Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
After all of the debate in the comments on my post about FIRE's annual report on speech codes on college campuses, I'd like to tell the story of one of the most important disputes over free speech at universities in our history.
In the early 1970s, a Nobel Prize laureate named William Schockley -- inventor of the junction transistor -- spent most of his time touring around the country giving speeches on college campuses about the genetic inferiority of blacks. Needless to say, this caused a great deal of controversy. In 1973, he came to speak at Staten Island Community College and was greeted, as always, with counterprotests and demands that he not be allowed to speak.
One of Shockley's most determined opponents was Roy Innis, then the head of the Congress of Racial Equality. Innis hated Shockley's views, but he defended his right to express them freely. And he was furious when a group of white Marxists at the Staten Island school shouted Shockley down and prevented him from speaking. Blacks, he said, did not need these people to protect them from obnoxious views. We have no need to "hide like sniveling cowards behind the coattails of our Marxist friends."
Innis was not alone. Shortly before Shockley's appearance at the college, the president of the Black Student Union at the school, Orchid Johnson, and other members of the group held a press conference at the CORE headquarters in Harlem. There they declared their support for Shockley's right to speak and pointed out that giving a mob the authority to violate Shockley's freedom of speech could also result in that same authority being turned on them later. "The Black Student Union," they said, "has taken an independent stand in defense of its own interest."
Shortly after Shockley's appearance at Staten Island, at which he was unable to speak because of a heckler's veto being exercised by a mob, a conference on racism was held at New York University where hundreds of professors signed a statement in favor of censoring racist speakers on college campuses. A group from that same Staten Island college issued their own statement to counter that one. I'll quote it here:
Shockley's conclusions concerning the relationship between intelligence and heredity are disturbing, butmore profoundly, the social policy implications that might be drawn from them are dangerous and a threat to all people struggling to establish a truly equitable and democratic society in America.We must expose his fallacies, falsehoods, and inhuman policies. We must counteract his warped ideology with our moral beliefs. We must challenge his evidence with our evidence. If we fail to confront Shockley, we have failed ourselves and the chance to alter our society.
We believe that any community that silences one person for what he thinks is not a safe community for any of us. The real danger of Shockley is not that he will persuade an audience to act but that some bureaucrat somewhere will encounter his ideas and assume that they must be correct because they haven't been refuted. Hence we cannot afford to be silent, nor can we afford to silence Shockley. The first amendment is so essential that its protection must be given to all - even to William Shockley."
The following year, Shockley was scheduled to debate Roy Innis at Yale. Once again, protesters managed to prevent the event from being held. The head of the Progressive Labor Party at Yale declared freedom of speech to be a "nice abstract idea used to enable people like Shockley to spread racism." A local minister in New Haven called for a demonstration to take place that would be "as peaceful as possible and as violent as necessary" to prevent Shockley from speaking.
With such threats of violence and disruption, the Yale Political Union decided to withdraw the invitation to take part in the debate. A second campus group stepped in to extend an invitation, but they too ended up withdrawing under the intimidation of threats of violence from those on campus. A third potential sponsor likewise withdrew under pressure and the debate never took place.
In 1975, Yale established a committee led by their eminent historian C. Vann Woodward. They issued a report, the Woodward Report, that remains part of Yale's governing documents to this day. That report said, in part:
The primary function of a university is to discover and disseminate knowledge by means of research and teaching. To fulfill this function a free interchange of ideas is necessary not only within its walls but with the world beyond as well. It follows that the university must do everything possible to ensure within it the fullest degree of intellectual freedom. The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.We take a chance, as the First Amendment takes a chance, when we commit ourselves to the idea that the results of free expression are to the general benefit in the long run, however unpleasant they may appear at the time. The validity of such a belief cannot be demonstrated conclusively. It is a belief of recent historical development, even within universities, one embodied in American constitutional doctrine but not widely shared outside the academic world, and denied in theory and in practice by much of the world most of the time.
Because few other institutions in our society have the same central function, few assign such high priority to freedom of expression. Few are expected to. Because no other kind of institution combines the discovery and dissemination of basic knowledge with teaching, none confronts quite the same problems as a university.
For if a university is a place for knowledge, it is also a special kind of small society. Yet it is not primarily a fellowship, a club, a circle of friends, a replica of the civil society outside it. Without sacrificing its central purpose, it cannot make its primary and dominant value the fostering of friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility, or mutual respect. To be sure, these are important values; other institutions may properly assign them the highest, and not merely a subordinate priority; and a good university will seek and may in some significant measure attain these ends. But it will never let these values, important as they are, override its central purpose. We value freedom of expression precisely because it provides a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox. Free speech is a barrier to the tyranny of authoritarian or even majority opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of particular doctrines or thoughts.
If the priority assigned to free expression by the nature of a university is to be maintained in practice, clearly the responsibility for maintaining that priority rests with its members. By voluntarily taking up membership in a university and thereby asserting a claim to its rights and privileges, members also acknowledge the existence of certain obligations upon themselves and their fellows. Above all, every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university. No member has a right to prevent such expression. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed.
The strength of these obligations, and the willingness to respect and comply with them, probably depend less on the expectation of punishment for violation than they do on the presence of a widely shared belief in the primacy of free expression. Nonetheless, we believe that the positive obligation to protect and respect free expression shared by all members of the university should be enforced by appropriate formal sanctions, because obstruction of such expression threatens the central function of the university. We further believe that such sanctions should be made explicit, so that potential violators will be aware of the consequences of their intended acts.
In addition to the university's primary obligation to protect free expression there are also ethical responsibilities assumed by each member of the university community, along with the right to enjoy free expression. Though these are much more difficult to state clearly, they are of great importance. If freedom of expression is to serve its purpose and thus the purpose of the university, it should seek to enhance understanding. Shock, hurt, and anger are not consequences to be weighed lightly. No member of the community with a decent respect for others should use, or encourage others to use, slurs and epithets intended to discredit another's race, ethnic group, religion, or sex. It may sometimes be necessary in a university for civility and mutual respect to be superseded by the need to guarantee free expression. The values superseded are nevertheless important, and every member of the university community should consider them in exercising the fundamental right to free expression.
We have considered the opposing argument that behavior which violates these social and ethical considerations should be made subject to formal sanctions, and the argument that such behavior entitles others to prevent speech they might regard as offensive. Our conviction that the central purpose of the university is to foster the free access of knowledge compels us to reject both of these arguments. They assert a right to prevent free expression. They rest upon the assumption that speech can be suppressed by anyone who deems it false or offensive. They deny what Justice Holmes termed "freedom for the thought that we hate." They make the majority, or any willful minority, the arbiters of truth for all. If expression may be prevented, censored or punished, because of its content or because of the motives attributed to those who promote it, then it is no longer free. It will be subordinated to other values that we believe to be of lower priority in a university.
The conclusions we draw, then, are these: even when some members of the university community fail to meet their social and ethical responsibilities, the paramount obligation of the university is to protect their right to free expression. This obligation can and should be enforced by appropriate formal sanctions. If the university's overriding commitment to free expression is to be sustained, secondary social and ethical responsibilities must be left to the informal processes of suasion, example, and argument.
This is a powerful and eloquent expression of the principle that I hold most inviolable. It is doubly important coming from a private university that is not technically bound by the first amendment. But the Woodward committee understands what many radical students do not, that silencing those whose views enrage us is really just a poor means of assuaging our own insecurities. The zeal to censor, while understandable on an emotional level, is primarily a reflection of our lack of confidence in the power of reason to persuade and to separate the true from the false.
Politics
Comments
I agree with you on principle, Ed, but let's be honest for a second here.
Given recent history (evolution, climate change, marijuana prohibition, etc.), do you think this lack of confidence is unfounded, or a rational response to observation of our fellow man?
Posted by: Shygetz | December 18, 2009 9:47 AM
Shockley was the inventor of the junction transistor, not transmitter.
Say what you want about his political views, the man changed the world.
Posted by: Russell Miller | December 18, 2009 10:00 AM
"Given recent history (evolution, climate change, marijuana prohibition, etc.), do you think this lack of confidence is unfounded, or a rational response to observation of our fellow man?"
And you've obviously made up your mind and think your fellow mind is stupid (to be charitable, I think) for holding a disagreeing opinion.
Sorry, but I would say you're part of the problem, as that is not conducive to constructive dialog. It doesn't mean you're not right, but coming at a debate with the idea that your opponent is an idiot does not change peoples' minds.
And I'm guilty of the same thing.
Posted by: Russell Miller | December 18, 2009 10:04 AM
Shygetz wrote:
Even if that was true, government censorship is hardly an effective means of changing minds.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 18, 2009 10:13 AM
Okay, now we're talking REAL threats to free speech. I'll just offer one minor quibble here, to the effect that "not inviting someone to speak at a particular venue" is not quite the same thing as "forbidding him to speak" or "censorship." Speeches and debates of this sort are held at certain locations, which have only so many time slots available for speakers; which means that whoever does the scheduling will inevitably have to make choices as to which speakers are worth a time slot and which ones aren't. In other words, First Amendment or no, someone inevitably has to decide that speaker A is, according to some relevant set of guidelines, "more worthy" of an invitation to speak at their location than speaker B.
IMO, I grudgingly admit that it did make sense to give Shockley an opportunity to speak at campuses, at least at that time, because at that time, his views were still "mainstream," as in still held by a significant fraction of the white majority; and students needed to be reminded of this fact so they could prepare a response to them. His views were bogus, but their existence and popularity was still a fact worth teaching in schools. Shockley wasn't just any old dime-a-dozen fringe-loony or con-artist.
And this gets back to the necessity of those pesky rules of behavior, a.k.a. "speech codes," mentioned in the last thread. If people are going to be dealing with unheard-of and/or unpopular opinions, then some code of civility is necessary to make sure the resulting heated debates remain constructive and helpful, and don't degenerate into shouting-matches, verbal abuse or worse. Freedom of speech means, in part, freedom to express unpopular views without being shouted down, harassed, or otherwise punished or intimidated into silence. In collegial settings, it also means everyone who wants to say something gets a reasonable turn to do so.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 10:14 AM
Good story. Shame that FIRE would have been complaining that the mob was being prevented from shouting people down. RED LIGHT for all universities involved!
Posted by: Lynxreign | December 18, 2009 10:19 AM
How about it be required that ALL institutions of education in the United States, public or private, conform to the First Amendment?
