College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/magazine/college-free-speech.html

by mitchbob • 2 years ago

65 64 2 years ago

mitchbob• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/2024.01.24-150831/https://www.nytimes.com...

fullshark3• 2 years ago

Except in reality college is all about learning class signals, the knowledge and ideologies that are required to become a member of the professional managerial class.

jasonlotito• 2 years ago

Then it's always been that. It's just now it's flowing in a direction that a certain segment of the population disagrees with, so now that's a bad thing.

mikrl• 2 years ago

How the turntables in 60 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement

Whoppertime5• 2 years ago

https://youtu.be/1hZylJp-pHo? It's signalling. If college was about teaching skills someone who completed 3/4 years would get 3/4th the income boost. Someone who finished all their classes except their last final exam would get the full benefits. But that's not how it works. Sheepskin effect means it's the stamp of approval that matters and not the education or training provided.

74024• 2 years ago

I think this is a category error. A vocational school ideally provides training in skills that can lead to direct employment in that area. A college ideally provides greater understanding of the world, though general study in many areas, combined with in-depth study in one area.

74024• 2 years ago

Yeah, right. When _I_ went to Harvard (of all places!), it was all about learning Physics (in my case) and being with other people who cared _deeply_ about what _they_ were studying. Everyone I knew there regarded all the final club / class-signalling arcana as ridiculous, humorous, and utterly irrelevant bullshit. Some people have weird hobbies, like caring about that sort of thing. Good for them, but I didn't have to think about it.

To be sure, that was a while ago. Maybe it's different now. If so, that's sad.

Did you go to college? Did you learn about class signals? Is that really what it's about these days?

fullshark3• 2 years ago

I did, perhaps at Harvard or at whatever time you went to college, the degree was enough to guarantee gainful employment in a field of interest, so you could treat it ultimately as an enriching 4 year summer camp.

For lower tier schools and today, the degree doesn't open enough doors, and people aren't learning enough practical skills in college so they go into massive debt just to learn how to talk like someone a corporation/firm is willing to trust with their capital, with a piece of paper to prove that they will fall in line and do what is asked.

jruohonen3• 2 years ago

A forceful argument I can relate to. I'd like to add one angle that may be unfamiliar to Americans: down here we have actually the following written into a specific law on universities (a rough translation);

"The function of universities is to promote liberal research and scientific and artistic scholarship, to provide the highest education based on research, and to educate students to serve their country and humanity. In carrying out their tasks, universities must provide opportunities for continuous learning, interact with the rest of society and promote the social impact of research results and artistic activities."

lookitsnicholas• 2 years ago

if I may ask, where is "down here"

jruohonen3• 2 years ago

Finland, although I am fairly sure some other European countries have similar statements in their laws. Note though (for marcus_holmes above too) that the word liberal is a somewhat morbid translation; a direct translation would be free, but the word liberal fits better into the weird North American separation ("liberal arts" versus "university"), which we do not even have in Europe as they belong together.

marcus_holmes2• 2 years ago

If "down here" is Australia, then it might interest you to note that 1 in 30 Australian residents are international students, and none of those people expect a liberal scholarship. The entire industry is built on giving foreign students what they paid for, and scholarship be damned.

drewcoo• 2 years ago

If an entire industry "is built on" the needs of 1/30 of its customers either they're paying a lot more than the other 29/30 or the 1/30 needs are a superset of most of the rest or it seems mismanaged. Pick at least one.

beaeglebeached4• 2 years ago

In a market economy the producer sells what the customer demands. If some dystopic speech restrictions is what consumers want, that's what will be provided.

Symptoms of a diseased customer.

cpursley• 2 years ago

Do federally backed student loans that you can’t even escape via bankruptcy really make college part of the “market economy”?

beaeglebeached4• 2 years ago

This is more of an argument those who fund the federal government backstop are one of the customers imo.

sokoloff• 2 years ago

Students are applying for and voluntarily taking those loans and spending the money (and their time) electively attending universities.

Is it as perfectly market competitive as buying retail gasoline? No. Does it contain significant elements of consumer choice? Yes.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

The donors are also customers.

anonporridge• 2 years ago

The Constitution of the United States is only upheld by the constitution of the body of people that believe in it.

A people of weak constitution will lead to collapse of the Constitution.

mempko3• 2 years ago

I have served happily as a professor at Yale for most of my adult life, but in my four-plus decades at the mast, I have never seen campuses roiled as they’re roiling today.

Really? Not even during Vietnam war? Not even during Occupy? I don't buy this. I think what is happening is that those in power are getting pushback and now they are complaining about the loss of free speech. The reality is speech was suppressed for a long long time at Universities, but since the people who lost the speech didn't have any power (think communists, anarchists, people promoting black rights, women's rights, etc) it seemed all was well in University land.

downrightmike• 2 years ago

"Am I out of touch? No, its the kids who are out of touch."

mempko3• 2 years ago

Except it's not the kids complaining!

morelisp• 2 years ago

“At Yale” is bearing virtually the entire plausibility load of that extract.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

think communists, anarchists, people promoting black rights, women's rights, etc)

These groups still have absolutely no power.

