SKWs” censor people while lauding a known advocate of censorship, or be surprised that people might consider milo a bad example for your cause. This stuff has been all over the news in the past year, there are whole sub threads on Reddit and 4chan devoted to it, major figures connected to it trashed the Hugo awards and drove some big figures in modern feminist off the internet and off college campuses, and you are ignorant of the whole thing … Yet here you are expounding on campus speech as if you know something about it …

Do I really need to point out to you that it doesn’t matter whether you stop speech by a censorship law, contract law or some kind of emergency services rule, the purpose of the instrument used is to stop the speech – it is all censorship. If you accept the use of these tools then you are pro censorship, and you agree with J-D that the content needs to be checked before you can decide whether or not to censor.

Now that we have established that you are in favour of censorship, the posturing about how “SJWs” are always wrong to censor people on campus becomes just that – posturing. We have established what you are, now we can get down to haggling over the price.

@496 You’ve asserted that Milo is famous for forcing people to cancel speeches “What is Milo famous for? And what are his victims famous for? Being forced to cancel their university campus speeches because of death and rape threats, and being forced out of journalism jobs or internet speech by the same movement.”

Milo’s not famous for shutting down speech at all except, it seems, in your fucking melon. I’ve looked under a number of different search strings and the only links that pop up are where you and your loopy pals temporarily succeed in shutting Milo down.

So, cough-up some names and some real life examples of Milo forcing people to cancel speeches, or lose their jobs, why don’t you?

Or, as the more genteel might say: ‘Substantiate, or retract.’

My bet is: you got nothing outside of your fevered imagination.

Here’s a question: ‘If Hillary Clinton is forced to remove her coaching communication device during Townhall sessions, or debates, is that censorship?’

http://truepundit.com/nypd-hillary-clinton-was-wearing-invisible-earpiece-to-receive-stealth-coaching-during-live-nbc-tv-town-hall/

Wikleaks: Huma to H

‘Did u take your earpiece or do I need to get it?’

[Z @495:] Hey Skipper, if you’re serious about that, you’ll find no shortage of examples [of Coulter’s incitements].

Okay, looks like she earned an F- in civility (but so has Paul Krugman). In my humble and very subjective opinion, all those examples are hyperbole, not incitement. (YMMV for very good reasons. Full disclosure: I’m not a Coulter fan.)

[Fautusnotes:] Hey skipper et al appear to be completely ignorant of the major movements in campus censorship over the past two years. I guess that is why you can say such silly things as “only SJWs” censor people while lauding a known advocate of censorship,

That is a perfect example of a category error. SJWs have engaged in actual censorship. Shapiro advocates for much stricter control over pornography. They aren’t the same: the former has happened many times, the latter not yet, and almost certainly not ever.

… major figures connected to it trashed the Hugo awards and drove some big figures in modern feminist off the internet and off college campuses, and you are ignorant of the whole thing … Yet here you are expounding on campus speech as if you know something about it …

Within the context of this thread, the Hugo awards (which seemed to include some very bad acting from the left, too) are the epitome of irrelevant.

Do I really need to point out to you that it doesn’t matter whether you stop speech by a censorship law, contract law or some kind of emergency services rule, the purpose of the instrument used is to stop the speech – it is all censorship. If you accept the use of these tools then you are pro censorship, and you agree with J-D that the content needs to be checked before you can decide whether or not to censor.

Bollocks. There is a clear civil and legal environment that puts almost no limits on free speech. That some speech may fall afoul of incitement, or be the consequence of fraud or invasion of privacy, doesn’t make me pro-censorship. You are, in effect, accusing me of hypocrisy, without having gone to the trouble of understanding my argument, or the ample legal foundation for it.

Now that we have established that you are in favour of censorship, the posturing about how “SJWs” are always wrong to censor people on campus becomes just that – posturing. We have established what you are, now we can get down to haggling over the price.

No, you haven’t. All you have done is demonstrated your misunderstanding.

Now, if I was to advocate shutting down, say, Laurie Penny, on account of she holds the all world indoor/outdoor free style record for spewing the most nonsense per second, then you would have me dead to rights.

However, you will find that nowhere in anything I have written. Viewpoint discrimination is bad, full stop. Institutions that accept government funding are obligated to observe that. Got that?

[Rich Puchalsky:] There seems to be an idea that once informal expectations about freedom of speech are quashed that righteous pushback against the right wing will happen. It’s nonsensical. First, the alt-right or whatever you want to call it is actually stronger than the left in that arena …

All of the campus censorship has come from SJWs. All of the political violence this election has come from the left.

Hay Skipper: “All of the campus censorship has come from SJWs. All of the political violence this election has come from the left.”

When the campus censorship is “Severe event disruption”, shouting down speakers etc, in the FIRE database it’s all from the left, as I noted above.

However, when the censorship is “withdrawing invitation to speak due to viewpoint”, the FIRE database has about the same number of “from the left” and “from the right” disinvitations and withdrawals, although mostly “from the left” in the last few years. This is not including commencement speakers, who should not be considered in the same way as other kinds.

“In other words, there have been demands to make them mandatory and to allow students to avoid triggering material completely.”

But its not to allow all students to avoid triggering material, only those students who are triggered by the material.

There are medical questionnaires that are used to assess if someone experiences PTSD.

So there could easily be another provision for the students to go to the university counselling service to be assessed for PTSD if they wanted to avoid triggering material.

I kind of wonder though if the students have been working with the university admin on this issue or not though, because at the university where I go there are already provisions for equity and disability support that allow adjustments to be made.

I am pretty sure students with PTSD would be able to access academic adjustments through the regular scheme which is broadly defined, without any new provisions specifically about triggering material.

The University of Chicago says it provides accomodations for students with disabilities, so I would think students could access this service for adjustments for PTSD https://disabilities.uchicago.edu

But its not to allow all students to avoid triggering material, only those students who are triggered by the material.

Cognitive pathology, remember. No insight into the thoughts of others, so if any claims about mental states have to be treated as valid then all do; no way of distinguishing.

When we judge people on our assessment of their motives it’s like magic to them, a trick they can’t replicate and can’t believe.

Collin Street,

“What we have is stuff written by a person whose mental framework is such that they don’t actually realise, at least not sufficiently to let it shape their thinking, that categories can and do overlap.
…
As I keep on saying: all right-wing activists, without exception, display obvious symptoms of empathy impairment.”

I think we all cut down on empathy when we are arguing our point. Think about debating, the teams aren’t empathetic to one another, they are trying to win the argument.

For CT commenters on the left the comment threads are more about communicating with like minded people, but for commenters on the right they have a lot fewer allies on CT. And there are not many comment threads which are politically neutral to discuss other non political things. Although Maria’s current one is I guess, and Harry’s.