Posted by: Katharine | December 18, 2009 10:25 AM
Great post. Should be required reading for anyone connected with education OR the press. M Duran
Posted by: Mark Duran | December 18, 2009 10:25 AM
Lynxreign wrote:
You are completely full of shit. FIRE would have been on the side of free speech in that situation just as they have been in similar situations all around the country since their formation. A little research might keep you from making such inaccurate statements.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 18, 2009 10:27 AM
Lynxreign, have you considered shooting FIRE an email to ask why they included things like graffiti and harassment in their Red Light designation? You might get an answer that either satisfies you, or you might get an answer that proves to your own satisfaction that the people running FIRE have their heads stuck WAY up their butts. It might be worth a shot.
Posted by: Captain Mike | December 18, 2009 10:32 AM
No, actually, Lynx isn't quite that full of shit: a significant amount of FIRE's complaints did indeed center around rules of conduct that tried to prohibit "harassment," which would have included heckling an invited speaker and harassing people who either agreed with his views or had a hand in inviting him to speak.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 10:36 AM
@Ed
Really? So their complaints that harassment and obscene phone calls aren't allowed, their complaint that students aren't allowed to disrupt classes, those don't suggest that they'd be on the side of the mob? I'm sure that by supporting the mob's right to scream they'd think they were on the side of free speech, at least from what I've seen on their site. Their site comes across as hysteria, misrepresentation and overreaction. If you have special information that contradicts this, it'd behoove you to share it rather than just saying people who point out their hysteria are "completely full of shit."
@Captain Mike
Not a bad idea, I should also ask them why they've got a scale of 1-3 if it is so easy to trigger the red light that it makes it nearly meaningless.
Posted by: Lynxreign | December 18, 2009 10:39 AM
Raging Bee wrote:
This is almost always false. Rarely does the university itself invite someone to speak on a campus. Speakers are almost always invited by organizations on campus and on every campus there are going to be many different places to hold such an event, from a small classroom to a football stadium depending on the interest. If two groups want the same venue at the exact same time, it would go to the first one to request it, not to which speaker the university decides is more worthy.
Ironically, those who wanted him censored then made the very argument you say wasn't true at the time, that Shockley's views were so far out of the mainstream and so universally rejected that they need not be expressed in public. But this is totally irrelevant to the first amendment. The expression of views is protected whether they are shared by 1000 people, 1 million people or 100 million people.
How odd. This is pretty much the opposite of what you were arguing in the other thread, that not everyone should get a turn to express views that are "obnoxious" or "childish." As for civility, there is no more reason to ensure such a thing on a college campus than in any other setting. What constitutes incivility? Yelling at someone? So if a racist speaker came to campus and protestors yelled "racist" at him as he entered the building, would that constitute incivility that should be punished?
We already have the legal lines drawn where they should be. We do not punish speech unless it is explicitly threatening in a manner that constitutes an imminent threat. Subjective notions of "incivility" provide impossible lines to draw.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 18, 2009 10:46 AM
Lynxreign wrote:
You're stuck inside your own misinterpretations of their position so deeply that reality has become irrelevant. Nowhere does FIRE support the idea that students can "disrupt" classes; that's your own false interpretation of something you read on their site. And the term "harassment" can mean pretty much anything you want it to mean, including someone saying something unkind to another person, which is precisely why FIRE targets speech codes that use that term in such a broad manner - because it could be used to punish speech that is clearly constitutionally protected. And no, neither of those things, even if they were true, suggests that they would support a mob engaging in a heckler's veto.
The fact that you're sure of something that is so easily shown to be false should tell you that the assumptions on which you base that certainty must be false. This exact situation has come up regularly on college campuses all over the country. At Columbia a couple years ago, for example, where the founder of the Minutemen was not allowed to speak because a mob of people screamed and shouted and took over the stage. FIRE was squarely against the mob and defended the speaker's right to speak and the audience's right to hear him speak. So you see, what you're "sure" of has no relationship to reality whatsoever.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 18, 2009 10:53 AM
Heckler's veto never ok. But one perspective shift. We should call foul whenever anyone asserts the "representing" canard. Shockley is invited to speak, and people say he's representing Yale, and therefore tarring its, whatever. Speech is speech; an individual, whether it's Jesse Helms or Paul Wellstone or anybody, is just a voice. Their associations are not relevant. When people shout that someone "doesn't represent me" they are stating the obvious. but of course it's tactically valuable to assert that one person speaks for another; guilt by association is a powerful tool. Many, many of our young people, even those in prestigious and selective universities, lack any clear sense of the burden of civil liberties. They consider it all privilege.
I've also heard this silly assertion that if people shout a speaker down they are just acting on their own freedom of expression. I don't have a handy articulation of why that's wrong, except the general definition of a heckler's veto. But I admire the civic clarity and logic of the Black Student Union and Orchid Johnson you quote above, and I will remember that the next time my work with young people takes me into first amendment territory (which is, I am happy to report, often.)
Ice9
Posted by: Ice9 | December 18, 2009 10:53 AM
OK Ed, I'm a little confused. You just posted:
As for civility, there is no more reason to ensure such a thing on a college campus than in any other setting.
But the Yale committee wrote:
The conclusions we draw, then, are these: even when some members of the university community fail to meet their social and ethical responsibilities, the paramount obligation of the university is to protect their right to free expression. This obligation can and should be enforced by appropriate formal sanctions.
Do you intrepet that to mean the Shockley hecklers should have faced sanctions? If so, do you agree?
Posted by: Taz | December 18, 2009 10:57 AM
@Ed
If their site is so easily "misinterpreted" then maybe they should spend some time on it so they don't look like a bunch of idiots. Here's the part where they complain that mobs can't rule:
Student behavior or speech that disrupts the instructional setting or is
clearly disrespectful of the instructor or fellow students will not be
tolerated. Disruptive conduct may include, but is not limited to:
1. rude or disrespectful behavior
2. unwarranted interruptions
3. failure to adhere to instructor's directions
4. vulgar or obscene language, slurs or other forms of intimidation
5. physically or verbally abusive behavior
Remember, they're listing this section of the code as a problem with the code. If they consider this a problem, the conclusion is that they'd like to see this allowed. They have no problem picking parts of the code to highlight, that's essentially the whole page, highlights with links to the full code. If they don't mean to be highlighting "unwarranted interruptions" then they shouldn't be listing it here.
My interpretation of their listing the above language implying they'd support a mob engaging in the "heckler's veto" is easily as valid as your claim that people could be in violation if the UMass code for "having a picture of their boyfriend or girlfriend in a swimsuit." Yours, I feel is a willful misinterpretation of the full line of the code since that same person in public wouldn't raise an eyebrow so it is highly unlikely a photo of that same person would rise to such a standard as being a "display of pictures, posters or cartoons that a reasonable person would find offensive or sexually suggestive".
Posted by: Lynxreign | December 18, 2009 11:05 AM
Ed Brayton: Even if that was true, government censorship is hardly an effective means of changing minds.
Censorship is not aimed at the minds of those who speak; it is aimed at the minds of those who listen; it does not seek to turn minds away from the censored concepts, but to reduce opportunities of minds to turn towards them.
Like a war, it's not going to change the minds of individuals, but tries to change the collective/average "mind" of the society. A war does this by killing people who have an undesirable idea; censorship, by trying to limit the number of people who incorporate it. Like war, censorship is generally not very effective, but it's not always completely ineffective. (Try asking a Phoenician for the secret to making Greek Fire.)
The larger secondary problem is that depending what it's applied to, the censorship can have detrimental effects on adaptability of the society and it's prospects for continued survival. Sometimes the benefit of censorship in very restricted cases can outweigh the harm; thus, in the US, we have restrictions that effectively act to censor willful libel and slander. However, the US has as a nation (usually) decided that the harms of allowing censorship by the government outweigh any benefits to society thereby. A more sophisticated expression of the principle of "free speech" might conceptually be possible, which would (in a sense) explicitly allow for censorship of some additional examples of the worst forms of expression, but make for an even more "perfect Union".
However, human psychology and sociology isn't presently advanced enough to do political engineering at that level.
Posted by: abb3w | December 18, 2009 11:07 AM
Censorship, whether government or otherwise, isn't meant to change minds. It's meant to prevent minds from changing, and it works pretty well at that.
Sorry, but this is bollocks. Your argument boils down to "The problem is, we haven't treated evolution deniers with enough respect. If only we would have a constructive, reasoned dialogue with them, we could arrive at an agreement about the truth."
This naive point of view illustrates my point--sure, free speech and debate works great if your fellow man is genuinely interested in reaching the truth of a matter. But, assuming such an interest is counterfactual.
Now, as a matter of principle and practicality, I am against censorship simply because the anti-truthers are likely to be the ones doing the censoring. But that doesn't mean that I think that free speech works as a tool for reaching the proper conclusions, at least not in the timescale that we live in.
Posted by: Shygetz | December 18, 2009 11:11 AM
@Ed
At Columbia a couple years ago, for example, where the founder of the Minutemen was not allowed to speak because a mob of people screamed and shouted and took over the stage. FIRE was squarely against the mob and defended the speaker's right to speak and the audience's right to hear him speak.
Well good for them for doing the right thing. It is a shame that they're so lazy with their website, most people's exposure to them, that they come across as over-reacting and hysterical. Then again, that's a single high-profile event that you're referencing. If they're primarily interested in publicity for themselves, that's the way to go. From what I've seen of their site, they seem very interested in blowing things out of proportion to make themselves seem more needed.
Posted by: Lynxreign | December 18, 2009 11:14 AM
@Ed
Sorry for the multiple responses, this is what happens when you click post, then think about it some more and repeat.
I think what bothers me most about this is that you're expecting FIRE to be given the most charitable interpretation of their site and their postings while expecting university codesas listed to be given the least charitable interpretation.
Universities' codes aren't worded as they're enforced, FIRE has listed, apparently, a ton of things they're not actually against. Communication, as is frequently the case, is at the crux of the problem. Universities should spend more time on the wording of their codes, not just to make them adhere more closely to what they actually enforce, but to ensure their constitutionality while still ensuring the kind of environment a university needs, not an easy task at all. FIRE should take the time to make sure their website actually says what they want it to say. I understand there are a ton of universities out there and thus a ton of content for their site, but it isn't that hard to add text emphasis and explanations instead of just dumping whatever seems like it might possibly be a problem under some hypothetical onto their list of concerns. They should also do a better job of vetting their sources on the links they provide, or at least provide commentary of their own.
Posted by: lynxreign | December 18, 2009 11:25 AM
This is almost always false. Rarely does the university itself invite someone to speak on a campus. Speakers are almost always invited by organizations on campus and on every campus there are going to be many different places to hold such an event...