DiggyJohnson• 2 years ago

This is an obviously false statement. Why make it? Especially regarding individuals, groups, organizations, and politicians that support black causes or women's rights. They have significantly increased in power over the last 60 years, especially on campus.

Just because you don't think they have much power, or as much as they should, doesn't mean they have "absolutely no power". I know I'm being pedantic, but if you actually believe your statement then it's an example of a mentality that forever holds us back.

flir• 2 years ago

While not disagreeing with your basic point, I think there's been a slow churn of "who's on top". I'm thinking of the pressure to no-platform Germaine Greer a few years back - in that case, she represented the academic establishment.

arp242• 2 years ago

US involvement in the Vietnam war ended in 1973, 51 years ago.

And it's pretty clear the author isn't against "pushback", but would rather see that in the form of refutation. You can agree or disagree with that and discus that, which is all fine, but your reply doesn't connect with that at all, and is just a generic tangent.

ilikehurdles• 2 years ago

The people punished for exercising suppressed speech have been on the right for about ten years now, and that’s been on behalf of that loosely aligned bucket of identities you cite whose views have disproportionately been in power at universities.

I was in university during occupy, and i was a participant in occupy. The movement hardly impacted campus life, especially compared to the way that open antisemitism is affecting it.

I’m all for free speech on campus, from all sides, but these articles today are coming from the so far dominant side, who has been pushing a line the world outside their ivory towers will not toe.

mempko3• 2 years ago

People fail to see the campus disruptions are speech. Students protesting on campus is good and a form of free speech.

ur-whale• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/c6pt7

lgleason• 2 years ago

Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of democracy. Democracy has brought prosperity to a larger percentage of the population than any other form of government known to man. The systematic dismantling of that is also a dismantling of democracy and freedom. Unfortunately though, history shows the rise and fall of civilizations over time and I do fear that, with the hollowing out of democracy, we are headed towards another set of dark ages.

beaeglebeached4• 2 years ago

do fear that, with the hollowing out of democracy, we are headed towards another set of dark ages.

The power of democracy has always been proportional to that of the people to backstop their source of power which is violence.

For a brief period of time weapons and force was accessible to the common man. As overwhelming complex weapons of nation-state cost dominate government the wheel turns in their favor until the next technological change like the firearm shifts violence back towards egalitarian access to violence.

Whoppertime5• 2 years ago

What I find more insidious is saying that certain political candidates are incompatible with democracy. Like we will allow people to vote but take Trump's name off the ballot. It's like holding a Brexit vote and taking Leave off the ballot so the only choice is Remain. Public choice is the cornerstone of democracy, and if half the people aren't voting it's probably because the choice they want isn't on the ballot and the existing options aren't good enough

nineplay• 2 years ago

"Free Speech" is a popular outrage-generating topic where just about anyone, anywhere, at anytime can shout loudly about free speech violations because <someone they like> has said <something they agree with> and is getting negative feedback from <someone they don't like>.

A quick reminder that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was in the 1960s so it's not like college campuses have been some utopia of free expression until now.

The reality is that free speech is messy. There are few true absolutists and even fewer, I suspect, who are in vulnerable minority populations. If the majority keeps telling themselves that it's OK to hate the minority, the minority has very little defense. That doesn't mean censorship is A-OK, it just means that the discussion deservers more nuance than most people want to give it. Angry polemics in the media do little to encourage such nuance.

genman2• 2 years ago

If it was like this then there would be no need for such discussion, I think. It is not about argument and counter argument but about systematic censorship.

twelfthnight2• 2 years ago

Before this scandal basically no one knew or cared who the president of Harvard was. All of a sudden, we all have an opinion.

I think the issue we have is not a culture restricting free speech, I think the issue is a media landscape that spoon feeds us emotional content to manipulate us.

One thing we can all do right away is stop blaming left/right/woke/trumpers etc and be a little more critical on the news we're getting to suss out what's real vs propaganda.

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

Before this scandal basically no one knew or cared who the president of Harvard was. All of a sudden, we all have an opinion.

This is how all new information works.

And the highest ranking member of one of the highest ranking schools being a known cheater seems like a newsworthy thing (regardless of the motivation of those publicizing the information).

It is signal rather than noise, in that it can provide a more accurate prior probability to people about the brand name of the school and people coming from it.

twelfthnight2• 2 years ago

I hear you. It's good to point out and hold accountable people in positions of power who are corrupt.

