And yet more on freedom of speech

Yeah, good old academia…

University of Delaware Requires Students to Undergo Ideological Reeducation
October 30, 2007

FIRE Press Release

NEWARK, Del., October 30, 2007—The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students’ rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech.

“The University of Delaware’s residence life education program is a grave intrusion into students’ private beliefs,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “The university has decided that it is not enough to expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

The university’s views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to “sustainability” door decorations. Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as “When did you discover your sexual identity?” Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s “worst” one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having “diversity shoved down her throat.”

According to the program’s materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of “citizenship.” These competencies include: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”

At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university’s ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an “oppressed” social group, and taking action by advocating for a “sustainable world.”

In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation. In documents relating to the assessment of student learning, for example, the residence hall lesson plans are referred to as “treatments.”

In a letter sent yesterday to University of Delaware President Patrick Harker, FIRE pointed out the stark contradiction between the residence life education program and the values of a free society. FIRE’s letter to President Harker also underscored the University of Delaware’s legal obligation to abide by the First Amendment. FIRE reminded Harker of the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), a case decided during World War II that remains the law of the land. Justice Robert H. Jackson, writing for the Court, declared, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

“The fact that the university views its students as patients in need of treatment for some sort of moral sickness betrays a total lack of respect not only for students’ basic rights, but for students themselves,” Lukianoff said. “The University of Delaware has both a legal and a moral obligation to immediately dismantle this program, and FIRE will not rest until it has.”

FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, due process rights, freedom of expression, and rights of conscience on our campuses. FIRE would like to thank the Delaware Association of Scholars (DAS) for its invaluable assistance in this case. FIRE’s efforts to preserve liberty at the University of Delaware and elsewhere can be seen by visiting http://www.thefire.org.

Brett,

Am I one of the ones you are questioning?

I don’t like government intervention. However, I don’t see that, in the current world, there’s any real substitute in some cases. The government has its thumb on the scales already; if you’re going to punish employers for “hostile environment harassment”, saying that they can’t punish employees for having particular bumper stickers might be necessary.

Nope, utterly uninterested in who funds FIRE (or who Sarah Mellon is).
I was quite interested in the freedom of speech (and conscience) issues brought up at the University of Delaware, though. Admittedly, this doesn’t impact where people work: it impacts where they live. A minor quibble, though.

Sk

I’d be much more open to the idea that free speech interests ought to make it more difficult to fire people for most forms of speech (though probably you can’t take it as far as free speech in other contexts because of customer interactions or image issues with spokespeople) than I am to the idea that the government ought to restrict hate speech or try to control who owns media outlets.

I would formulate the free speech *right* as being held against governments, but that a free speech *interest* is found with employer/employee relationships. I would make the distinction to allow for customer interaction interests and the like to be considered (you shouldn’t for example be forced to hire a bellman who is going to urge customers to vote for Bush while on the job).

I think the story of the Alabama worker is like the story of University Delaware. Maybe it happened, maybe it happens, maybe there’s something to it but who knows if its in any way representative or common. But of course it’s easy to use it as cudgel to bash your political opponents with, so the “maybe”s get quickly forgotten.

Why do you think that Americans have a lot fewer “rights” in the workplace than others? I mean, aside from the “job protection” reasons which aren’t directly or necessarily related to expressing one’s opinion or having a bumper sticker.

From the Univeristy of Delaware: the fiends clearly mean to teach undergraduates to deal with everyday problems in a civil manner; thank gods for Fire and etc.

Behind Closed Doors Scenarios
SCENE 1: General Noise

It is Wednesday at 11:15pm. RAs won’t be doing rounds again for another hour or so and the floor RA is at an event. The person two doors down from you has her/his stereo on and is sitting in the doorway on her/his cell phone having a loud conversation while bouncing a tennis ball against the hallway wall. You have an 8:00am Thursday class and have yet to prepare for the quiz.

SCENE 2: Hallway Vandalism

For the third time in a month, someone has put her/his trash down by the bathroom. The floor has incurred a $25.00 and $50.00 fine and this incident will lead to a $75.00 fine. You have seen who is doing this.

SCENE 3: Guest

The person living three doors down the hall has had a friend visit 4 times since the start of the year. This person is not a student and seems to have nothing better to do than to hang out here. He constantly walks around the floor dropping in on your (and several others’) room. He makes himself fully at home, taking stuff from your refrigerator, sitting on your bed, borrowing your music, etc. He does not seem capable of taking a hint that he is not welcome in your room. In general, he makes you fairly uncomfortable. You are walking down the hallway and you overhear a floor member on the phone inviting this guest to stay for 10 days.

http://www.udel.edu/reslife/about/samplelessonplan.htm

I think this:
http://www.udel.edu/reslife/about/competencies.htm

is more along the lines of what FIRE is whining about. It’s not as bad as they make it out to be, but it does seem obnoxious in an irrelevant smug hippy kind of way.
In other words, there’s nothing wrong with the sentiments per se but you just know the implementation is goofy.