None of that refutes my point, which was that someone, somewhere, has power to make decisions as to who gets to use their facilities and when. The First Amendment does not abridge their ability, or their responsibility, to decide such things; nor is it "censorship" merely to choose not to invite someone to use one's premises.
But this is totally irrelevant to the first amendment. The expression of views is protected whether they are shared by 1000 people, 1 million people or 100 million people.
What about the right of campus political and other interest groups to decide, based on their own priorities, whom they invite to speak? Is that not protected by the First Amendment? In this case, Schockley's right to say what he wants does not mean anyone has any obligation to invite him to speak at any particular location.
How odd. This is pretty much the opposite of what you were arguing in the other thread, that not everyone should get a turn to express views that are "obnoxious" or "childish."
Once again, you are misreprestning my position. What I said earlier was that "free speech" does not necessarily include the freedom to harass others, or to express one's views any damn way one pleases, without regard to the burden your behavior may place on others' freedom. Fists and noses, remember?
Subjective notions of "incivility" provide impossible lines to draw.
You have to know that's bullshit. We have basic notions of "civility" and "harassment" that are easily verifiable, and agreed upon by a solid majority of the adult population. For example, disagreeing with your opinion is okay, but screaming and spitting in your face, shouting you down so you can't finish a sentence, calling you nasty names, or hacking your blog so you can't manage it as is your right, are all considered "uncivil" due to negative effects of such actions that are objectively verifiable. Furthermore, adhering to a code of civility does not diminish our ability to express ourselves; it enhances it.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 11:28 AM
Lynxreign: I think you're being a bit too charitable to FIRE. From what I've seen so far (admittedly not a representative sample since it is a lot of stuff), they really seem to be all about taking a college's rules of behavior, labelling it a "speech code" with the obvious implication that it's dictating what students are allowed to say, and then re-pasting a standardized sermon about the Constitution and our most cherished freedom of speech -- a sermon made without regard to any specific rule or its intended or actual effect. Like children chafing at their parents' rules, they really do seem to think that the mere act of trying to impose mutual limits of behavior is a dire threat to freedom of speech. Intentionally or not, they really do seem unable to imagine freely expressing themselves within any sort of universal standard of behavior -- a skill most kids are epxected to learn as part of the process of growing up, and one of the necessary skills that schools and colleges are supposed to teach, or at least reinforce.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 11:52 AM
Russell Miller: And you've obviously made up your mind and think your fellow mind is stupid (to be charitable, I think) for holding a disagreeing opinion.
The other way around, I think; because some people are stupid, it can contribute to their holding a disagreeing opinion, even when the disagreement holds no merit by inference from evidence.
Shygetz: This naive point of view illustrates my point--sure, free speech and debate works great if your fellow man is genuinely interested in reaching the truth of a matter. But, assuming such an interest is counterfactual.
Of course, this leaves open the question of the proper response (individual or societal) when dullards with duplicitous motive want "debate" on evolution, racial superiority, the global warming conspiracy, the Apollo mission hoaxes, or whatnot. Is there a better response than the "heckler's veto"?
Posted by: abb3w | December 18, 2009 11:52 AM
And you've obviously made up your mind and think your fellow mind is stupid (to be charitable, I think) for holding a disagreeing opinion.
There are cases where that assumption may be warranted. There are others where the assumption is that the other person has been duped (which is not the same as being stupid).
Posted by: Taz | December 18, 2009 11:54 AM
Ed, I know there's a lot of (mostly economic) political issues where we're pretty much on opposite ends of the map, but I just wanted to pop in and say how much I appreciate your uncompromising defense of free speech. It's a fragile thing, and we have to be willing to defend it with vigor. Rock on!
You have to know that's bullshit. We have basic notions of "civility" and "harassment" that are easily verifiable, and agreed upon by a solid majority of the adult population. For example, disagreeing with your opinion is okay, but screaming and spitting in your face, shouting you down so you can't finish a sentence, calling you nasty names, or hacking your blog so you can't manage it as is your right, are all considered "uncivil" due to negative effects of such actions that are objectively verifiable.
Not at all. Spitting and hacking (and sometimes screaming) are separate crimes having nothing to do with the content of the speech. A crime does not become legal just because there's speech involved. Conversely, one of the main points of free speech is that the content is irrelevant. Spitting and screaming "I THINK EQUAL RIGHTS ARE GREAT!" in someone's face without their consent should be exactly no more or less acceptable than doing the same thing with "WOMEN SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO VOTE!" No idea is so bad that its expression should be punished.
Posted by: Matt Springer | December 18, 2009 11:56 AM
@lynxreign: Communication, as is frequently the case, is at the crux of the problem. Universities should spend more time on the wording of their codes
That is exactly what FIRE is saying!
Look again at the section you quote in #17, which FIRE has a problem with. Your claim is that it is possible to interpret FIRE's position as supporting mob veto, and therefore, FIRE is a bunch of idiots. But what FIRE is saying is that that section of code is overbroad, and could be used by the University to prevent legitimate speech. So it should be rewritten so as not to be overbroad.
Lets pare this down. University X's code, section Y says "Actions A, B, and C, and anything we deem like them will not be tolerated." FIRE then objects that section Y is overbroad. It could prevent free speech. You read FIRE's objection and conclude from it that FIRE supports people doing action A, and therefore they're not worth listening to.
But your conclusion simply doesn't follow from what they said. An objection that some code is overbroad and needs to be rewritten is not the logical, legal, or common-sense equivalent to saying A should be allowed.
Posted by: eric | December 18, 2009 12:00 PM
Of course, this leaves open the question of the proper response (individual or societal) when dullards with duplicitous motive want "debate" on evolution, racial superiority, the global warming conspiracy, the Apollo mission hoaxes, or whatnot. Is there a better response than the "heckler's veto"?
Yeah -- don't invite them to speak, don't pretend their asinine, babyish or clearly dishonest ideas are the equal of better ideas, don't pretend there's a "controversy" when there clearly is none, and don't waste time responding to every irrelevant street-lunatic you see.
Seriously, folks, there's a time for discussing all ideas in a fair and open forum, and a time for declaring that a certain argument is won and done and moving on. A university does not need to invite anyone from the Flat Earth Society to speak; there's better things to do than listen to someone who was proven wrong centuries before he was born.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 12:08 PM
@Lynxreign:
Any of those could mean absolutely anything you wanted it to mean. 1, 3, 4, and 5 would cover wearing a t-shirt an instructor doesn't like. If he doesn't like it enough, he could easily stretch 2 to fit as well. I think that's the issue FIRE is taking with those rules.
Hell most people seem to think rude/abusive behavior and intimidation are disagreeing with them in any way.
Posted by: JThompson | December 18, 2009 12:26 PM
Any of those could mean absolutely anything you wanted it to mean.
Speak for yourself. Any adult with any common sense would be perfectly able to figure out what either of those concepts listed really mean, and chances are an overwhelming majority of other grownups would come to a pretty quick concensus as to whether this or that action fell in either of those categories. It's really not that hard.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 1:09 PM
Bee @28:
Yeah -- don't invite them to speak, don't pretend their asinine, babyish or clearly dishonest ideas are the equal of better ideas, don't pretend there's a "controversy" when there clearly is none, and don't waste time responding to every irrelevant street-lunatic you see.
You don't get to make that call based on your beliefs. Speakers are typically invited by various student groups.
Seriously, folks, there's a time for discussing all ideas in a fair and open forum, and a time for declaring that a certain argument is won and done and moving on.
To quote a childish taunt: Who died and made you God? How come you get to decide what should and shouldn't be discussed in an open forum?
A university does not need to invite anyone from the Flat Earth Society to speak; there's better things to do than listen to someone who was proven wrong centuries before he was born.
If a legitimate student group wants to invite a Flat Earth society speaker to come to their campus and they have the funds to do so, then you have no right to say they can't. You can argue that it's a dumb idea, yes, but you don't get to make the decision on who speaks or doesn't speak.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 1:29 PM
I think that nobody's ever going to be able to solve the problem that someone in every group is going to want to stretch the rules to be an asshole.
It's just how humans seem to work.
Posted by: Katharine | December 18, 2009 1:30 PM
Any adult with any common sense would be perfectly able to figure out what either of those concepts listed really mean, and chances are an overwhelming majority of other grownups would come to a pretty quick concensus as to whether this or that action fell in either of those categories. It's really not that hard.
Again, Bee, you prove unable to recognize anything beyond your own point of view and bias. If you read some of the horror stories on FIRE's web site, you would see that many of these complaints did not come from "adults with common sense".
Look at the Henry Louis Gates arrest flap. Gates cried racism at the cop's behavior, despite the lack of evidence that racism motivated what the cop did. The cop behaved like a jerk in arresting Gates, yes, but there was no clear evidence of racism. I would think "any adult with common sense" could see that, but that's not what happened. If that police officer had been a Harvard employee, he would have been dismissed for racial harassment, I'm sure.
Besides, if it were really crystal clear what "reasonable people" would do or think, there'd be no need for lawyers.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 1:33 PM
I find this sentiment aborhent. Using the goverment to punish people for the views they experess, regardless of how stupid or evil or ignorant you think those views are, is wrong.
The notion that censorship should only be avoided because the right people aren't in charge, whether or not they are hypothetical future hypercompetent technocrats, reduces freedom of speech to a priviledge to be doled out to by the state in pursuit of whoever happens to be in charge's ends to worthy recipents rather than a right. Once censorship is permitted, the boot is on everybody's throat - the remaining question is only when it will be pressed down.
Posted by: MattXIV | December 18, 2009 1:33 PM
Well first of all the First Amendment applies to governement restricting Freedom of Speech. So that its application to Colleges and Universities is at least arguable. Unless you consider Colleges and Universities governement institutions.
The other thing is that I can remember the Speech Code wars of the 1990's, when frothing at the mouth, hysterical conservatives were shrieking about a reign of PC terror, that largely existed only in their own heads. I was surprised to find, given the level of hysteria, that a great many Universities had very broad and vague rules and regulations that gave in many cases carte-blanche to punish and discipline people for very vague infractions. Also that these rules were of very long standing going back many, many decades.
It is a bit of shock to discover that in many cases, if not the majority, the Speech Codes were a distinct improvement in extending freedom of expression etc., in Colleges and Universities.
Of course what fascinated me at the time and still does fascinates me is the silence of the Anti-PC Speech Codes are wicked crowd about the Speech Codes and related infringements on Freedom of Speech at Conservative Bible Schools, Private Universities etc., many of which routinely supress, free expression etc.,of their faculty and Students. The Silence is deafening.
