Even Alabama has heard of the First Amendment.
What, for example, would be the verdict on a [Harvard] panel discussing the recent bans on transgender women participating in women’s college athletics? The [Crimson] Editorial Board provides a clear answer (in the event that someone supports them): supposedly “bad-faith” attacks and pure political scapegoating — surely not anything worth reasoned debate.
It does not matter that a vast majority of Americans — and a plurality of Democrats — believe that people should only play on sports teams that match their birth gender; such strident language indicates a self-assuredness incompatible with even countenancing that reasonable people can disagree. Implicit in this arrogance is a belief that dissent can only stem from bigotry or ignorance.
The perennially offensive U Penn law prof, Amy Wax, has been sanctioned by that university: A year suspension, at half pay. Background here.
Loyal readers know that UD – for obvious free speech/academic freedom reasons – disagrees with sanctions and thinks the better path involves students boycotting her classes, and the university denouncing her at every opportunity.
DEI is DOA; but why was this brain-eating beast allowed to stalk our land in the first place?
MIT announced a similar decision last month, saying it would stop requiring diversity statements for positions across the university.
… [Harvard] Psychology professor Steven A. Pinker, a co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, slammed diversity statements in a December 2023 Boston Globe op-ed, arguing that they “purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar.”
As usual, Pinker emerges a hero. But I tell you. The shit that guy has to put up with to defend free speech…
If you don’t have anything nice to say, Barnard College tells its students, don’t say anything at all.
New policy: NOTHING may be displayed on your dorm door. NOTHING. Onaccounta you might say something that upsets someone. We’re thinking lately of Palestine, but into the future we can think of lots of other shit. Maybe you’re Iranian and you dare express some negative thoughts about the hijab. Maybe you’re antiabortion, and you put the phone number of adoption agencies on your door. Hey, maybe you even oppose American support for the war in Ukraine. Maybe you think women should carry guns.
All of these and more are guaranteed to piss off some of the people who walk by your dorm door – not to mention some of our donors – so shut the fuck up.
Governor DeSantis makes his banning announcement.
You don’t gotta be on the right, babe.
“The same administrators now cloaking themselves in the mantle of free speech have been all too willing to censor all kinds of unpopular stuff on their campuses,” said [one observer]. “It is such utter hypocrisy.”
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UD‘s favorite example.
U Penn’s president is probably about to announce her resignation, and Harvard’s doesn’t look too secure either, after what everyone’s calling their “disastrous” congressional testimony. What’d they do wrong?
Same thing that sank Dukakis: Lack of emotion when emotion is clearly called for. A reporter asked Dukakis, a death penalty opponent, about whether he thought his wife being raped and murdered would affect his thinking on the penalty.
“No, I don’t, and I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life.” Perhaps there is validity in the criticism many directed toward [the questioner,] accusing him of injecting an unfair scenario into a policy discussion. Regardless, all I know is that when I heard Dukasis’ words, my brain red flagged, and my heart sank. For the candidate, in his response, came across as robotic, uncaring, and devoid of emotion. That night Dukakis’ poll numbers dropped from 49% to 42%.
On that fateful evening the candidate spoke only with his brain, and he completely disregarded his heart. This catastrophe would have been avoided had he said something like: “Barnard, I would want to murder, to torture, to rip from limb to limb anyone who even dared to hurt my wife or child. But, you see, with all of my heart, I want laws to protect me from the worst of me.”
The presidents need not have said something so vehement; but they needed to communicate their fundamental humanity, their capacity as sensitive human beings to be appalled by the cruelty of (in this instance) anti-semitism, and for whatever reason they didn’t go there. They waxed bureaucratic. Terrible mistake.
It was touch and go there for awhile, but Anne Frank – it has just been announced – has passed the notoriously rigorous admissions standards of the Keller Texas Independent School District public library, and will be allowed to return to its shelves.
Some parents had complained that Frank’s hiding out in Amsterdam and then dying in a concentration camp was pornographic and had no place in a young person’s library, but, after removing the book, the library’s Review Committee came down with the judgment that, although end-stage emaciation from typhus in Bergen-Belsen is certainly in questionable taste, well, chacun à son goût!