For CT commenters on the left the comment threads are more about communicating with like minded people, but for commenters on the right they have a lot fewer allies on CT. And there are not many comment threads which are politically neutral to discuss other non political things. Although Maria’s current one is I guess, and Harry’s.

Empathy isn’t just caring about what other people feel, it’s about your ability to know it as well; “normal” is to know and care what other people feel, but you might know and not care, or you might care but not know, or you might neither know nor care. It’s the knowing I’m talking about here.

Impairments here have distinctive linguistic effects on “pragmatics”, language structure above the sentence level: “what you say” is shaped by “what people need to hear to understand what it is you believe” which is obviously tied to empathy two ways [you need to model how other people model you]. Impairments to the ability to understand others’ thinking manifest as odd, non-responsive statements, non-sequiturs and similar: for example, that “basing your arguments on premises the people you’re arguing with have explicitly rejected” that I’ve pointed out a couple of times.

This doesn’t actually have a lot to do with whether or not people broadly agree with you, because it’ll be revealed just as well in the details.

Collin Street@513: Along with the rest of the faculty here, I get a notice from the ADA office at the start of every semester informing me of which students in my classes have what particular issues, along with recommended accommodations. I’ve yet to hear anyone here complain.

If you mean “people will be jerks about online”, well sure. But what about it? Trolls gonna troll.

Hey skipper, you clearly don’t know what you are talking about. Here is a brief rundown of what has happened to one feminist who had to cancel a talk at Utah State university because of death threats. The campus and local police couldn’t guarantee her security – and here we have people whining about “SJWs” demanding safe spaces. Do you know what SWATting is? I get the feeling you don’t know what is going on here.

That case is in the FIRE database. There are also cases of teachers and commencement speakers withdrawing because of pressure from the right. Is the problem that you don’t know how to do basic research ? Or are you just completely ignorant of all news about this topic?

I really think, before people get on their high horse about censorship and violent activism, they should go to the trouble to find out who is being censored and how, and whose speech is being privileged.

516 I really think, before people get on their high horse about censorship and violent activism, they should go to the trouble to find out who is being censored and how, and whose speech is being privileged.

Agreed. Still waiting for you to provide a single example of Milo getting anyone fired, or forcing the cancellation of a speech.

Remember? You claim Milo’s speech rights need to be suppressed because he’s ‘famous’ for getting people fired, and forcing speech cancellations.

You’re lack of self-awareness is mind-boggling.

Provide the evidence that Milo (shouted down and silenced at Depaul) does what you explicitly claim he’s ‘famous for’ getting people fired and forcing them to cancel speeches, or retract your claim and acknowledge that these firings and cancellations occurred in the ‘false memory’ of your tortured imagination.

Still waiting;

You gotta love reasoning that goes, “People are saying that my position is too extreme, but I think that the people I’m talking to are cognitively deficient in ways that sound subtly close to saying that they’re intrinsically evil, so I’m pretty sure they’d object even if my demands were more limited. So I may as well not worry about it.”

I mean, if its really true that you’re arguing with a bunch of cognitively deficient people filled with nothing but hatred in their hearts for everyone who isn’t them, then I guess that’s what you gotta deal with. But if you’re WRONG about that, then you’re literally the exact sort of cognitively deficient monster you think you’re facing.

I think Collin has actually said before that he or someone in his family has an autism spectrum condition. I don’t think he’s saying the right wing people are evil monsters.

Mahood, the link is not to harassment but to a campaign to drive her off he Internet through general nastiness. But it doesn’t matter whether Jessica vale to leaves the internet because of threats to rape and murder her daughter or just because the people being lauded in this thread made life too generally unpleasant for her – speech is speech. Whether you stop it through death threats or using a law to prevent harassment, you have stopped speech. If you accept that harassment and child porn is unacceptable speech then you accept censorship. You are not a defender of the first amendment or any absolutist concept of free speech. You believe that legal and extra legal tools can be reasonably used to limit speech. Whether that extra legal tool is a demonstration, Twitter banning people who make death threats or bombard activists with nasty stuff, and whether he legal tool is a censorship law or a harassment law – whichever tool you think is best, you have accepted that speech should not be free.

Once you understand that we can get down to debating whether person X should or should not have been censored because they said thing Y. But until you accept that we are talking at cross purposes, becuase you think a law to shut down a certain type of speech is not censorship, even though it stops someone speaking through a legal move; and you think an extra lega strategy to stop speech is not censorship because it is violent. Your position is incoherent, and we can’t discuss censorship from such a position.

So far people on this thread who claim to support free speech have identified a wide range of mechanisms to stop speech that they claim are okay. The issue for them is that someone they disagree with has added a method to that toolbox, or has a slightly different idea about exactly which category of things are protected speech. That’s not a debate about free speech, it’s a debate about politics and power.

For example, some people here have suggested libel is one of those things that can be used to shit down speech. Trump has said he wants to make libel laws easier to use to stop newspaper reports attacking him. By most definitions deployed here this is not an attack on free speech. But we all know he has suggested this to shut down speech he doesn’t like. This makes he position of most of the free speech absolutists on this thread contradictory and incoherent.

Any strategy to stop sleeping any kind is censorship. Once you accept that, we can move on to talking about useful issues – who is censoring who, what political forces are at play, what should be allowed and what cannot be stopped and what these things mean for free speech. But we can’t do that until the Americans on the thread come to terms with what censorship and free speech are, and stop treaty the first amendment like a catechism.

Mahood @521
Actually I’m inclined to think C. Street sincerely believes what he writes; he is a commenter of fairly long standing here and this theme is not a new one with him.

To be blunt, the assertion that people on a particular part of the political spectrum suffer from psychological conditions, which is what C. Street has long suggested at Crooked Timber, is something I find quite repulsive and ludicrous. First, it is at least potentially offensive to those who actually *do* suffer from psychological conditions. Second, it collapses political and ideological disagreement into psychological malfunction: conservatives aren’t wrong, according to this view, they are not misguided, no, they are sick.

On this view of the world, Phyllis Schlafly wasn’t wrong; she was sick. Ronald Reagan wasn’t wrong, he was sick. Edmund Burke wasn’t wrong; he was sick. And on and on and on. The claim is that anyone on ‘the other side’ either suffers from, or is close to suffering from, a psychological illness. It’s nonsense.

My @527 paragraph 4 is especially riddled with sloppy grammar errors. Apologies.

Point made, however.

The attacks on the free speech rights of college Republicans, under the guise of ‘banning hate speech’ is real, as the Depaul ban on chalking support for Trump confirms.