Now all that said I do believe that Freedom of Speech etc., is a good thing in Universities and Colleges etc., and that it should exist in these institutions and I would like a poster suggested above include so-called private colleges etc. I just do not think that the First Amendment provides such protection, at least overtly and without some stretched interpretation.
Regarding Shockley. I found him to be a disgusting human being and his opinions repellent and I found him to be a incredible racist. However I must inform people here that Shockley's opinions are not marginal anymore. There as been a resurgence of interest in the idea of "race" and the idea of "significant" differences between the "races" Evolutionary Psychology contains some people who who are absolutely ga ga over so-called racial differences. In fact Skeptic Magazine has two house "racialist" thinkers Savich and Miele. Pinker among others thinks that investigating so-called "racial" differnces is a courageous stand against PC. I could go on. I could of course mention Jensen and so-called "Scientific" journals like Intelligence that are obsessed with "racial" differences in intelligence and does anyone remember The Bell Curve? I would also suggest that the idea of inate black inferiority is still a widely held idea.
Posted by: Pacal | December 18, 2009 1:33 PM
abb3w said @24:
Great question. My first response is "yes, beat them at their own game."
In my local paper ["fishwrapper"], the disingenuousness of some AGW skeptics is astounding. I'm a naive person and believe folks don't usually obfuscate on purpose, rather it's a function of their ignorance due to few enriching experiences (the area I live in is known as the Redneck Riviera). But I've become convinced some of the posters are willfully distorting the facts/argument to put across their political agenda; it is frightening to behold. You people who live in big cities probably can't grasp how it is in places like this.
I would prefer above-board debate/argument/discussion, but that is impossible when your opponent values zero-sum outcomes rather than co-operation (and who sees such as weakness to be exploited). You can't have intellectually honest discourse with someone willing to do what it takes for their perspective to dominate.
[sorry if this is a repost - I forgot about the 3-link moderation purgatory before sending it last time]
Posted by: marnk | December 18, 2009 1:34 PM
Pacal @35:
I was surprised to find, given the level of hysteria, that a great many Universities had very broad and vague rules and regulations that gave in many cases carte-blanche to punish and discipline people for very vague infractions.
Ding ding ding. Someone gets it.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 1:38 PM
MattXIV @34:
The notion that censorship should only be avoided because the right people aren't in charge, whether or not they are hypothetical future hypercompetent technocrats, reduces freedom of speech to a priviledge to be doled out to by the state in pursuit of whoever happens to be in charge's ends to worthy recipents rather than a right. Once censorship is permitted, the boot is on everybody's throat - the remaining question is only when it will be pressed down.
+1
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 1:43 PM
Bee @30,
One would like to think so, however the evidence is not so clear. Remember the guy at IUPUI who was reprimanded for reading an academic book about how the Klan was defeated at Notre Dame? I remember an incident at Oregon State in the '90s, when a student who was trying to study yelled, "Be quiet, you water buffalos" at a group of loud female students, who as it happened were black, and was accused of racial harassment (it's not clear he had any idea of their ethnicity, as it was at night and he was up in his dorm room while they were outside). And I remember vividly a situation at U. of Oregon while I was there in which a student used the phrase "a coon's age" and all hell broke loose over his "racial insult." (For those not from the South or Midwest, a coon's age is just a long period of time, and has nothing to do with race).I tend to agree with you that "any adult with common" sense wouldn't act that way. But I can't agree that the overwhelming majority of adults have that common sense. Or perhaps it's the case that what is common-sense to one person really isn't so obviously common-sense to another. Without agreement on what constitutes common-sense, we're no closer to agreement on what can be limited and what cannot.
Posted by: James Hanley | December 18, 2009 1:56 PM
If a legitimate student group wants to invite a Flat Earth society speaker to come to their campus and they have the funds to do so, then you have no right to say they can't.
Where did I say I had any such right? You're failing to understand my point because you're not cognizant of the question to which that comment was an answer.
If you read some of the horror stories on FIRE's web site, you would see that many of these complaints did not come from "adults with common sense".
Why don't you quote me some here? I don't have time to sort through all of that to find anything that supports your (vague) allegations. All I've seen so far are universities getting red lights (their WORST rating) merely for having rules of behavior that use words whose universally-understood meaning the FIREbugs seem unwilling to comprehend. And what rating do they give to "horror stories" worse than that? An infrared light?
Look at the Henry Louis Gates arrest flap...
What does that have to do with campus rules of behavior?
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 1:59 PM
"Of course what fascinated me at the time and still does fascinates me is the silence of the Anti-PC Speech Codes are wicked crowd about the Speech Codes and related infringements on Freedom of Speech at Conservative Bible Schools, Private Universities etc., many of which routinely supress, free expression etc.,of their faculty and Students. The Silence is deafening."
Seconded for probable truth. I would go one step further and say that essentially any religious university probably represses, to some extent, its students' freedom of speech.
Posted by: Katharine | December 18, 2009 1:59 PM
Pascal @35.
Actually, all public colleges and universities are government institutions and are subject to the constraint of the First Amendment. That's why every public university whose speech code has been challenged has lost in the federal courts. It's a clear and undisputed point of constitutional law that the First Amendment applies to them.A private college like mine is not subject to the first amendment, so we actually can censor speech. We don't, because we have these traditional liberal ideals of liberty and open debate, etc. I imagine Congress could tie a prohibition on censorship to the receipt of financial aid, just as they have with a prohibition on discrimination, but they've not done so.
Posted by: James Hanley | December 18, 2009 2:03 PM
This brings back memories.... Shockley and Innis were going to debate at Harvard in the fall of 1973. As a fresh-faced, innocent and naive first-year law student from a small town in the Midwest, I was looking forward with excitement to hearing my first debate between nationally known figures. I was shocked and disappointed when the debate got canceled after leftist student groups threatened to disrupt the debate to prevent Shockley from speaking. One of the leftist ringleaders, when asked why he didn't want to allow Innis the opportunity to take Shockley apart, replied that he didn't think Innis was sufficiently certain to win the debate to allow it to go forward! Thus began my gradual loss of intellectual innocence....
Posted by: knutsondc | December 18, 2009 2:04 PM
Pacal, on the issue of Intelligence - it actually revolves more around intelligence in children and does not exactly have any racial biases. In fact, I've exchanged emails with Douglas Detterman, the editor of the magazine, and Nick Martin, a contributor and former president of the Behavioral Genetics Association, and as far as I'm aware the issue of race and intelligence has been marginalized in the intelligence research community. The journal is not obsessed with race, to my knowledge.
It works like this: yes, there may be a different average IQ in one racial group than another, but you cannot generalize from an average to the individual. Also, IQ is about half environmental; I find many people who use race and intelligence as a cover for their own racism ignore this fact.
The Bell Curve is generally regarded as having had little (not none, but little) useful information, and some of the information and conclusions are valid, but many are not. It's a bit like a less unethical version of Mengele's experiments combined with a bit of Nazi pseudoscience: sure, you can derive some conclusions from some of it, the parts that are untainted by the pseudoscience and the racism. But much of the book is full of shit.
Posted by: Katharine | December 18, 2009 2:07 PM
RB @40:
Why don't you quote me some here? I don't have time to sort through all of that to find anything that supports your (vague) allegations.
Fair enough. Hanley named a few of the more famous incidents, such as the U Penn "water buffalo" flap.
en dot wikipedia dot org/wiki/Water_buffalo_incident
OK, from FIRE's web site:
www dot thefire dot org/article/108.html
www dot thefire dot org/article/7343.html
www dot thefire dot org/article/72.html
www dot thefire dot org/article/8866.html
www dot thefire dot org/article/5005.html
Not putting in the true links to avoid comment getting held in moderation.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 2:09 PM
"Actually, all public colleges and universities are government institutions and are subject to the constraint of the First Amendment. That's why every public university whose speech code has been challenged has lost in the federal courts. It's a clear and undisputed point of constitutional law that the First Amendment applies to them.
A private college like mine is not subject to the first amendment, so we actually can censor speech. We don't, because we have these traditional liberal ideals of liberty and open debate, etc. I imagine Congress could tie a prohibition on censorship to the receipt of financial aid, just as they have with a prohibition on discrimination, but they've not done so."
I suspect the issue of private colleges and censorship, if someone suggested requiring private colleges to not censor speech, would boil down to a few fundie colleges whining that they can't censor teh gheys or something to that effects.
Part of why I hate religion is that it tries so doggedly to mix itself in with the rest of society when it needs to be kept in its own fucking corner and told to shut up in public.
Posted by: Katharine | December 18, 2009 2:11 PM
Re: Pascal and Katherine, on FIRE's silence about religious schools. Note that those schools are private, hence not subject to the First Amendment. I don't follow FIRE, so it's possible they're being hypocritical here--certainly there's room for standing up for free speech in every institution of higher education (although I take issue with your claim that "many routinely suppress free expression," as my experience with private colleges has been different--I'm sure some do, but I doubt that most do). But if FIRE's point of emphasis is First Amendment rights, then they're not being hypocritical at all by ignoring private schools. The distinction between public and private--for legal purposes, although not for ethical ones, perhaps--is absolutely critical, and it's a serious analytical error to treat them as similar.
Raging Bee, I think you and your opponents are talking past each other to some extent. You are absolutely right that no one has a right to demand an invitation to speak at a university, or conversely, that a university has no responsibility to invite them. The First Amendment does not imply that someone else has to give you a forum.
But I don't think your opponents mean to dispute that, although they could be clearer. I think they're just saying that given a large enough university, the odds that some student organization will invite a given crackpot to speak approaches 1.0. So while they certainly don't have a right to an invitation, the odds are that they will receive an invitation if not to college X, then to university Y. And nearly every school has so many various rooms available that it's unlikely there would actually be an issue of having to choose which speaker to allow on campus (although there quite plausibly could be an issue of which speaker gets the nice auditorium and which gets the cinder-block walled classroom with the ragged carpet).
Posted by: James Hanley | December 18, 2009 2:13 PM
Hanley, if FIRE talks about Harvard or Yale, you can bet they're being hypocritical.
Posted by: Katharine | December 18, 2009 2:15 PM
Hanley: I don't deny the truth of your anecdotes; but THREE anecdotes is nowhere near a representative sample when we're talking about alleged threats to free speech across the board in god-knows-how-many accredited schools all over the USA. There will ALWAYS be isolated incidents of a law -- any law, however carefully written -- being misapplied by idiots. Look at how our child-sexual-abuse laws are misapplied -- does that mean we can't ban child sexual abuse?