What it means to be a Burkean conservative in a (more or less) liberal society of long-standing isn’t entirely clear to me. The skepticism Andrew has toward limits on speech seems broadly consistent with a Burkean conservatism in present circumstances.

On the Gobbell story, a couple of thoughts: First, I think the reaction to Geddes’s firing of Gobbell was universally negative. The “rest of the story” is that the reaction was so strong that Geddes reversed his decision, and offered her her job back. There are limits on this sort of misbehavior, even if they are not legal limits. Second, I’d note that the proposed legal response (for-cause terminations only) is overbroad (one could simply limit the at-will arrangement further by saying that political speech isn’t a permissible reason for termination), and subject to serious complications. One serious problem is the interaction of this protection and the concept of effective liberty: what is one to do with the speech of say, neo-Nazis? We’ve run the subsidy right up to the ban, meaning that a comprehensive sort of speech code is required. Surely at this point a Burkean conservative, whatever he looks like, is entitled to hop off the bus.

Stories like the ones the FIRE press release describes are almost always the product of (a) hyperventilating kids with chips on their shoulders freaking out about the policies created by (b) lawsuit-paranoid upper administrators who appoint (c ) ad hoc, poorly-guided and disorganized committees to design policies implemented by (d) overearnest, too-goofy, and often self-important lower administrators (and their student employees).

The policies themselves are either a direct and smothering response to some incident that PR-minded administrators are concerned to prevent happening again (by whatever means are flexible and comprehensive enough to keep people in line), or alternately are in place because no one on the committees creating them could come up with a good argument to oppose the ends they proclaim (‘What do you have against sustainability, Fred?’).

In other words, they are (virtually) never the result of a leftist conspiracy. University administrations are the dumping grounds for risk-averse managerial busybody rule-followers, not latter-day Guevaras and Dworkins.

mm
That pretty much nails it.

I think it is certainly possible for the property of others to impact one’s rights. The classic example of having all the property around your present location bought, and fenced in, imprisoning you.

Well done, Brett. Now: learn to apply the concept of metaphor.

BTW, the non-metaphorical example you cite presents, I think, a pretty trivial problem. I’m fairly certain there’d be an easement by operation of law. I don’t think the CTers are asking for anything more than that.

But you can’t eliminate inequalities of power; The very inequality you lament can only be abolished by increasing the even more profound inequality of power between government and the governed.

But you can’t eliminate inequalities of power

Here Brett dismisses pretty much every development in society since (before?) the magna carta. He then goes on to suggest

The very inequality you lament can only be abolished by increasing the even more profound inequality of power between government and the governed.

which is not even true. For example Unions could strong arm government and employers to reverse the power of the employer to restrict the employees free speech, without ever having to increase the strength of government – they could even weaken it, by setting up in the process their own newspapers and radio stations to represent their members, their own paramilitaries to fight the police and strikebreakers, etc. I believe there are historical precedents for this…

Perhaps in this lies the answer to notsneaky’s question, as to why Americans will tolerate these kinds of restrictions while other countries won’t – because those other countries are social democracies, their governments and societies heavily influenced by unions.

At my factory my boss put up messages on the bulletin boards in 2004 telling us how good he thought Bush would be for our economy. There’s also a big screen TV in the break room with plant news… and also arguments against building the new ethanol plant in town. Meanwhile, a guy who got up in the employee meeting and criticised them for cutting our health insurance was fired the next day.

Seems like the only job where the employees can make political speech that the employer is uncomfortable with is the government.

Brett, in Australia at least in the 30s to the 60s, strikers were shot by the army, which was on occasion dragged out to confront them. You may recall similar events in the 60s in the US, in connection with Vietnam. I don’t think that happens as much anymore, and (aside from a few changes made by your mates on the right to support the GWOT), I don’t know that it can be said that federal power has increased relative to the Great Depression. You probably ought to defend that claim a little.

Only one question: Why should a the privileges of a corporate charter be given to a business behaving in ways so antithetical to the Bill of Rights and the truths we hold self-evident?

And has the “overall level of government power” changed for the worse? Are you talking here, for example, about the state having the right to set the minimum wage? Or to decide who can be a teacher and who can’t? Do you mean the decision of the state to set certain minimum standards on who can and cannot be a doctor?

A lot of this “increased power” really just represents the state stepping in to try and regulate the private conflicts that used to occur between for example, unions and businesses, teachers and students, or doctors and patients. To represent this “increased power” as a bad thing you have to imagine that before the state “siezed” this power those conflicts were solved better, more fairly or more efficiently. They weren’t.

In this as in all other debates Brett, you have mythologized the state as a monster that preys on society. Like most glibertarians you are happy to talk about the importance of freely associating individuals freely choosing certain decisions, but you emphatically refuse to accept that in most aspects of its ordinary “increased power”, the state is merely an efficient representation of that.