My argument is that (to me) I doubt a leader being corrupt is uncommon. Thus I think it's worth questioning why we are focusing so heavily on this one specific person versus a general story on corruption.

For instance, does someone have an agenda against her identity or political views? That definitely doesn't exonerate her, but it's worth sensing if we the public are having our attention focused in a certain way in service of someone's agenda.

inglor_cz• 2 years ago

"Before this scandal basically no one knew or cared who the president of Harvard was."

Possibly because Claudine Gay was an academic nobody with no other significant talents?

Plenty of people knew who Lawrence Summers was.

It is a similar story to Mozilla. Many programmers know who Brendan Eich is. How many people know the name of the current Mozilla director without googling? Me neither, the only thing I know about her is that she was chosen because she offended nobody. Hardly a recipe for standing out in a crowd of other gray mice.

latentcall• 2 years ago

Thank you for this comment. I know some fairly intelligent people who succumb to the us vs. them ideology and its disconcerting.

I have to remember this propaganda is created by people with a very good understanding on how to trigger the outrage in everyone’s brain.

People on all sides of the aisle are more alike than they want to admit right now.

Just hoping people can turn the bullshit off someday.

helen___keller• 2 years ago

In a pre-internet society I think universities rightfully earned reputations as being the closest place to a true bastion of inquiry and free speech. There were conflicts and exceptions over the years, but generally universities would lead the way on introducing, refining, and testing the radical discourse that might later go mainstream (or not!)

On the contrary, in the 21st century I don’t think universities own this privilege nor should we pretend that they do. Radical discourse is now almost exclusively introduced, refined, and tested on the internet, then later brought to other venues (including universities). And this is for good reason - the internet is simply more efficient and with less barriers.

To that end, as someone who is not a university professor, I frankly could not give a crap about the state of universities wrt free speech. Every student carries a phone in their pocket with a cellular connection that offers all the free speech and inquiry they could want.

Biologist123• 2 years ago

I really like this idea. There’s obviously a point where an idea crosses the membrane between individual human and human collective for the first time. And that is obviously not in universities anymore.

lacker• 2 years ago

I think it is a mistake to be too abstract about "free speech" issues. Colleges are inevitably going to permit some speech and not others, among their professors and students. The issue now is that the political consensus among university leadership has drifted far from the consensus of some key stakeholders. In particular donors and politicians.

Some degree programs are really entirely politically aligned with the Democratic party. It's basically impossible for these to "allow free speech". You can't expect a group of people who strongly believe in Democratic party politics, who tie that into their everyday work, to be open and fair when hiring people who equally strongly believe in Republican party politics. You are never going to have the Harvard Women's Studies department be half Republicans.

What I think would be interesting and might actually happen is if there were more "alternative universities" that had different viewpoints. Maybe the University of Austin could be something like this.

Whoppertime5• 2 years ago

In the 1950s half of Harvard's Women's studies department were Republicans. This is a modern problem. These institutions didn't used to be so partisan

74024• 2 years ago

This is utter and complete nonsense. There was no Women's Studies at Harvard until 1977. [0] And no women received a Harvard undergraduate degree until 1963; before then Harvard College was all male, although there were shared classes with Radcliffe. [1]

[0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1978/2/17/womens-studies-...

[1] https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=1108872&p=8085578

martythemaniak• 2 years ago

I'm pretty amused by the vast disparity between the soaring rhetoric of free speech types and the actual things they say / Want to say. Very very rarely do I see anyone say anything novel or challenging - mostly they just want to say something people used to say freely in the past (jews control the world, women should be making babies at home, non-whites are stupid, etc etc). Maybe we can disagree on whether it's repugnant or not, but surely we can agree that it's very very boring? For example, did anyone find James Damore's writings to be novel and challenging, or were they just glad that someone was telling women to GTFO like people used to in the 70s?

I think a lot of the anger over free speech is not that people can't freely spout their silly old views, but that people won't respect their silly old views.

beaeglebeached4• 2 years ago

Some modern free speech topics include the right to publish 3d printable firearm designs, and the ability to anonymously receive a signed block chain hash which others recognize as some sort of value without being compelled to report that speech on a 1040 form even when you've received no compensation/gain/income for doing so.

Whoppertime5• 2 years ago

I found James Damores writings to be novel as he described disparities in a way that reflected reality. I find the work of Thomas Sowell to be just as novel as he can provide an alternative https://youtube.com/shorts/ZSLy0JsoUp8? Thomas Sowell talking about Birth order, in 5 children families the first born is more likely to be a finalist in an academic contest than the other 4 put together. The first born is more likely to be an Astronaut than the other 4 put together. If you cannot get equal results in a family where everyone has the same parents same household income and same living arrangements, how do you expect to equal results across families? across groups?

major505• 2 years ago

CLauudine Gay fall for grace is not tragic. Tragic is a system that allow a woman who believes in segregation, and is incapable of having a original througt rise to that position.

mizzao• 2 years ago

I'm in complete agreement with the need to protect free speech and the right of those even with "ugly positions" to share their point of view.