This is just like all those "leftie-Marxist-dominated colleges" stories: a handful of scattered anecdotes is not enough to prove the alleged conspiracy.
(PS: you don't have to see a group of noisy women to get a good idea whather they're white or black. White and black women generally (I repeat GENERALLY) have distinctly different voices, and can easily be told apart merely by hearing. I don't mean that as a put-down, just as a fact that I've observed. If that student heard them, he would most likely have known whether they were black. The only possible excuse he had for calling them "water buffaloes" would be that he didn't know it was a racist term. And yes, the name-calling was a (relatively mild) form of harassment, and unnecessary; he could have just yelled "Would you all please just shut the fuck up?" Oh, and what was the final disposition of that case?)
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 2:21 PM
Katharine @48:
FIRE has taken on Harvard and Yale, and no, they are not hypocritical.
See https://thefire.org/article/7936.html
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 2:22 PM
RB @49:
Hanley: I don't deny the truth of your anecdotes; but THREE anecdotes is nowhere near a representative sample when we're talking about alleged threats to free speech across the board in god-knows-how-many accredited schools all over the USA.
Well, RB, you have to decide for yourself, I guess, what separates "a number of anecdotes" from something that indicates pervasive censorship. It sounds like we could come up with hundreds of examples and you'd still consider them a bunch of anecdotes and not representative of a trend.
I believe that even if FIRE were dealing with "a handful of anecdotes", their work is still valuable and necessary. Injustice is injustice, no matter how many times it occurs.
And why, exactly, is "water buffalo" a racist term?
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 2:26 PM
Part of why I hate religion is that it tries so doggedly to mix itself in with the rest of society when it needs to be kept in its own fucking corner and told to shut up in public.
How does "religion" do this? Did you mean to say part of why you "hate some members of various religions...?"
And certainly the freedom of religious people to speak their minds in public is just as important as the freedom of non-religious people (like you and me) to speak our minds.
Posted by: LJM | December 18, 2009 2:40 PM
Water buffalo is a racist term? Really? That's a new one on me.
Posted by: Captain Mike | December 18, 2009 2:42 PM
Raging Bee,
I don't remember the final disposition, and I can't seem to find any information on it. I assume I only heard about it because I was in the same state at a nearby university, and it probably didn't go beyond the local news. So it's just an incident stuck in my memory. Sorry, I'd give you more info if I had it.
But as to this merely being three incidents, that's what popped into my head as being ones I was familiar with. There's no reason to assume that these are the only three, and like the water buffalo one, most probably don't make much news, so there's reason to believe there's considerably more than all the participants on this thread collectively know about. And now that I'm thinking about it, there was another similar incident at U of Oregon while I was there, in which a student made a biased comment against Latino culture (not against Latinos, in fact, but just their culture, saying it made them lazy) out of gross ignorance, and the uproar exceeded any common-sense response, with calls for suspension, forced sensitivity training, etc. No action was taken by the university--it was just some very vocal students and faculty, and as it turned out, the kid was just a freshman who said as a result of people objecting to what he said he learned more about Latino culture and he regretted his remark. He came across as a decent kid who'd made a thoughtless comment of no great harm, and been very publicly excoriated for it.
I want to agree with you that common sense will be sufficient. God knows it'd be a better world if it was. But keep in mind that time was in this country when a public university prof could be fired for being an atheist or a Marxist. How much common sense has there ever been in free speech matters?
Posted by: James Hanley | December 18, 2009 2:47 PM
Ah, that https://thefire.org/article/7936.html article clarifies what it is, exactly, that FIRE objects to re: colleges/universities and speech codes:
There you go. Sectarian (and some secular) campuses don't come into FIRE's radar because they are upfront about NOT guaranteeing free speech.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 2:53 PM
How the water buffalo incident @UPenn turned out, per Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_buffalo_incident
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 2:55 PM
OK, Adrienne has referenced a water buffalo incident at UPenn in 1993. I could swear there was one at Oregon State while I lived in Oregon, which would put it between 1994 and 2001. So either there are two distinct water buffalo incidents, or my memory's faulty (I don't think I drank that much in grad school, but who knows?).
Posted by: James Hanley | December 18, 2009 3:10 PM
Adrienne: Thanx for the citations. Here's my response to each one:
108.html: The guy got fired for saying something in public that could impact his credibility as director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute -- an organization whose mission could be compromised if its director appeared prejudiced against peoples of Central Asia or the Caucasus. This is nothing new or dire: stupid or bigoted remarks can get you fired, even after you apologize.
7343.html: Yes, Columbia’s decision to suspend the club for posting an ‘offensive’ flyer WAS an absurd overreaction -- but so was FIRE calling it an attack on free speech and linking it to suppression of actual beliefs or opinions, when the latter suppression had not happened. "If you punish me for saying 'pussy' you can punish me for being a Democrat" really doesn't follow; there are plenty of situations, all over the real world, where people are indeed nailed for insulting behavior while being perfectly free to express all manner of opinions. Learn some manners and deal.
72.html: Okay, this is one incident where FIRE is absolutely right. So if UVA gets a red light for having rules of behavior, what does UCSD get for abrogating its own judicial procedures and forcing secret trials? Infrared? Microwaves?
8866.html: Another point for FIRE. That prof should not have been burdened merely for pointing out that a certain word was considered an epithet. OTOH, "Neither the letter nor Hindley's statement specified what he said or is accused of saying" kinda implies a dispute over what he really said. And if there really is a dispute, then it's perfectly reasonable to have a monitor in his class to see how he normally behaves.
5005.html: This freshman's flyer was insulting and sexist, and strongly implied that women did not have the same right as men to use the elevators; and that they were obligated to make themselves pleasing to the men's eyes. He should have been punished for it, but if this was his first offense, then eviction was quite excessive, espeically since he'd apologized and offered other forms of atonement, especially if freshmen are required to live in dorms, and really especially since looking for housing drains both time and energy away from other pursuits like learning. In this case, the student was punished cruelly and excessively, but the rule he'd violated was a reasonable one.
So all in all, FIRE gets 2.5 points on specifics, and minus-2000 for lumping three important cases in the same pile as all that empty blathering about speech codes. That's 2.5 out of how many articles?
@Hanley:
But as to this merely being three incidents, that's what popped into my head as being ones I was familiar with. There's no reason to assume that these are the only three...
Um...there's no reason NOT to assume this, at least until we've verified whether there really are more such incidents. We really need to be careful not to let isolated anecdotes be inflated in our minds into overall trends -- that's how whole groups of people or institutions tend to get smeared by demagogues. That's how the far right smeared ACORN, and how Hitler's propagansists smeared the Jews.
I believe that even if FIRE were dealing with "a handful of anecdotes", their work is still valuable and necessary.
Not if they're conflating vastly different incidents and trying to pretend they're all threats of the same magnitude. When they do this, they damage their own credibility, and that of their cause. Look at how much of FIRE's manure we had to sift through just to find THREE real and serious injustices. What good does that do the victims?
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 3:29 PM
If it helps tilt the balance towards memory error, urban dictionary (the definitive source for online information) makes several references to UPenn for the definition of water buffalo and none to OSU.
And yes, I went to urban dictionary to see if there was a definition of water buffalo that would support its use as a racial slur :p
Posted by: JohnV | December 18, 2009 3:34 PM
So much to read, so much to say.
But preventing the mob from shouting is matter of enforcing a modicum of respect. When you are a stage you are not acting with a singular voice. You have a mike.
Posted by: MarkusR | December 18, 2009 3:44 PM
I don't remember the final disposition, and I can't seem to find any information on it.
That's understandable, but it's part of the problem here: if we don't know how the story ends, then we really don't know how great an injustice was really done. Maybe he was expelled, or maybe he had to write a letter of apology (as I did when I once said "fuck" in the presence of an adminstrator), or maybe the charges were dismissed because they were just plain silly. So (at the risk of going ad-hom) why do you remember the beginning and not the end? Have you tried to find out the end? Is anyone in FIRE talking about how it ended? Did anyone you asked remember the end? Answer these questions, and you'll get a good idea of how facts might get subordinated to narratives and agendas.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 3:52 PM
RB:
This freshman's flyer was insulting and sexist, and strongly implied that women did not have the same right as men to use the elevators; and that they were obligated to make themselves pleasing to the men's eyes.
Whaaaa??? *Blink* Implied that women did not have the same right as men???? Obligated to make themselves pleasing?????!!!
I think you and I have vastly different ideas about what constitutes both "harassment" and "common sense", RB. Sigh. So be it. We'll "agree to disagree".
And now back to the main topic of this thread:
I wanted to mention re: what I posted in #55: remember, that only applies towards *private* colleges and universities. Public colleges/unis are mandated to uphold free speech by law.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 3:53 PM
It looks like the use of the term water buffalo as a racist slur may actually date from that incident:
From Wikipedia:
"He was told the term "water buffalo" could be interpreted as racist because a water buffalo is a dark primitive animal that lives in Africa."
I'm not really into racism as a form of self-expression, so I'm not up on all the hip new terms, but wouldn't the normal go-to dark skinned animal from Africa be a gorilla or a monkey or something?
Posted by: Captain mike | December 18, 2009 3:57 PM
Adrienne: here's the text of the offending flyer:
9 out of 10 freshman girls gain 10 ��" 15 pounds. But there is something you can do about it. If u live below the 6th floor takes the stairs….Not only will u feel better about yourself but you will also be saving us time and wont be sore on the eyes. [sic]
As you can see, it pretty explicitly states that women should use the stairs (up to the SIXTH floor), both to avoid inconveniencing the men who didn't want to go to the same trouble, and to conform to the men's standard of beauty. Insulting, sexist, stating a double standard of who has the right to use the public elevators, and totally uncalled-for.
Public colleges/unis are mandated to uphold free speech by law.
You can repeat that all you want, but it still doesn't establish a solid case that public colleges can't make rules of student conduct, within reasonable limits.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 4:05 PM
Mike: If I had to make an offhand uninformed guess, I'd guess that "water buffalo" means either a fat woman, a fat black woman, or a fat woman seen near a body of water. At the very least, it sounds pretty sexist, and seems to mean "ugly," just like callng a woman a whale, a pig, a cow, or any other large and unwieldy animal.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 4:10 PM
RB @64:
The flyer, to me, is mildly sexist and also dumb. That's it, though. I don't infer the stuff you do regarding women's allegedly lesser rights and obligations to look good. Sorry. Just don't.