This anti-democratic behavior is indefensible as Lawrence Tribe noted when he actually pushed through his own biases to examine the ‘totally unfounded’ charges that the IRS targeted conservative political activists. https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/766399802070462464

Here’s Tribe ‘I confess error wrt IRS ideological targeting. The IG report and the CADC panel decision seem right to me. Inexcusable abuse.’ (That’s August 18, 2016) Democrats pushed the IRS to attack Tea Party groups in 2012.

Here’s Tribe, again, ‘See my agreement that IRS is engaged in unconstitutional discrimination against conservative groups and must be halted’ (Also August 18, 2016)

Note Tribe’s use of the present tense ‘IRS is engage in unconstitutional discrimination against conservative groups and must be halted.

The cocooning of the left in media and universities is so pronounced that even Tribe was ready to dismiss the charges of unconstitutional targeting without examining a shred of evidence. To his credit, when challenged Tribe did read the IG report and CADC panel decision.

Yet, how many here knew that Tribe agrees with Milo and other conservative activists. Four years after the unconstitutional targeting of grass-roots conservatives by the IRS began, conservative activists still find themselves audited and subject to intense scrutiny from one of the most invasive government authorities simply for holding views liberal authority figures deem undeserving of constitutional protections.

Denying college Republicans the right to bring in speakers of their choice is every bit as repellent, no matter how dull or loopy the speaker may be. It’s indefensible and the worst part is that I strongly suspect a sizeable percentage of readers here, like Tribe, are unaware these systematic abuses are taking place, often in their own academic communities.

Yes those despicable university girls, seizing way more power than they deserve by getting free sanitary pads in the toilets.

Sanitary pads are safe spaces now? What, very small, very localized safe spaces? I mean, I’m all for euphemism if its cute but that one’s just ridiculous.

I love the reasoning here.

1. Some people in this thread are skeptical of “safe space” rhetoric.

2. So is Dreher.

3. Dreher once wrote an article complaining about free sanitary pads.

4. Therefore the people in this thread must carry water for this article. MUST. Their actual opinion doesn’t matter; it will be imputed to them.

5. No, in fact, therefore sanitary pads LITERALLY ARE safe spaces, so if the people in this thread say something about safe spaces, they’re also saying exactly the same thing about sanitary pads.

Isn’t this an academic blog?

That’s clearly teh case Val, since Patrick has hooked onto the sanitary pads bit in order to avoid talking about the sacred spaces bit.

Also, it’s perfectly okay to build broad claims about how some random group of kids at a random university represent the entire left, but Rod Dreher has nothing to do with the right-wing movement against safe spaces. When your enemies do something that shows what you think is their true ideological bent, it’s representative; when your allies do the same for you, they’re an outlier and not representative at all.

Hey Skipper 09.07.16 at 11:19 am

[J-D:] I care about their reasons because I am unable to decide whether what they did is a problem without knowing what the reasons for it were. I observe that you can; that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t.

If you care about free speech, then their actions are a problem by definition.

To my way of thinking, caring only about one thing absolutely suggests fanaticism. I am not a fanatic; I care, in different proportions, about many things.

If you don’t, and that seems to be the case, then you stand with them in awarding yourself the power over deciding what others may say, hear, write, and read.

On the face of it, that reads as doubly silly: first, because the idea that people acquire power by awarding it to themselves is patently circular (if people are actually able to ‘award themselves power’ to do something, that can only mean they had the power to do it independently of the ‘awarding’); second, because I don’t have (and can’t meaningfully be ‘awarded’ by myself or anybody else) any power to decide what anybody at the University of Chicago, or any other US university, or anywhere in the US, says, hears, writes, or reads.

Most probably you did have a more sensible idea, but it’s not clear what it was.

That link to Wikipedia contains, I would think, plenty of examples why that is a problem.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution says ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …’. It does not say ‘Nobody shall abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press’ …

There are two serious problems with this.

First, many constitutional restrictions extend to any entity accepting government money. Liberty University, for example, accepts no federal funds, and is free to do as much viewpoint discrimination as it chooses. But UoC does accept government funding, and therefore is as much barred from exercising, or tolerating, viewpoint discrimination as as Congress. As far as this thread is concerned, your comment is true, but irrelevant.

My standard for forming evaluative judgements is not ‘Is that in line with the Constitution of the United States?’, and I don’t think it should be anybody’s. It doesn’t even seem to be yours; you’re disapproving of the behaviour of hecklers, aren’t you? but not on the basis that it’s unconstitutional, surely?

And do you really want to assert that if Liberty University prevents people from speaking, that’s okay, but if the University of Chicago does, that’s not okay? I’m not asking about what’s constitutional, or legal, but about how you yourself judge such actions.

Secondly, 1A jurisprudence has created a civil culture that values almost completely unbridled speech. Should universities tolerate, or, worse, encourage censorship, then civil society is likely to value free speech less. Which, so long as it is progressives deciding what others may think, is just peachy. But what about when the air horn is in the other hand?

I’m not sure how much truth there is in the assertion that jurisprudence in the US has created a civil culture that values almost completely unbridled speech, but the use of the word ‘almost’ interests me. It seems to me that people who value almost completely unbridled speech must do so because they value unbridled speech but they also hold to other values, and that their values sometimes conflict, and that sometimes they find that their concern for unbridled speech is outweighed by other considerations and must give way: which is more or less the way I feel.

Should Trump win, and the zeitgeist get rather less tolerant of progressive ideas, any tolerance of progressive censorship is going to put progressives on very thin ice indeed when they start appealing to free speech.

I can only evaluate any attempt to restrict speech by taking into account (among other things) the reasons for attempting to restrict it. That’s the exact opposite of somebody who thinks that a restriction of speech for one reason is a justification for restricting it for another reason. I don’t think the fact that Donald Trump is capable of misinterpreting a statement is sufficient reason for avoiding it.

What’s more, the Supreme Court, like me, and unlike you, cares about the reasons the government gives for attempting to abridge the freedom of speech; the Supreme Court does not try to decide First Amendment cases without investigating the reasons for the laws under scrutiny.

You have this backwards. SCOTUS has clearly stated there are almost no reasons where abridgment is justified. Which is why virtually every time it is tried, it gets slapped down stat.

Here is an item at Popehat, a legal blog that frequently writes on 1A issues, pretty clearly explains why reasons don’t matter.

As noted in one of the links from that post:

It has long been settled law that the First Amendment is binding on public universities
such as UWS. See Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169, 180 (1972) (“[T]he precedents of this
Court leave no room for the view that, because of the acknowledged need for order, First
Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses than in the
community at large. Quite to the contrary, ‘the vigilant protection of constitutional
freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.’”)