Hi. My name is Jim. I’m a Californian and I used to be a business owner. My understanding is that anyone could be fired for any reason or for no reason, apart from an assortment of protected classes. I’m not at all sure that an affronting bumper sticker would be an issue, political preference not being privileged.

My partners and I were slightly to the left of at least our white collar employees, a trick perhaps not easily accomplished outside Southern California, with the result that my erstwhile colleagues, even those we fired for cause, greet me by name and embrace and show off their latest offspring.

Mrs. Tilton@22: There’s actually someone in Massachusetts who’s had her driveway (which was on an old railroad easement) covered with a new commuter rail; who had sold her property on another side; and who, having tried to build a driveway out the remaining side, discovered doing so would be in violation of zoning rules (and that, moreover, as her property is in one town but the driveway would connect to a road in another, she needs to deal with not merely two towns but two separate counties). The commuter rail folks, having made a token, failed attempt at helping her, have walked away.

The non-metaphorical example turns out to be not so hypothetical.

So the zoning rules get 100% of the blame, and the commuter rails 0%.

Big Money 1, Government 0!

“Christ, brett has to be the most intentionally uncomprehending person i’ve ever run across. The ‘power of the state’ hasn’t increased wrt ‘no knock searches’ if you actually look at the context. War on Drugs is hardly anything that Prohibition wasn’t, except replace demon rum with mari juana. But since tax rates have gone up on rich people, OMG!!”

Posted by yoyo

yoyo, Brett has a long, long history here. ‘Uncomprehending’ is not the correct term. The correct term is ‘evil and highly dishonest’.

But you can’t eliminate inequalities of power; The very inequality you lament can only be abolished by increasing the even more profound inequality of power between government and the governed.

This makes the disagreement clear, not that it wasn’t already. Libertarians are unconcerned about inequalities deriving from differences in wealth (and power), and are militant about any but the most minimal exercise of government power. Probably 300 years ago this was a reasonable stance, but in the world of today (transformed by three centuries of liberalization and strengthening of property rights) most find it unreasonable. That’s why libertarians are lucky to get 1% of the vote, except as protest candidates or in mentally ill places like Texas.

we’ve got an epidemic of “no-knock” raids

The notion that we have more “no-knock” raids now than back in the 30’s, a couple of decades before Mapp v Ohio was decided, is risable.

“Mrs. Tilton@22: There’s actually someone in Massachusetts who’s had her driveway (which was on an old railroad easement) covered with a new commuter rail; who had sold her property on another side; and who, having tried to build a driveway out the remaining side, discovered doing so would be in violation of zoning rules (and that, moreover, as her property is in one town but the driveway would connect to a road in another, she needs to deal with not merely two towns but two separate counties). The commuter rail folks, having made a token, failed attempt at helping her, have walked away.

The non-metaphorical example turns out to be not so hypothetical.”

The remedy is easement by necessity. Or special exception. Or both.

Henry: someone who can’t get a reference from their previous employer, and seems like a ‘troublemaker’ is likely to have a tougher time getting a new job

Possibly, although references are becoming increasingly useless here. For fear of liability, HR departments are less and less willing to provide anything other than, yes, the person you’re asking about worked here from date X to date Y.

Even so, I’d happily advocate for at-will employment plus a proper safety net if I thought it was a feasible political option in the US (unfortunately I don’t).

In terms of political feasibility, I’d argue that is much more likely than a heavily regulated French-style labor market (not to mention a hell of lot more desirable).

I’m not seeing that the seen/not seen argument is a specifically libertarian one, by the way.

Well, libertarians certainly include Bastiat in the pantheon, but if those on the left claim his as well, so much the better.

Henry (47): “I’d ask people to refrain, insofar as they can, from the temptation of arguing with brett bellmore. There are much more intelligent and interesting statements of the conservative and libertarian cases to be argued with if that’s what you’re looking for.”

Brett hasn’t said a single thing I’ve agreed with in the several months I’ve been reading CT, and I certainly agree that there are more intelligent libertarians and conservatives out there. But brett is generally civil and articulate, and his point of view is quite common and influential in the US. Europeans and others in more advanced societies than the USA may feel justifiably exasperated with him, but those who hope to shift American politics in a more humane direction will have to find a way to convince an awful lot of people who believe what brett believes. I suggest you all treat arguing with him as a form of exercise, a way to cultivate patience, tact, persuasiveness, and the other rhetorical and political virtues.

Why would I want to give up a current individual right to allow the state to shutdown the voices of people Chris and Henry disagree with? How does this increase the power of my voice? It only seems to increase the power of Chris and Henry’s voices.

Putting the shoe on the other foot. Lets say I wanted to shut down the NY times because it has influence on the other major newspaper publications in the US. Are Chris and Henry advocating for this? If the answer is in any way no, then this entire line of thought is an exercise in increasing one point of view and not in in the creation of some sort of balanced voice.