Why the "Water Buffalo" perp at UPenn chose that term, per http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/3042/jewish-alumnus-sues-univ-of-pa-over-water-buffalo-incident/:
An Israeli-born Orthodox Jew from Long Island, N.Y., Jacobowitz explained at the time of the original case that his use of the term "water buffalo" came from the Hebrew word "behema," which can mean "water buffalo" but has often been used by Hebrew speakers as a mild rebuff when someone commits a thoughtless act.
Wikipedia says in its page about the incident that "Behema", Hebrew slang for "water buffalo", means disruptive and rowdy person.
So those UPenn was being culturally insensitive to Jews by misunderstanding the insult! Fer shame!
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 4:18 PM
RB @64:
You can repeat that all you want, but it still doesn't establish a solid case that public colleges can't make rules of student conduct, within reasonable limits.
Sigh. RB, it's not a matter of me repeating anything. It's a matter of LAW. Got that? What I think or say or repeat is immaterial.
And there you go again with that "reasonable limits" thing. What constitutes "reasonable"? Not so easy to determine, as we have already seen just on this thread.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 4:22 PM
Um, yeah. That's why I said, "I can't seem to find any information on it." The implication there, which seemed clear to me, was that I had in fact tried.But let me emphasize that I think cases with formal proceedings aren't the only ones of interest. As with the two cases I noted at U. Oregon, the comment on Latino culture and the use of the phrase "a coon's age." In neither case did the students have to go through any formal process. But a vocal group of faculty and students demanded such process. That creates a chilling effect on speech if we don't stand up and vigorously denounce them for their attempts at censorship. Put yourself in the position of an 18 year old who's away from home for the first time, saying something that's either not actually offensive, or that is offensive but he didn't realize it, or even if he realized it but thought he was being clever, then having a bunch of professors demanding you go through a judicial process for your words. That's very intimidating. It's not fundamentally different from a heckler's veto. "If you use the words coon or niggardly, regardless of context and meaning, we're going to publicly denounce and humiliate you!"
And we can in fact assume there are more cases than we know about. Parsimony requires that we not assume we're familiar with every incident.
But I'm really not quite sure what you and I are arguing about. What exactly is our substantive point of disagreement? If all we're disagreeing about is how frequent violations of free speech are, that's not a very substantive debate.
Posted by: James Hanley | December 18, 2009 4:25 PM
Not so easy to determine, as we have already seen just on this thread.
Speak for yourself. I don't have a problem deciding what are reasonable standards of behavior, and neither do a huge majority of people I talk to about the subject. The only people who seem to have a problem are the dumber free-speech absolutists, who relentlessly conflate manners with censorship no matter how carefully one tries to explain the difference.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 4:28 PM
Adrienne, I'm not sure how you cannot infer "women's allegedly lesser rights and obligations to look good" from that flyer.
I don't usually notice sexism until it punches me right in the face, but even I noticed that one.
Posted by: Captain Mike | December 18, 2009 4:38 PM
I don't have a problem deciding what are reasonable standards of behavior, and neither do a huge majority of people I talk to about the subject.
Of course, it's not difficult for you and people you agree with to "determine" what should and shouldn't be allowed to be said or written. But does it make me one of the "dumber" people to point out that anything that's relatively subjective, like standards of behavior and appropriate responses to various behaviors, has always been difficult for diverse groups of people to agree on?
Posted by: LJM | December 18, 2009 4:48 PM
Keep in mind also that it's common for any kind of incident to be news at first, while by the time there's any kind of resolution, it's no longer interesting enough to be news.
There is, potentially, another process at work here: the end of the story was not "news" because it didn't fit the narrative that those repeating the story loudest wanted to tell. I suspect that if the student had got even a slightly excessive punishment, we'd all have heard about it from the same people who made it part of their "ZOMG PC THUGS ON CAMPUS ELEVENTY-ONE!!111!!!" narrative in the first place.
I remember the same thing happening WRT those killings of black tweens in Atlanta in 1979-81: everyone suspected it was either the KKK or the cops, and it was all over the nation; and when their only suspect turned out to be a young black man, evryone very quickly lost interest, and his conviction was buried on page 354 of the national newspapers.
What exactly is our substantive point of disagreement?
For me, at least, it's a question of whether there's really some pervasive trend of suppression of free speech in college campuses (I say the evidence of this is insufficient); whether rules of conduct constitute suppression of free speech (I say they don't -- we all need to have SOME limits on our conduct); and whether FIRE really cares about free speech, or just wants to bash "PC thugs" and liberals in academia (So far, it's looking like the latter -- why aren't they making a fuss about suppression of free speech in private religious colleges? Sure it's legal, but does that mean they can't criticize it?)
Posted by: Raging bee | December 18, 2009 4:49 PM
At another level, it's a subject of political debate, just like we're engaging in here. You and Adrienne and I agree that the rules have to reasonable, but probably disagree about where the line of reasonability is--which means we're going to be in agreement in many cases, and in disagreement in some number of other cases.
But let's step aside from what seems to be an argument about whether or not limits can be drawn. No one is arguing that they can't, so far as I can see.
Posted by: James Hanley | December 18, 2009 4:50 PM
Of course, it's not difficult for you and people you agree with to "determine" what should and shouldn't be allowed to be said or written.
No, it's not just people who agree with me. Right-wing anti-Communists and conservative Christians, in my experience, also tend to agree (at least when you press them on it) that it's not right to scream in people's faces, harass them and hinder them in their daily business, use bigoted epithets to make them feel unwelcome or less than equal, substitute name-calling for argument, hack or gum up their blogs, heckle their speeches, that sort of thing. Do YOU disagree with any of this? Do YOU think any of the behaviors I described are okay?
Oh, and thanks for proving my point about free-speech absolutists refusing to distinguish between enforcing a code of conduct and "determining what should and shouldn't be allowed to be said or written."
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 5:00 PM
Posted by: James Hanley | December 18, 2009 5:04 PM
Of course public universities can make rules of student conduct within reasonable limits. No one's denying that, so again, I'm not sure we have a substantive disagreement.
FIRE effectively was denying that, and that's why I was attacking their BS. But yes, there are well-written and poorly-written rules, and the poorly-written ones can be unconstitutional. Also, just because such rules mention less-than-concrete-specific concepts like "harassment" doesn't mean they're dangerously vague: such concepts are well-understood and, from the evidence I've seen so far, with few exceptions, they are in fact sensibly interpreted in most cases. Sort of like other non-specific phrases like "due process of law" and "consistent with the principles of well-ordered liberty."
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 18, 2009 5:10 PM
The issue is whether it's "right" to do something. The issue is whether or not that something can be legally prohibited or whether it's protected under the First Amendment. Despite your fucktardery, it's probably not "right" for me to call you a fucktard. But I have a free speech right to do what's not right.
And while all of your examples are not "right" behavior, some are legally protected and some are not. Lumping them together and pretending they're the same isn't even common sense, much less a good argument. Is that what you and your right-wing anti-communist conservative Christian friends think--that these are all legally the same? Let's break them down one by one, instead of conflating them all.
1. "scream in people's faces," Could be legal to prohibit, could be not. Depends on the context of screaming in someone's face. If a guy walks up to a girl and asks her out, and she screams in his face, "GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME," it ain't right, but it's free speech. If some Nazi's speaking at a college, and supporters and opponents are both protesting and screaming in each others' faces, that's protected. If said Nazi is giving his speech and some student rushes up on stage and screams in his face, that's not protected speech and can be prohibited.
2. "harass them and hinder them in their daily business," Has anyone on this blog argued in favor of allowing someone to harass or hinder someone in their daily business? If male student follows female student from classroom to classroom pointing at her and saying, "look at the slut," that's not protected speech. I can't speak for whether Adrienne would agree, but I'm a free speech absolutist, and I know that this goes beyond protected speech. But basically, harassment and hindering are actions, not speech, and the Supreme Court has always drawn that distinction. Speech--protected. Speech+action--not protected.
3. "use bigoted epithets to make them feel unwelcome or less than equal," Again, depends on the context, but very often is protected speech. If a group of white guys are lounging in the dorm room of one of them, and a black guy wants to join them, but is told, "Go away, ni**er," I don't think you'll find anyone on this blog who will say that's "right," (but "right" was never in question-it's only your dishonest representation of the debate that brought that word in), but it's very likely legally protected. It's clearly constitutionally protected speech to say, "I don't like ni**ers," or "I can't stand sp*cs." You're not arguing against Adrienne and me if you say not, you're arguing against the Supreme Court, too.
4. "substitute name-calling for argument," Protected speech, you fucktard! See, I substituted name-calling for argument. If we were both students at public state U, would you think that I should be put through a judicial process for that? What if I merely said, "you're an idiot"? No, this may not be "right," but if you think public universities should be allowed to punish people for it, then you have no claim to common sense at all.
5. "hack or gum up their blogs," That's action, not speech. Do you really have a hard time distinguishing the two? Do you really believe that any of us free speech absolutists defends that kind of attack on someone else's free speech rights? What an astoundingly stupid thought.
6. "heckle their speeches," Depends on the degree of heckling. If the Nazi is giving a speech and people boo certain parts, yell, "you lie" at certain statements, hold up signs saying, "Nazi's not welcome here," I'd say that's all protected. If they heckle to the extent that the person can't speak, and those who actually want to hear cannot, then it can be prohibited. And nobody here has argued that speakers should be heckled to the point of not being heard! You willfully misrepresent your debate opponents. Look back, and you'll see not one iota of support for the heckler's veto on this thread.
So, Bee, despite your claim to have a perfect common sense understanding of where the lines should be drawn, you conflate very different types of things, including sticking pure actions in with speech. There's no common sense there at all, if you can't distinguish between the two.
I tried to be polite in this debate, I swear to God. But you ended up being so dishonest in your representation of the views of us "absolutists," and so arrogant in your assumption that you've got special--perfect--insight into what's reasonable, that I just can't be politie anymore. You don't deserve it.
Posted by: James Hanley | December 18, 2009 5:30 PM
...it's not right to scream in people's faces, harass them and hinder them in their daily business, use bigoted epithets to make them feel unwelcome or less than equal, substitute name-calling for argument, hack or gum up their blogs, heckle their speeches, that sort of thing.
Whether or not it's "right" is different from whether or not it should be banned. For instance, the case of the kid who put the stupid flier up encouraging women to take the stairs. That doesn't seem to qualify as anything outside the realm of what the students themselves could take care of.