The whole text of the judgement in Healy v James is available online. Have you checked what the result in that case was? The Supreme Court did not decide that there was no possible justification for the university’s restrictive action in the context of that particular case. It decided, after considering the details of the case, that there was a possible justification in the circumstances of the case, maybe, but that the courts below had not investigated that issue properly and so the case had to go back for reconsideration.

Here’s one relevant part of the judgement:

These fundamental errors — discounting the existence of a cognizable First Amendment interest and misplacing the burden of proof — require that the judgments below be reversed. But we are unable to conclude that no basis exists upon which nonrecognition might be appropriate. Indeed, based on a reasonable reading of the ambiguous facts of this case, there appears to be at least one potentially acceptable ground for a denial of recognition. Because of this ambiguous state of the record, we conclude that the case should be remanded, and, in an effort to provide guidance to the lower courts upon reconsideration, it is appropriate to discuss the several bases of President James’ decision. Four possible justifications for nonrecognition, all closely related, might be derived from the record and his statements. Three of those grounds are inadequate to substantiate his decision: a fourth, however, has merit.

It’s absolutely routine for courts to do what the Supreme Court is doing there, by which I mean, saying that each case can be decided only on the basis of its particular facts. In this particular case the Supreme Court is saying, in the passage I’ve just quoted, that not enough information about the facts of this particular case is available for a definitive evaluation; which is roughly what I’ve been saying about all the cases you’ve mentioned.

Hey Skipper, there are countries outside America you know. First Amendment legal doctrine is not the only or even the best theory on free speech. Just because that doctrine has identified “protected speech” and unprotected speech, that doesn’t mean the unprotected speech is suddenly not speech. It simply means that you have identified a specific set of tools for determining what should and shouldn’t be censored. You’re still pro-censorship – you just have a different mechanism for deciding what to censor compared to say an Australian, who has a different legal basis for protecting speech.

If a conservative supreme court suddenly decides that criticizing the bible is not protected speech, that doesn’t suddenly mean that people who criticize the bible are not being censored.

Once you accept that we can talk about censorship. Until you accept that, you don’t have a coherent basis for discussing free speech and censorship.

The whole debate is bizarre. As long as rightwingers allege that students criticizing the choice of a certain commencement speaker are engaging in censorship and threatening the freedom of speech, they just don’t deserve being taken seriously.

Except that no one has made that allegation.

[faustusnotes @540:] Hey Skipper, there are countries outside America you know. First Amendment legal doctrine is not the only or even the best theory on free speech.

It is the only one in the US, which for the purposes of this discussion, is the only one that matters.

Just because that doctrine has identified “protected speech” and unprotected speech, that doesn’t mean the unprotected speech is suddenly not speech.

Never said it wasn’t, only that it is outside the very wide bounds of protected speech. The distinction is important. In the current civic and legal milieu, limitations on protected speech, when tested in court, always fail.

If a conservative supreme court suddenly decides that criticizing the bible is not protected speech, that doesn’t suddenly mean that people who criticize the bible are not being censored.

You can make up anything with hypotheticals. The principle of free speech (and freedom of religion, for that matter) stands, regardless of what your hypothetical court might decide.

And that is, to repeat for the eleventeenth time, speakers and listeners being able to talk and hear without prior restraint. Why is this important? Because prior restraint invariably involves subjectivity. I’ll bet SJWs don’t want to be on the receiving end of what they have been dishing out.

Once you accept that we can talk about censorship. Until you accept that, you don’t have a coherent basis for discussing free speech and censorship.

Your unwillingness to perceive a clear distinction is not my problem.

[J-D @539:] The question that interests me more in this case is not the abstract evaluation of the hypothetical reasons that might — or might not — justify people in trying to prevent Ben Shapiro (and the other speakers cited) from speaking, but rather the concrete evaluation of the actual reasons of the people who made those attempts. Knowing the facts, however, doesn’t seem to interest other people as much as it interests me, and this disparity is another phenomenon that interests me.

I haven’t found that question interesting because I don’t think there is any reason that SJWs could possibly concoct that wouldn’t end up in the bin of circular logic: they are progressives, progressives think only correct thoughts, because they are progressives. Therefore, all disagreement is down to either ignorance, mental illness, or malignance.

In addition, it is very difficult to imagine what Shapiro et al could have said that puts them outside the bounds of protected speech.

Finally, I have spent some time watching some of Shapiro’s presentations. Which is how I ended up concluding the only possible justification could be SJW circular logic.

Have you watched any of his stuff? Can you think of anything he has said justifying SJW heckling and threats?

[J-D @539:] To my way of thinking, caring only about one thing absolutely suggests fanaticism. I am not a fanatic; I care, in different proportions, about many things.

This discussion isn’t about many things, it is about whether view point discrimination is ever acceptable (see also, England, non-platforming). Sure, there are a few cases — in the academic environment, university sponsored events that have a wide audience and expected attendance.

Outside that, though, what?

On the face of it, [awarding oneself power] reads as doubly silly: first, because the idea that people acquire power by awarding it to themselves is patently circular (if people are actually able to ‘award themselves power’ to do something, that can only mean they had the power to do it independently of the ‘awarding’)

Seriously? I decide to stop a Laurie Penny presentation by pulling the fire alarm. By definition, I had the power to do so (as does just about everyone) and I decided to exercise that power — I awarded to myself veto power over Laurie Penny communicating with her audience.

No circularity there.

My standard for forming evaluative judgements is not ‘Is that in line with the Constitution of the United States?’, and I don’t think it should be anybody’s. It doesn’t even seem to be yours; you’re disapproving of the behaviour of hecklers, aren’t you? but not on the basis that it’s unconstitutional, surely?

It is indeed my standard, and it ought to be (although for progressives, often isn’t) the standard for Americans “forming evaluative judgments”.

By this time you can’t possibly be confused over my main point: censoring protected speech is always wrong, regardless of the means: it violates constitutional guarantees, which are there for many very important reasons.

And do you really want to assert that if Liberty University prevents people from speaking, that’s okay, but if the University of Chicago does, that’s not okay?

As a general matter, censoring protected speech is never “okay”. It is much less okay if the UoC does it than Liberty University, to the point where UoC may not, and LU may.

I’m not sure how much truth there is in the assertion that jurisprudence in the US has created a civil culture that values almost completely unbridled speech, but the use of the word ‘almost’ interests me.

That, I hoped, was a clear reference to protected vs unprotected speech. The former category is almost boundless. Not quite — fraud, copyright violation, commercial speech, threats, libel/slander, incitement etc, aren’t protected — but they are all quite limited.

I can only evaluate any attempt to restrict speech by taking into account (among other things) the reasons for attempting to restrict it.

So long as the speech isn’t in an unprotected category, there are no acceptable reasons.

Well, except SJWs seem to think their opinions are sufficient. That can come back to bite.