However, what happens when those "ugly positions" are algorithmically amplified and spread far and wide through social media to people who are not prepared to question them critically, and instead appeal to their basest desires and inner fears? Is that still free speech or is it now brain power-washing... or even a brain water-cannon?

Whoppertime5• 2 years ago

A lot of ugly positions are pushed as necessary. If you want to talk about things that are algorithmically amplified and spread far and wide, we could talk about the first and second world war. We get the phrase "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" from Schenck v. United States which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment. The yelling fire in a crowded theater was telling Americans not to die for a European war and to burn their draft cards. The same thing happened during the Vietnam War. It happened during the Iraq war, and anyone who had doubts about Saddam having WMDs was shouted down. It happened with Covid too

southernplaces7• 2 years ago

However, what happens when those "ugly positions" are algorithmically amplified and spread far and wide through social media to people who are not prepared to question them critically, and instead appeal to their basest desires and inner fears? Is that still free speech or is it now brain power-washing... or even a brain water-cannon?

Are you going to set up a committee of "specialists" who decide what speech is okay for wider distribution and what speech is perfectly in its rights to be freely said, so long as its passed by non-digital means? Considering how much garbage came wrapped as firm truth even from mainstream sources of information during the pandemic, I'd like to laugh at the idea of anyone being able to concretely say they can judge "correct" speech from "ugly" speech well.

Your entire text above tacitly implies that a large majority are nearly brainless sheep who need to somehow be protected from supposed harmful ideas by their betters, by some sort of betters. Perhaps such as yourself?

rickydroll• 2 years ago

I wish I could remember where I saw this first, but the message bears repeating. I expect that the concepts expressed here are too liberal (as in freedom) for some. That said, I think of this paper as an important pushback on the Republican destruction of civil liberties, corruption of the First Amendment, attacks on universities, and suppression of ideas that don't agree with them.

I wonder if David Brin has read this piece because his, for lack of a better term and not to dismiss, rants read like an amped-up version of this paper.

https://www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/franks.pdf

FTA: The key to understanding the current legal and cultural landscape of free speech is not some enduring constitutional value or method of interpretation, but rather the ascendance of a very specific political ideology that is best described as neo-Confederate. Neo-Confederate ideology is a constellation of values that includes investment in racial hierarchy, attachment to traditional gender roles and gender conformity, idealization of the pre-Civil War South, belief that the U.S. is a Christian nation, and hostility to democracy.

The neo-Confederate agenda renders coherent what otherwise appear to be chaotic free speech positions: the condemnation of “cancel culture” by promoters of censorship; the conflation of speech reactions with speech restrictions; the equation of the right to speak with the right to an audience; alternating invocations and dismissals of the state action doctrine. While these positions are malleable enough to occasionally serve progressive interests, they are most consistently and powerfully deployed to protect the interests of white male supremacy.

genman2• 2 years ago

It looks to me that you are trying to pull a "reverse uno" on this.

mindslight• 2 years ago

oof. I had thought that link was going to contain some modicum of insight. But the only thing I could take away is just more hyperdivisive pigeonholing politics dressed up as if it's intellectual work. It's not clear why this theory of some unified "neo-Confederacy" has more explanatory power than say "populist demagogues fanning the flames with latent racism", and the concept seems to mainly serve as an inflammatory boogeyman for the author to repeatedly bash to drive points home.

The truth is that every lofty ideal attracts opportunistic charlatans and grifters who hold up the ideal and claim to be fighting for it, while being utterly hypocritical when adherence to the ideal would actually cost them. And as a libertarian myself I'd say Libertarians are quite at risk of being drawn in by this, tending to hold views axiomatically rather than qualitatively (ie assuming correctness by construction rather than judging constructive effect). But being a political patsy is most certainly not limited to libertarianism, and the right answer is to call out both those who arbitrage ideals into cynical action and those who cast aspersions on lofty ideals by association.

6R1M0R4CL3• 2 years ago

it doesnt matter. not anymore.

you see, everyone outside of those places know how infected by socialism and communism ideas those wokr morons are. and the real world outside of their little "safe spaces", this shit won't fly. in the corporate world, playing the woke card will get you out of a job faster than a pervert would by touching in front of everyone a women's tits.

let them get out of those universities. please. let them get into the corporate and real world.

they have no idea how they're going to be burned. but my pop-corn is ready.

binary132• 2 years ago

Sometimes I feel like people don’t have real opinions any more, just carefully engineered, flexible / shifty, safe, ingroup-signaling, one-uppy, cloutchasing hot takes and meme positions.

College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech.

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