Oh, and thanks for proving my point about free-speech absolutists refusing to distinguish between enforcing a code of conduct and "determining what should and shouldn't be allowed to be said or written."
But aren't you determining that the above student shouldn't have been allowed to write the stupid things he posted? And how is a "code of conduct" which doesn't prohibits certain speech and writing different from "determining what should and shouldn't be allowed to be said or written?"
And when you call free-speech absolutists "dumb," aren't you suggesting they're "less than equal" while "substituting name-calling for argument?"
Posted by: LJM | December 18, 2009 5:35 PM
oops. "...And how is a "code of conduct" which prohibits certain speech..."
Posted by: LJM | December 18, 2009 5:38 PM
The world is a sad place when someone as retarded as you-know-who knows how to use proxies. It's the ultimate enabler of further retardation.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 18, 2009 6:58 PM
If said Nazi is giving his speech and some student rushes up on stage and screams in his face, that's not protected speech and can be prohibited.
And why the fuck not?
Posted by: MarkusR | December 18, 2009 7:07 PM
And why the fuck not?
I think because the screamer is basically prohibiting the Nazi from speaking.
Posted by: LJM | December 18, 2009 7:33 PM
I think because the screamer is basically prohibiting the Nazi from speaking.
Screaming at someone is not prohibiting them from speaking. It might prohibit hearing, but not the act of speaking. There is no actual act that forces the speaker to stop doing whatever they were doing.
Posted by: MarkusR | December 18, 2009 7:49 PM
Screaming at someone is not prohibiting them from speaking. It might prohibit hearing, but not the act of speaking. There is no actual act that forces the speaker to stop doing whatever they were doing.
Are you saying the screamer would be free to take a megaphone on stage and scream into it, as well? Should any number of people be allowed to walk onto the stage during any speech by any speaker at a public university and basically make it impossible for what they say to be heard, simply because the speaker could go on purposelessly speaking?
I could be wrong, but I think screaming in a speaker's face, or otherwise preventing people from hearing what someone is saying, qualifies as "disturbing the peace."
Posted by: LJM | December 18, 2009 8:02 PM
I could be wrong, but I think screaming in a speaker's face, or otherwise preventing people from hearing what someone is saying, qualifies as "disturbing the peace."
But "disturbing the peace" is such an ambiguous thing, as FIRE would put it.
Posted by: MarkusR | December 18, 2009 8:19 PM
Cap'n Mike @70:
Adrienne, I'm not sure how you cannot infer "women's allegedly lesser rights and obligations to look good" from that flyer.
I don't usually notice sexism until it punches me right in the face, but even I noticed that one.
I could see how someone might infer those things, yes. Perhaps my POV is influenced by having read about the story. I see it as a matter of Occam's Razor too: which is more likel, that some 18-yr-old male doofus meant to send a message of intimidation and sexism to the women in his dorm, or that he was just trying to make a dumb (albeit mildly sexist) joke? I see the latter as the more logical conclusion.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 8:26 PM
Aw crap, the "I don't usually notice....that one." sentence in the previous comment was also Captain Mike's, not mine.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 8:28 PM
Hanley @75:
Raging Bee and his friends have the absolute truth about them. How does he know they have the truth? Because they all agree! Therefore, anyone who disagrees on where to draw the line is an idiot. Logic=fail.
FTR, I believe Raging Bee is female. Perhaps he/she/it can clarify?
Logic = fail, definitely.
What a fucktard. What a waste of perfectly good carbon that could have made a nice shiny engagement ring.
Wow, Hanley. Did you just call RB a waste of carbon? That's a bit of an extreme reaction to her illogic and sloppy reasoning, no? I would even call that an "unreasonable" reaction.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 8:32 PM
Speaking of Logic Fail:
FIRE is right there with Bill O'Reilly on how University of Minnesota is going to "enforce a political litmus test". When in fact there is absolutely no indication of such a thing.
Ed, I would like to read your take on this. Lukianoff claims that the proposal would require "a specific ideology to be considered qualified". That is utterly false.
Posted by: MarkusR | December 18, 2009 8:37 PM
FTR and so there is no further speculation about just what it is I think, I agree with basically everything Hanley and LJM have posted regarding what constitutes true harassment vs. constitutionally protected speech.
Agree with LJM on what should have happened in the sexist dorm flyer case. The guy taking them down and apologizing should have been the end of it.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 18, 2009 8:39 PM
But "disturbing the peace" is such an ambiguous thing, as FIRE would put it.
This is true. But are you saying the screamer should be free to take a megaphone on stage and scream into it? Should any number of people be allowed to walk onto the stage during any speech by any speaker at a public university and basically make it impossible for what the speaker says to be heard?
If I'm listening to a radio broadcast of a speaker that someone dislikes, should they be able to yell into a megaphone to prevent me from hearing the radio?
Posted by: LJM | December 18, 2009 9:03 PM
But are you saying the screamer should be free to take a megaphone on stage and scream into it?
It's all freedom of speech. I think it would be absolutely poor judgment on the behalf of the speaker, likely very rude as well, but those things don't matter one bit to FIRE.
Posted by: MarkusR | December 18, 2009 9:22 PM
It's all freedom of speech. I think it would be absolutely poor judgment on the behalf of the speaker, likely very rude as well, but those things don't matter one bit to FIRE.
Really? Does FIRE endorse the rights of students to heckle speakers until they can't be heard? Do they think students should be able to scream in the faces of anyone at anytime on the basis of freedom of speech? I'd appreciate a link.
Posted by: LJM | December 18, 2009 9:33 PM
Does FIRE endorse the rights of students to heckle speakers until they can't be heard?
Their "official" stance is no. But, the way they criticize school policies which prevent such things makes you wonder how they expect to allow speakers to speak, without policies that police student conduct.
For example, they list this policy at my school as violation of speech:
...; or the conduct has the effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s academic
performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive learning environment.
http://www.thefire.org/spotlight/codes/509.html
I don't want to spam anymore of this thread, so please don't take it the wrong way if this ends up being my last post on this thread. My opinion of FIRE has gone from indifferent to fairly negative the more of their site I've read. I doubt I can comment much more of them here without excessive sarcasm.
Posted by: MarkusR | December 18, 2009 9:47 PM
I'm angry about the way people use their free speech to act like assholes or harass people or make it harder for people to feel safe. I really hate people who do these.
Posted by: Katharine | December 18, 2009 10:21 PM
I suppose I'm glad I came late to this thread, else I'd have let it absorb too much of my day. So I'll be brief, and I may not make it back here.
-- I got the same impression as some others that FIRE's concern about free speech is driven more by protection of anti-PC speech than free speech in general.
-- As someone who, in a private prep school, had to sit politely in a small class while a teacher (an elderly bachelor, huh) regularly carried on about about homosexuals (they were of one with the "criminal mind"), and occasionally while working as grounds or janitorial staff, when school was out ate meals with some coaches and other staff and occasionally heard about someone being in some way "not natural," all before homosexuality was depathologized by the American Psychological Association, I have a bit of sympathy for speech codes.
For many students, going to college may be their first significant journey outside of a cultural bubble. For some this means discovering, sometimes quite viscerally, that there are others not like them; for others, the opposite. Gay children in particular frequently grow up in, as some author once put it, their own personal diaspora.
Fortunately in today's western society this is largely not true anymore, but still exists in pockets of what I suppose I could call isolation via indoctrination. I suppose my sensitivity shows my age (several months older than PZ).
p.s. Anyone see Maddow not too long ago with "Doctor" Dickhead Cohen, the ex-gay? I was with a group that heckled him nearly 20 years ago. "Heckled," btw, doesn't mean his ability to speak was substantially infringed. Fucking lying Moonie (yes, arranged marriage) fraudster, only exceeded by his source of "statistics" on gay deviancy, Paul Cameron.
p.p.s. I noticed the statement from Yale, from 1974, did not include sexual orientation. I wonder if they had any sort of non-discrimination policy at the time. MIT had added sexual orientation sometime in the 1960s.
Posted by: Uncle Glenny | December 18, 2009 11:01 PM
Katherine: I'm angry about the way people use their free speech to act like assholes or harass people or make it harder for people to feel safe. I really hate people who do these.
I just had to take longer and vent more spleen saying it.
Posted by: Uncle Glenny | December 18, 2009 11:03 PM
When somebody who is completely full of crap wants to speak, and the only way one can counter their full-of-crap opinions is to shout them down, does that mean that one is too stupid to engage the full-of-crap argument, or that one does not respect the audience enough to expect them to see that the opinions are full of crap?
Just asking.
Posted by: BaldApe | December 19, 2009 9:56 AM
MattXIV: Using the goverment to punish people for the views they experess, regardless of how stupid or evil or ignorant you think those views are, is wrong.
However, libel and slander laws exactly that: a means to punish some forms of expression... a point which you seem to have missed.
MattXIV: The notion that censorship should only be avoided because the right people aren't in charge,
You miss the point. It's not that the right people aren't in charge; it's because "save libel, slander, and incitement to imminent lawlessness, censorship is not allowed" is as close to an optimal universal expression that our society is capable of. This may be because no more optimal expression is possible; however, I've not seen that formally argued. (Part of the difficulty being agreement to what bridge across the is-ought divide is used for giving meaning to "optimal" (or in the other direction, "wrong").
MattXIV: Once censorship is permitted, the boot is on everybody's throat - the remaining question is only when it will be pressed down.
Again, what your argument misses is that libel and slander laws constitute a form of censorship that already exists. I can see at least four errors that might lead to that.
1) You didn't notice (or pay attention) when I pointed that out in my first comment this page.
2) You consider allowing laws against slander and libel to be a bad thing. If so, please explain the basis for this judgment.
3) You don't consider them censorship "by the government". However, while libel and slander require catalyst by citizen complaint, it is a law passed by the Legislative branch that allows the citizen to petition the Judiciary for redress of the offense; and, in the event of a verdict adverse for the defendant, the power of the Executive may be invoked in the form of collection procedures and seizure of assets.
4) You don't consider prohibitions on libel and slander really to be "censorship". Which is much my point: there are exceptions carved out of the "Free Speech" universal, and still considered a good thing. This conceptually implies a philosophical possibility for additional exceptions as not really "censorship" also being considered good things... absent a rigorous proof of uniqueness for the existing set of exceptions. (And if you have such a proof, I'd at least briefly be fascinated while you present it.)
Posted by: abb3w | December 19, 2009 2:33 PM
libel and slander laws are exactly that
FTFM.