Have you checked what the result in [Healy v James] was?

Is this the Healy v James holding that refusal to recognize the SDS was a 1A violation?

I haven’t found that question interesting because I don’t think there is any reason that SJWs could possibly concoct that wouldn’t end up in the bin of circular logic: they are progressives, progressives think only correct thoughts, because they are progressives. Therefore, all disagreement is down to either ignorance, mental illness, or malignance.

I’m not sure I’ve understood you properly. Is it your position that all opinions held by progressives can rightly be dismissed as valueless? if not, how is your position different from that? (also, how can you tell who falls into this category?)

I can say, though, that if that is your position, then it would help to explain why you are less interested in knowing the facts than I am.

Seriously? I decide to stop a Laurie Penny presentation by pulling the fire alarm. By definition, I had the power to do so (as does just about everyone) and I decided to exercise that power — I awarded to myself veto power over Laurie Penny communicating with her audience.

No circularity there.

Saying that you had the power and that you decided to exercise the power is clear, and it adds nothing substantive to expand that description with a reference to your awarding yourself the power.

It is indeed my standard, and it ought to be (although for progressives, often isn’t) the standard for Americans “forming evaluative judgments”.

I can’t think of any reason why I should use conformity with the US Constitution as my standard of judgement, or why you should, for that matter; you certainly haven’t given any reason for it.

By this time you can’t possibly be confused over my main point: censoring protected speech is always wrong, regardless of the means: it violates constitutional guarantees, which are there for many very important reasons.

I am confused, though. Are you asserting that heckling is unconstitutional, or not?

As a general matter, censoring protected speech is never “okay”. It is much less okay if the UoC does it than Liberty University, to the point where UoC may not, and LU may.

I can’t think of any reason why it should be worse if the University of Chicago does it than if Liberty University does it, and I can’t find one in anything you’ve written.

Is this the Healy v James holding that refusal to recognize the SDS was a 1A violation?

What, is there more than one Supreme Court judgement called Healy v James? It was a case about recognition of the SDS, yes; the portion of the judgement I quoted above asserts that there was something called a ‘cognizable First Amendment interest’ (I am not sure whether ‘cognizable’ has some special technical meaning), but also states that there was still a possibility that non-recognition was permissible, despite the First Amendment issue. Unlike you, the Supreme Court did not take the position that as soon as you discover a First Amendment issue, the rest of the facts don’t matter.

“Knowing the facts, however, doesn’t seem to interest other people as much as it interests me, and this disparity is another phenomenon that interests me.”. It interests me that in all these comments you have steadfastly refused to sketch out even in broad hints what kind of facts you think would be enough to support censorship. You are very careful to only ask others to clarify what types of facts they find important without revealing yours. It gives the appearance of not actually being interested in the facts, despite your claims because you keep your views above be checked by the facts.

My position is that if you don’t maintain a fairly strong default pro-speech position, you end up destroying free speech. This allows us to spend time analyzing the facts when they matter, and much less time when they don’t. In the kind of university cases which are the main subject of this post, the facts are typically grounded in political disagreement and therefore not particularly exciting UNLESS you think mere political disagreement should be enough. I don’t think they should be enough. We have no idea if you think they should be enough. The fact that this deep in the conversation we don’t have any idea if you think mere political disagreement is enough suggests your question raising may be just bad faith argumentation.

Sebastian H 09.09.16 at 12:01 pm
“Knowing the facts, however, doesn’t seem to interest other people as much as it interests me, and this disparity is another phenomenon that interests me.”. It interests me that in all these comments you have steadfastly refused to sketch out even in broad hints what kind of facts you think would be enough to support censorship. You are very careful to only ask others to clarify what types of facts they find important without revealing yours. It gives the appearance of not actually being interested in the facts, despite your claims because you keep your views above be checked by the facts.

I’m not asking an abstract question about what hypothetical set of facts might in general justify one or another judgement; I’m asking concrete questions about the actual facts of specific situations cited by other people. I don’t recall ever having even heard of these example cases before this discussion, but I’m assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the people who are bringing them into the discussion and passing judgement on them do have some knowledge of the facts. For the most part I don’t even know when or where these things are supposed to have happened, so it’s not easy for me to track down information; I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to ask that the people who are invoking these examples be just a little more specific about them, so I can get just a little bit more of an idea of what they’re referring to.

And we still don’t know.

Val- he brings up Dreher and argues that Dreher is a hypocrite because Dreher likes churches as safe spaces but laughs at at free sanitary pads. He argues that this says “something” about safe space skeptics in this thread, but snidely claims that he’s too couth to say it. I point out that Dreher is a well known fool and that there no reason ere has to carry water for him.

And instantly the conversation devolves into “Whaddaya got against sanitary pads, Patrick? Huh? Huh?”

Up to and including literally just taking things I said about safe spaces an swapping in “sanitary pad” for “safe space,” presumably for the lulz.

I’d say this sort of school yard bullying is beneath you all, but it’s happening so apparently it’s not. I suppose I shall have to factor that into how I perceive you and your “contributions” to the conversation in the future.

Hey Skipper @542, faustusnotes @540 is quite right about the intellectual importance of not burying one’s head, and the brain contained within one’s head, too deep within the ideological rectum of one’s own particular nation-state. Instead of turning exclusively to the opinions of the admittedly august past/present members of the United States Supreme Court, why not turn to some actual foundational work of liberal political philosophy?

Such being the reasons which make it imperative that human beings should be free to form opinions, and to express their opinions without reserve; and such the baneful consequences to the intellectual, and through that to the moral nature of man, unless this liberty is either conceded, or asserted in spite of prohibition; let us next examine whether the same reasons do not require that men should be free to act upon their opinions—to carry these out in their lives, without hindrance, either physical or moral, from their fellow-men, so long as it is at their own risk and peril. This last proviso is of course indispensable. No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. Acts of whatever kind, which, without justifiable cause, do harm to others, may be, and in the more important cases absolutely require to be, controlled by the unfavourable sentiments, and, when needful, by the active interference of mankind. The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

Of course leftist critics of liberalism can raise all the interesting ad hominems we want about Mill’s decision to use a capitalist threatened by a starving mob as his example of a case that might justify limits to free speech, but Mill’s reasoning can be transposed pretty much word for word onto the reasoning employed by those darn censory-censorin’ Ess Jay Dubyas and their darn censory censorship: the speaker is someone like Ben Shapiro (or better yet someone like John Bolton or Paul Wolfowitz), the mob is the combined might of the US/Israeli/Saudi/etc. military, and the corn dealer is a civilian population of whom the speaker is in a position to participate in effecting the military invasion and occupation, at great resulting harm. It should be emphasized that Mill takes a philosophical view and doesn’t assume that support by any particular institutional or state apparatus is in principle relevant to whether any particular act of speech or censorship is justified or not — this is the guy who also writes that “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind” — so the differences in perceived institutional legitimacy between a wealthy business owner in his mansion and the residents of Dahiya, or between a starving mob and a well-funded military, are in principle irrelevant.