Such as this 2015 event at the University of Chicago, which wee UD only just discovered.
Let me frame my remarks by recalling this comment from Christopher Hitchens:
When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.
One of the heroes of free expression I’ve found through writing this blog is Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the U of C. I’ve had two occasions to feature him, one when he defended Laura Kipnis against silly Northwestern, and another when he shared an email exchange he had with American Nazi Richard Spencer. Stone is a wise calm rational defender of pretty much unfettered free expression, and he introduced the guest speaker on my cosmic convergence youtube, which – I dunno – already the combination of Stone and the U of C – a school which welcomed wee UD generously and lovingly for her graduate education – had UD warm and runny…
This is from Stone’s introductory remarks:
We the people acting individually … get to decide what we think when we think it. We do not allow a government or a university or a corporation or a religion to make those choices for us. That’s the essence of what it means to be free.
Stone goes on to introduce the U of C undergraduate who unwittingly set in motion a big event at the school. Eve Zuckerman, president of the school’s French club, wanted to invite heroic free speech advocate Zineb El Rhazoui to speak to the club. But getting a person living under five thousand fatwas to the United States ain’t exactly a matter of paying for a flight from Paris. Zuckerman ended up needing serious help (help which was happily provided) from lots of French and American government and security officials, some of whom ended up attending El Rhazoui’s talk. So that’s impressive and heartening.
Yet more impressive was the tough, articulate (in her fourth language), non-negotiable defense of free speech and free thought launched by El Rhazoui, who has been particularly visible in the French media lately because of the notorious “dolls without faces” documentary which features the apparently Muslim-radicalized French city of Roubaix.
It’s funny how these dolls, on sale at a toy store there, have taken on a powerful symbolic life across France — I guess because they’re a simple, very graphic evocation of the social reality whereby some Muslim children are trained up very early indeed in a sense of their nothingness, their invisibility. Veiling is hardly scandalous, even to a six-year-old, if you’ve always understood yourself to be without even a face.
Anyway, there it all was: The University of Chicago, Stone, El Rhazoui. What a pleasure.
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UPDATE: The president of UD‘s George Washington University might want to watch the Stone/El Rhazoui youtube.
La vidéo – in which far-rightist Eric Zemmour announces his presidential candidacy to the French people – is burning up the airwaves; not only does the New Yorker give it a good once-over (“one of the most bizarre videos ever offered by a would-be leader to his nation”), but theocrat Adrian Vermeule has risen to its defense as Youtube slaps an age-restriction on it.
The age-restriction is the bizarre thing; the NYer writer is wrong that the video itself is bizarre. It’s a soppy chauvinistic rendering of La France, familiar from scads of such renderings from hyper-nationalist movements around the world. There’s no dead-in-the-water patriotic trope the video doesn’t use, re-use, and then re-use one more time. The only thing mildly unusual about it is the French sourcing. France used to be so secure in its cultural superiority that it didn’t have to sink to self-pleasuring.
Nice summary. UD keeps thinking that, with each meat toss, universities will wise up and stop suppressing speech. But things are getting worse. Every week, administrators pitch another porterhouse at reactionaries. How utterly fucking stupid.
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‘We are back to the age of Galileo’s inquisitors.‘
‘[T]he current fashion [is] a performance, a kind of, yes, virtue signaling… Upon what authority are [Bright Sheng’s denouncers] allowed such primacy of influence in how we speak, think and teach in our times?’
Actually, yes it is. Even hate speech is protected in the United States, a country which models freedom of expression for the world. As an American, I’m free to say that I despise the culture that continues to thrive in, say, the camps full of ISIS members being held in Syria. No one gets to hush me and advise me that it’s an illegitimate form of expression to despise sex slavery, the full body veiling of eight year old girls, routine beheadings.
An extreme example? We would all condemn such a culture?
Well, but then you don’t actually believe the expressed loathing of a particular culture is out of bounds.