Posted by: abb3w | December 19, 2009 2:46 PM
@ lynxreign - "I think what bothers me most about this is that you're expecting FIRE to be given the most charitable interpretation of their site and their postings while expecting university codesas listed to be
given the least charitable interpretation."
Exactly what I'm thinking. The ACLU I know; they are for the rights of the oppressed and the rights of bigots, and anyone in between. FIRE has nothing but a website whining about how anti-sexual harassment policies are gonna crush the First Ammendment.
Was a frat boy kicked off campus for telling a girl she had a hot ass? Not at UNO. (And if it's somewhere in there that I missed, yeah, it would be wrong, but I didn't see any actual incidents of that nature on the red-lighted campuses I checked.) The problem was FIRE just didn't like the *language* of the policy--that policy, mind you, while instituted to cover the asses of the PTB, is worded to protect the people on campus. The heart of the matter would be enforcement: If they expelled a student for making a single offensive statement like that, it would be overkill and a violation of basic civil rights. But on the other hand, if said hypothetical frat boy followed said hypothetical girl from class to class, continuing to come on to her, his ass should land in jail, or at least off campus.
It's the difference between standing around and hollering GAWD HATES FAGS vs. following an individual around, sitting behind him in class, and making personal attacks while he's trying to take notes and listen to the lecture. The former is protected speech; the latter is an offense that should get someone nailed to the wall.
@ Raging Bee - "Like children chafing at their parents' rules, they really do seem to think that the mere act of trying to impose mutual limits of behavior is a dire threat to freedom of speech."
Yes, yes, yes. You said in one sentence part of what I've been trying to say in paragraphs: You can have your opinions, but you have to treat your fellow students with a bare modicum of decency.
@ James Hanley - "And I remember vividly a situation at U. of Oregon while I was there in which a student used the phrase "a coon's age" and all hell broke loose over his "racial insult." (For those not from the South or Midwest, a coon's age is just a long period of time, and has nothing to do with race)."
I was born and have lived my entire life in the south, excepting a few months during that hurricane Katrina thing. This may be an issue specific to my area, but... calling someone a coon is on the level of calling them a n*gg*r. It is offensive. It is not in any way neutral speech.
"Coon's age" was a colloquial phrase.... once upon a time. It's like saying you can call black folks Negroes because that's what they were called in Huckleberry Finn. They used to sell "N*gg*r Head" canned oysters down here, too. In rural gas stations in the beknighted areas of Louisiana and Missippi, they still sell giant-fish-lipped Mammy dolls and Gollywogs. (I'm a lily-white cracker and it offends me, deeply. I don't want to think about the effect that crap might have on the people actually mocked by such racism.) There's nothing like pulling off the interstate to get gas and being confronted with a wall of Little Black Sambos.
"Are there any queers in the theater tonight? Get 'em up against the wall!
That one in the spotlight, he doesn't look right! Get him up against the wall!
And that one looks Jewish... and that one's a coon! Who let all this riff raff into the room?"
Mmmyep. "Coon" is a totally neutral, unhateful term.
And my ass is sculpted out of marble.
Posted by: db | December 20, 2009 4:19 AM
db, the phrase was something like "in a coon's age". Nobody was calling anyone a coon. Let me guess, you probably think the word "niggardly" ought to be avoided too?
Posted by: Adrienne | December 21, 2009 8:46 AM
Someone stated that FIRE seems to be mostly concerned with censorship anti-PC speech on college campuses. Well, that's because anti-PC speech is way more likely to BE censored or punished in the first place on college campuses. I'm sure that if conservatism were the reigning orthodoxy on college campuses, FIRE would be protecting the other side just as dilligently.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 21, 2009 8:49 AM
db, Adrienne - you are aware that the 'coon' referred to is Procyon lotor, aren't you? -DJ
Posted by: DingoJack | December 21, 2009 9:27 AM
Yep, I figured as much, DJ. Which makes me wonder this: how long do raccoons live in the wild? Where did the phrase "coon's age" come from, I wonder?
Actually, I was unaware of the slang meaning of "coon" until I was in college. I had just never heard that term before. Sheltered life, I guess?
Posted by: Adrienne | December 21, 2009 9:42 AM
Adrienne - around 2 to 3 years (apparently) although they can live much longer in captivity (apparently). It seems that in the 1800's trappers had no idea how long they lived, but the suspected it was a long time. Hence 'a coon's age'.
Weirdly, it's not nearly as offensive here - it's a popular brand of cheese! (Go figure) :) - DJ
Posted by: DingoJack | December 21, 2009 10:01 AM
FTR, I believe Raging Bee is female. Perhaps he/she/it can clarify?
That would be he, Adrienne.
That's a bit of an extreme reaction to her illogic and sloppy reasoning, no?
No, not at all.
Shygetz -
So you don't support speech restrictions, because you are afraid that you would be the one censored? Does that mean if you were the one entrusted with the censor's pen, it would be all right?
Forgive me if I wouldn't trust you any more than I would trust an ignorant, lying creationist who believes the world is flat. The problem with censoring speech we don't like, is that many humans don't like to be challenged. Yet to learn new things, grow and change our points of view, we must be challenged. Otherwise we become static, intractable and eventually as ignorant as the ignorant, lying flat earth creationist.
Posted by: DuWayne | December 21, 2009 10:10 AM
Pacal @35:
There as been a resurgence of interest in the idea of "race" and the idea of "significant" differences between the "races" Evolutionary Psychology contains some people who who are absolutely ga ga over so-called racial differences.
Actually, Razib Khan of SB's "Gene Expression" blog is very interested in this topic, but I think he confines his racial differences postings to his original blog site, which isn't hosted by Scienceblogs.
Posted by: Adrienne | December 21, 2009 12:43 PM
abb3w,
You presume I support the existence of libel and slander laws. I don't, although I don't have much of a problem with the US standards, which require a demonstration that the speaker knowingly be advancing a falsehood and have malicious intent - their abuse in the UK provides a good pragmatic case of how libel law can be used to try to stamp out ideas and I consider the UK's libel laws to be oppressive. The knowing falsehood and malicious intent distinctions are a meaningful difference, since it does not prevent someone from expressing an idea that they hold, but I consider even US libel law to be unjust and am glad that it's very difficult to make a case under it. I reject it overall however, since ideas exist independent of the intent of the people expressing them, so libel laws still restrict the range of discourse, even with the extreme restrictions on their scope in place in the US. And US libel law does apply the boot, although to a limited degree, since because of it there are ideas that I can't freely express - they're ones that I don't believe in and would only express out of malicious intent (and thus I'm not very interested in expressing), but the restriction is still there.
So, I do hold that the acceptable level of censorship is no censorship. I further hold that censorship of any sincerely held opinion is a far graver offense than prohibiting knowing falsehoods, the line currently drawn in the law, even if I think the current law is unjustified. The justification for the distinction is clear - the utilitarian case that restricting knowing falsehoods won't seriously impair people's ability to develop and express their own views is relatively easy to make. A sharper distinction can be made between saying "People who do X should be shot" and a credible statement of "If you do X, I'll shoot you" as the later is a statement of intent to commit a non-speech action which should be punishable - which is why a non-credible threat shouldn't be punishable (and isn't under current US law). I don't adopt a utilitarian line, but do accept distinctions in how harmful an offense against the right in question is, and a set of restrictions which is narrowly tailored to avoid restricting people's ability to form and express their own opinions is less burdensome than restrictions based on the idea being expressed. I firmly reject the proposition that psychology or any other method can be used to discern ideas which a person should be punished by the goverment for expressing and that speech policy aimed at restricting ideas is a categorically more severe offense than speech policy which studiously tries to avoid it but inevitably does a little like current US libel laws.
Posted by: MattXIV | December 21, 2009 1:04 PM
MattXIV: You presume I support the existence of libel and slander laws. I don't
I don't presume that; in fact, I explicitly note the possibility that you did not as option (2) of the four.
MattXIV: I don't have much of a problem with the US standards, which require a demonstration that the speaker knowingly be advancing a falsehood and have malicious intent - their abuse in the UK provides a good pragmatic case of how libel law can be used to try to stamp out ideas and I consider the UK's libel laws to be oppressive.
Yes, lacking the Zenger precedent and First Amendment, the statute and case law on libel stinks throughout most of the former British Empire, and goes too far. However, this looks like you are starting to shifting from case (2) to case (4)....
MattXIV: The knowing falsehood and malicious intent distinctions are a meaningful difference, since it does not prevent someone from expressing an idea that they hold
So, you do recognize a distinction between this form of free expression and others. However, you don't seem to be arguing very strongly that it would be better to NOT have means that effectively reduce the likelihood of this form of "free expression".
MattXIV: I reject it overall however, since ideas exist independent of the intent of the people expressing them, so libel laws still restrict the range of discourse
Yes; which makes it appear that you are presuming an range of discourse utterly unrestricted by consequences is an intrinsic and good; that is, "good" by absolute definition as a specific plank of your bridge across the is-ought divide, rather than derived as inference (absolute or approximate) from some other definition. In which case, we use the word "good" to refer to similar but different concepts; and further discussion would require a careful examination of the differences between our bridges.
MattXIV: I further hold that censorship of any sincerely held opinion is a far graver offense than prohibiting knowing falsehoods, the line currently drawn in the law, even if I think the current law is unjustified.
Since you hold the graver as an extension of your reasoning about the lesser, the lesser case of libel needs be addressed first.
MattXIV: I don't adopt a utilitarian line, but do accept distinctions in how harmful an offense against the right in question is, and a set of restrictions which is narrowly tailored to avoid restricting people's ability to form and express their own opinions is less burdensome than restrictions based on the idea being expressed.
However, you seem to be accepting that the lack of societal restriction on "knowing falsehood and malicious intent" does more harm than the current limited restriction; possibly because of a conflict in rights.
I consider such conflicts to indicate that the particular expression of one right or the other is imperfect, where "do X" is really an abbreviated form of "do X, EXCEPT when...".
The perfect expression of all rights would never conflict, but would contain resolutions to all such potential conflicts as explicitly stated exception cases. For mathematical reasons (related to the halting problem), I don't think such perfect expressions can exist within the universe; however, arbitrary approximations can. Since closer approximations of rights become more complicated, trade-offs come into play in terms of social evolution.
MattXIV: I firmly reject the proposition that psychology or any other method can be used to discern ideas which a person should be punished by the goverment for expressing
Including the method of determining in court of law that the expression is knowing falsehood made with malicious intent?
Posted by: abb3w | December 22, 2009 10:24 AM