Rich Puchalsky 554: Indeed, if an individual pulls a fire alarm to stop a debate, or shouts down a speaker, or issues an emailed threat, that doesn’t necessarily reflect on any group. But if a university disinvites a speaker from talking to a student group, because another student group objects to the speaker’s likely content, then that reflects badly on the university. Or if the university does not discipline the shouters, and doesn’t make clear its opposition to such disruption, then that reflects badly on the university. Ditto if the university refuses to provide adequate security in response to a threat. (Although, if the university and the FBI conclude that the threat is not credible, not quite as clear.)

As should go without saying, this is independent of the content of the speech or debate. (And again: in the context of speech that is not slander, a “true threat”, etc.) Nor does the speaker generally accrue any martyrdom credits and moral authority.

My impression is that CS is using ‘the Right’ in a fairly standard way, but I don’t want to presume to speak for him on that.

More-or-less.
+ it’s limited to those advocating for and promoting viewpoints [people whose engagement is receptive/”passive” — such as for example voters-qua-voters are not meant to be covered]
+ It’s actually something only true of the “hard right”, the right flank of the right-wing groupings, excluding right-wing centrists… but the collapse of the centre-right intellectual tradition and support means that this is essentially a moot point; there haven’t been any new centre-rightists made for thirty or more years. I used to specify “hard right”, but there’s really not enough non-hard-right-right left to justify preemptively hedging.

Some other things worth noting:
+ I’ve outlined the basis of my conclusion wrt at least KS up-thread; you can check, and you’ll see that it’s rooted solely in his rhetorical structures and cognitive approaches. My conclusion that KS has some sort of significant language/cognitive impairment is politics-blind, and the link between the signs I see and have mentioned and political frameworks is an inductive one, induced by the vast number of right-wingers who demonstrate HS’s exact problems.
+ I’m not making vague or heavily-hedged claims; “every damned member of a political movement that has control of both chambers of the US legislature has cognitive problems that generate X and Y effects”, or any of the other factors I’ve mentioned, is not a difficult-to-falsify claim. But noone ever tries. Admittedly, “empathy impairment” has some pretty diverse effects, sometimes even contradictory, but still.

Kiwanda @ 556: . . . if a university disinvites a speaker from talking to a student group, because another student group objects to the speaker’s likely content, then that reflects badly on the university.

Does it?

It seems to me that if the objecting group has a sufficiently valid or persuasive critique embodied in its objection, then the university may well do itself credit.

As should go without saying, this is independent of the content of the speech or debate.

Content-neutrality seems like a strong rhetorical position, since it relieves you of the obligation to examine content, but a university is in the business of critically examining content. There are no circumstances in which it can completely escape the imperatives of that function on a priori grounds alone and constraints on time and resources merely sharpen the point. And, that’s before we get to the power dynamics of the wider body politic.

The social norms observed in a university setting regarding controversy are exceedingly complex and always subject to political negotiation and contest. Just revealing what those norms are and how they are constraining the ambit of reason may be politically useful to the society, but is likely to be costly to those who choose to engage in the contest.

Establishing “free speech” as a sacred totem, so that authoritarians invoke it or even respect it in a grudging hypocritical way as a principle transcending petty disputes has its usefulness, even if some philosophic confusion ensues and discussion of proper etiquette displaces seeking after truth or justice. But, if you rely solely on the nullity of an unworkable notion of neutrality to defend the High Principle, you may well find that someone else has worked out detailed rules and sanctions that leave the sacred totem no operative domain.

[Rich Puchalsky @555:] That is ridiculous. You can’t be aggressively unconcerned with what the legal meaning of “censor” is and still refer to censorship as violating constitutional guarantees. Here’s a hint: students (as students) pretty much can not violate constitutional guarantees, by definition.

Wrong.

Regardless of the legal liability of the students — did you read the link in my previous post — the university has unavoidable responsibility. If the university fails to prevent hecklers censoring protected speech, then it has played a prohibited role in censorship. By failing to stop hecklers, it provided de facto hecklers’ veto.

This goes all the way back to why a “heckler’s veto” is really considered to be a veto *by the university*, not by the students — which you weren’t interested in.

Did you read the link in my previous post? It clearly describes both uses of the term “hecklers’ veto”.

[Bruce Wilder @561:] Content-neutrality seems like a strong rhetorical position, since it relieves you of the obligation to examine content …

No, it relieves everyone of the impossible burden of objectively examining content.

typo correction on 2nd line of my comment @561 — exceptions

Hey Skipper: it relieves everyone of the impossible burden of objectively examining content

Because we wouldn’t want anyone at University examining content. [Yes, that’s sarcasm.]

LFC: Actually they’re not (or at least used not to be). They’re quite simple.

Ah, yes, in a simpler, better time long ago and far away . . . [sarcasm, again]

I still don’t agree with Faustusnotes that all art before crocodile Dundee was awful and #problematic though

The only one who could ever reach me
Was #problematic
The only boy who could ever teach me
Was #problematic…

: o

bruce wilder 09.09.16 at 5:45 pm
Kiwanda @ 556: . . . if a university disinvites a speaker from talking to a student group, because another student group objects to the speaker’s likely content, then that reflects badly on the university.

Does it?

It seems to me that if the objecting group has a sufficiently valid or persuasive critique embodied in its objection, then the university may well do itself credit.

For example, there is a big difference between, on the one hand, a university cancelling an invitation from an African-American group to Frederick Douglass because a group of Ku Klux Klan members object, and, on the other hand, a university cancelling an invitation from a Turkish group to Talaat Pasha because a group of Armenian students object.

b wilder
The role of the University, somewhat “insulated from a variety of power-political pressures”, is precisely to work at that deliberate and discerning discrimination that may prevail against arbitrary power. We don’t promote that end by hiding from the obligation to judge, anymore than we would, if we yield to alleged tribal pressures to enforce allegedly politically correct norms.

Well you can exercise the “obligation to judge” all you want but the problem arises when that obligation gets expressed in the stifling of speech. There are other ways to exercise the ‘obligation’ and I’m fine w those.

[GR:] Instead of turning exclusively to the opinions of the admittedly august past/present members of the United States Supreme Court, why not turn to some actual foundational work of liberal political philosophy?

Mill is already embedded in US free speech concepts.

… but Mill’s reasoning can be transposed pretty much word for word onto the reasoning employed by those darn censory-censorin’ Ess Jay Dubyas and their darn censory censorship:

Everything following the colon demonstrates the falsity of everything preceding it.

(And you also miss that the corn dealer analogy is addressed in US free speech doctrine: incitement.)

[Collin Street:} If you’re going to disagree, give reasons, please. Give some sort of responsive response, say what sort of error I’ve made or what sort of factor I haven’t considered, something that I haven’t mentioned above.

Already done: above, you begged a fundamental question. Until you deal with that, then pretty much everything you have typed since is worthless.

And, this: Speech is rivalrous. Wrong. (And begging for wrongness: you have put yourself in the unenviable position of having to prove a negative.)

Will G-R @556
Mill’s reasoning can be transposed pretty much word for word onto the reasoning employed by those darn censory-censorin’ Ess Jay Dubyas and their darn censory censorship: the speaker is someone like Ben Shapiro (or better yet someone like John Bolton or Paul Wolfowitz), the mob is the combined might of the US/Israeli/Saudi/etc. military, and the corn dealer is a civilian population of whom the speaker is in a position to participate in effecting the military invasion and occupation, at great resulting harm.

an ‘A’ for creativity but an ‘F’ for persuasiveness, imho. Wouldn’t Mill be more likely to say “bring in someone to speak who disagrees w Shapiro/Bolton/Wolfowitz” than “prevent them from speaking”?

Hi, J-D:

You wrote —

From that it appears that the court was holding that the decision by the college to deny recognition was not legally permitted if it was based on A, B, or C, but might (perhaps) be legally permissible if it was based on D. So part of the court’s answer to the question ‘Is it legallly permissible for the college to deny recognition?’ was ‘It depends on the basis on which the college made that decision’.

This where I think our differing understandings arise.

The way I read it, A, B and C (relationship with the National SDS, university disagreeing with the group’s philosophy, fear of disruption) were dismissed out of hand. The first two were clear 1A violations. The third, disruption, might be, but there was no evidence to support that.

That leaves D: the refusal could be upheld if the group refused to comply with reasonable campus regulations. This is why I said:

… the only possible way to withhold recognition is if the SDS refused to comply with reasonable rules applying to all campus organizations. Since that was never demonstrated, the court has no opinion on that matter, which had no 1A implications in any event.

I concluded that because the opinion clearly segregated that reason from the other three. IMHO, that is because reasonable rules are things that aren’t speech related. For instance, a reasonable rule might be that any campus group using a campus facility is responsible for returning that facility to its pre-use state.

That is a reasonable rule that applies to all organizations equally, and that has nothing to do with speech. Had the SDS refused to agree to that rule — a pure hypothetical, since the administration offered no evidence that the SDS had done any such thing — then that would have been grounds for the administration to deny the SDS’s recognition request, and it would have had nothing to do with the 1A.

In case I have failed to make myself clear, I will give myself another chance to fail. Reasons A & B are prima facie 1A violations — they are wrong, full stop. Reason C might not be. If the SDS had engaged in incitement, which isn’t protected speech, then that might put the SDS outside protected speech. But since there was precisely zero evidence for this, then the 1A prohibits the administration from imposing prior restraint. (Which is why the police are prohibited from arresting people for crimes they have not yet committed.)

Reason D is purely administrative and, as such, can have nothing to do with speech. (Indeed, if evidence was provided that the administration imposed campus rules far more assiduously on the SDS than other organizations, then the court should have found viewpoint discrimination. See Lois Lerner, IRS, et al. But that wasn’t the case with Healy v. James. It is the case with Lerner and the IRS.)

[LFC:] an ‘A’ for creativity but an ‘F’ for persuasiveness, imho. Wouldn’t Mill be more likely to say “bring in someone to speak who disagrees w Shapiro/Bolton/Wolfowitz” than “prevent them from speaking”?

Why?

You have two problems here. First, you are implicitly agreeing to the false dilemma which Collin Street is perfectly happy to trot out absent an argument. It is entirely possible for Shapiro to speak unhindered AND for someone else bring to speak who disagrees w/ Shapiro et al.

Which is tantamount to agreeing with Collin saying all speech is rivalrous. No. Not by a long shot. Unless Shapiro had commandeered all speaking opportunities at all times in all places — or even a substantial portion of them — then Shapiro’s speech was not rivalrous. Those disagreeing had exactly the same ability to choose a venue and time as Shapiro did. There was absolutely no opportunity cost imposed on SJWs by Shapiro speaking.

The second problem is the extremely tortured argument from analogy. There are precisely two conditions where argument from analogy is acceptable. 1. The analogy simplifies the issue. 2. The analogy encompasses the conditions attending the issue; no more, no less. Those are two excellent reasons to strenuously avoid argument by analogy.

Will G-R @556 proposed an analogy so far divorced from the issue as to render it worthless. Had he used the parties and positions exactly as they were, with respect to Mill, then he would have found himself addressing whether Shapiro’s speech constituted an affront to incitement. Which, in turn, would have returned him right back to the hecklers’ veto.

And, in turn, to Collin Street’s begged question.

I am surprised at the resolution with which this simple fact is resisted.

Because if speech is rivalrous at all, speech is not in the general case cost-free and regulation in some cases is required. Which means speech can’t be completely unregulated, and “no speech regulation evah!” purists are stuck in the muck with the rest of us making pragmatic empirical judgements.

All this is double if “no speech regulation evah!” is something you’ve made a significant part of your identity. “If we agree with you it’d mean we were wrong all along” is a powerful motivation for persistence in error.

The idea that only the left practices the policies of intimidation and censorship is ludicrous.

http://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2016/09/10/catholic-university-drops-judge-as-speaker-over-pro-life-backlash/

First, it’s provably false. Second, it encourages faux physicians and amateur psychiatrists to ply their quackery in a quasi-academic setting: eg. ‘All x are sociopaths.’

@Hey Skipper
It is entirely possible for Shapiro to speak unhindered AND for someone else bring to speak who disagrees w/ Shapiro et al.

Yes. My point was that Will G-R tried to use Mill in support of ‘hindering’ Shapiro. Mill, I think, wd have been likely to advocate ‘more speech’ in this context (i.e. bringing in another speaker w another pt of view) rather than ‘hindering’ Shapiro. Fairly basic pt. Sorry if you found my expression of it unclear. (In other words, it’s not an either-or, it’s both-and: (1) Shapiro (or, within wide bounds, whoever) speaks unhindered; (2) students who disagree bring in their own speaker to contest what Shapiro said. So I think we agree on this particular pt.)

Anarcissie @582

In this regard it should be obvious that there is a difference between giving a speech in a park and giving a speech at a university.

Sure, and X’s NYT op-ed is going to be more widely read than Y’s comment on some blog or other. And so on.

But I thought the question at hand had to do with the approach to speech within a university setting.

A listener’s (reader’s, viewer’s) attention must be available and focused and there are only so many hours in the day and many other matters which any individual must attend. Eyeballs and ears are not only scarce resources, but being for political purposes a commons, congestion and exhaustion are significant hazards.

The power to flood the available space, or to disable or corrupt the capacity of discerning critics and gatekeepers, can be, if anything, more effective as a tool of political domination and control in our inverted totalitarianism than the authoritarian’s censor was in an earlier day.

@ LFC: Wouldn’t Mill be more likely to say “bring in someone to speak who disagrees w Shapiro/Bolton/Wolfowitz” than “prevent them from speaking”?

From this it seems like you missed the point of the analogy. The Ess Jay Dubyas’ reasoning in so many words is that Wolfowitz and his ilk are speaking to a “mob” (the military) and “inciting” it (convincing the political apparatus in charge of it to order it) to “burn down” (to bomb into rubble) the “corn dealer’s” (the population of Iraq’s/Dahiya’s/Gaza’s) “house” (immediate community and/or entire country). At this point, the way the Ess Jay Dubyas see it, Wolfowitz either is crossing or has long since crossed the threshold separating speech per se from action, at which point the imperative to constrain one’s objection within the boundaries of the “marketplace of ideas” becomes irrelevant. Of course given his own background Mill wasn’t exactly what one would call a thoroughly principled anti-imperialist, but unless he could find a reason to reject one of those equivalencies in principle, his reasoning would seem to justify if not every single individual case of Ess Jay Dubya “heckler’s veto” then at least the compatibility in principle between such a veto and the ideas of liberty and free speech.

As Hey Skipper seems to be hinting, if Mill would attack any of those equivalencies first, it’d be the concept of “incitement” as applied to the institutional political process of a justifying, approving, and launching a military invasion, especially when the invader is a Western imperial power and the invasion is of a non-Western “undeveloped”/”developing” society. Mill in fact explicitly argues for Western imperialism in On Liberty on the grounds that “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end”, a less-than-astonishingly naïve ideological take on the benevolent motives behind Western foreign aggression. But since today’s crowd of woke, anti-racist liberals seem to be no longer OK with all that explicit white-man’s-burden stuff where unwashed Third-World brown people are literally equivalent to children or the mentally disabled, what we’re left with is an argument that the only thing distinguishing Wolfowitz from the mob-inciter is the institutional process through which Wolfowitz conducts his “incitement”, and as long as Mill assumes that all actors in question are mature civilized white people he rejects that this distinction should be prima facie pivotal. Certainly if the tables were turned, and a “primitive” non-Western society was deliberating over whether to invade a Western country, Mill would be less reluctant to deem as incitement the speech of “an Akbar or a Charlemagne” (or more likely a Genghis or an Attila) in whipping up his savage barbarian horde into an animalistic tribal berserker fury against the innocent white women and children or whatever, and less likely to characterize someone who silences this barbarian political leader through shouting or even through violence as having thereby violated his just entitlement to freedom of speech and expression.

And yes, when hashing out these philosophical issues in legal settings like the US Supreme Court, the reasoning of institutional actors like lawyers and judges does pivot on terms like “imminent” and “immediate” to determine whether (say for instance) an assassination threat against President Obama by Stormfront user Saxon-Dominion_1488 constitutes protected political speech or criminal incitement. To the extent that Mill accepts this cop-out too, it’s arguably for the same reasons as his racist stance on barbarians and despotism — Western-style state and civic institutions are historically “mature” and therefore tacitly assumed to confer some sort of deliberative legitimacy, even when their instrumental rationality makes their progression toward violence no less imminent or immediate than that of an angry mob — but as one might also say regarding the assertion that “all men are created equal”, the reasoning itself transcends its initially blinkered and parochial application. Ultimately the cop-out falls into the same category of reasoning as Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” standard for obscenity, a decision to ignore the potential philosophical grey areas and contradictions of one’s own stance with a quick-and-dirty practical workaround that functions because a powerful institution has deemed it not to be challenged and can effectively silence those who disagree. If we’re acting not as representatives of the law but as philosophers, this stance that “I know the difference between Paul Wolfowitz and Saxon-Dominion_1488 when I see it” shouldn’t be good enough.

LFC 09.10.16 at 5:07 pm @ 591:
‘But I thought the question at hand had to do with the approach to speech within a university setting.’

No university is an island.

In that sense, is it your position that heckling is unconstitutional? and if so, why?

I’ve already explained that above (and is fully explained in a link). When the degree of heckling arises to the point where it denies the freedom of speakers to talk and listeners to hear, then that heckling is censorship. Censorship, regardless of the means, is completely antagonistic to the 1A.

To hold otherwise renders the 1A meaningless.

Hey Skipper 09.11.16 at 4:54 am
In that sense, is it your position that heckling is unconstitutional? and if so, why?

I’ve already explained that above (and is fully explained in a link). When the degree of heckling arises to the point where it denies the freedom of speakers to talk and listeners to hear, then that heckling is censorship. Censorship, regardless of the means, is completely antagonistic to the 1A.

To hold otherwise renders the 1A meaningless.

But haven’t you already asserted above that if censorship is carried out by a private organisation like Liberty University it isn’t a violation of the constitution?

Hey Skipper

Anybody who charges a fee to provide a security service and then fails to make a reasonable effort to provide the service they’ve charged for is, obviously, in default; if you charge a fee to provide a security service you should at least make a reasonable attempt to do so, and I’d still say the same thing even if that was not the law.

However, you now appear to be saying that the hecklers are allowed to heckle but that the University of Chicago is obligated to prevent them, which may for all I know be an accurate summary of the relevant constitutional law; but I still don’t regard the constitutional position as automatically the last word.

Well, yes the university’s action could have been constitutional had it been due to a specific reason that had no relationship to viewpoint or content, and for which there was exactly no evidence in any event. There are many plausible administrative reasons that — if equally applied to all organizations without regard to viewpoint or speech (which is what you think you need to assess before making a decision — that would pass muster. I gave an example above.

But the clear decision in Healy was that the university explicitly denied the SDS recognition solely due to viewpoint and content. The administration hated the SDS and what it stood for, and decided to deny them recognition solely on that account.

All of which is consistent with my previously stated position: if you want to evaluate the action, you have to inquire into the reasons for it.

Hey Skipper

1. According to you, it’s not necessary to know the reasons. But when I look at what the Supreme Court did in Healy v James, I find that they did investigate the reasons.

2. Obviously the Constitution is the last word on the question of what is constitutional, but I don’t accept it as the last word on any other question, and I’m not going to be persuaded to change my stance by your vehemence.