Senate College: Free Exchange of Ideas or Liberals Cancelling Chicken Sandwiches?

I just cannot imagine what it must be like to find and idea and go "JESUS **** **** I CANNOT COPE SHUT IT DOWN NO NO SHUT THEM ALL DOWN".

Intellectual agoraphobia.

 

Hitler needs a chance to identify himself so that you can can go back in time and kill him.

 

ima be real tho i own not one but two fedora-esque hats

 

I mean, if Men's Wearhouse would stop just including them when you buy suits that'd be great.

 

wait what seriously?

i have a cheap collapsable felt camping hat that looks like indiana jones' hat and a much nicer australian outback-style hat (no idea what the proper name is) which i pass off as a fedora at retro swing dancing events

 

Akubra.

Yes. Pretty much.

You don't get rid of bad ideas by getting them to form hidden, private facebook groups and sharing their views there.

You challenge them by not resorting to a more high pitched hyperbole. Assume people can be reached. Don't assume you just need to scream at them using made up words like "cisgendered" until they shut up.

 

I mean, I'm equally baffled that someone with loathsome views could get a portion of my student fees and the university's alumni donations while various classrooms are in utter disrepair, but apparently if I complain about it I'm weak or whatever.

 

thanks. they told me that when i bought it. ill try to remember this time

 

I don't actually follow your point here, and it might be localised to American university administration.

Can you elaborate?

 

This discussion is mixing a lot of issues that aren't really similar at all. This video, for instance, is about a series of racist incidents at a dorm during Halloween celebrations, which the administration down-played. Universities are certainly supposed to be a place for vigorous academic debate and healthy exchange of ideas. Allowing groups with radical views to hold meetings, or inviting speakers with provocative ideas fits into this mold nicely.

However, they are also places where human beings live. One's home is expected to have a certain sanctity. It is neither unreasonable nor a terribly high bar to ask that someone not be allowed to aggressively question your humanity or self-worth on the basis of race, gender, religion or ethnicity in the place that you sleep. Nor can such actions really be said to contribute to any sort of intelligent dialogue. It's just naked hostility. We can and should draw a distinction between these sorts of incidents and other concerns.

 

I feel like that's an x factor at play here that doesn't get the air time in these stories (for "some reason") but is absolutely affecting the discourse - these people who come to campuses and give event speeches are often getting a speaker's fee, and that money doesn't come from nowhere.

I guess to explicitly delineate my position - at my undergraduate university, we had a designated free speech area on campus. You'd get your odd doomsday prophet crack pot, the evangelicals on about how dem queers is going to hell, anti-abortion advocates, anti-corporate advocates, the works. Students would object to them in public discourse, and nobody got university money. I think that's always an acceptable way to be exposed to "offensive" intellectual ideas on a college campus and if people were protesting the school allowing it I'd be quick to argue that they were in the wrong. However, with the incidents I usually see getting coverage in these types of threads, it seems to much more frequently be the case that a particular speaker is booked by the university, in which case I 100% believe students (of any political affiliation!) are free to protest if they think the university's funds are being utilized contrary to their political inclinations (or contrary to the university's best interests, frankly). Once money's involved it stops being a purely speech-related issue, IMO.

 

Do you find Maryam Namazie loathsome?

 

I know you long ago decided that you wanted to die on the college students are mollycoddled hill but surely you're aware that a broad strokes counterargument, by its very nature, does not address every granular instance of every permutation of a given situation?

 

The fact that there are these instances is why I'm saying the situation of said mollycoddled groups throwing fits and getting their way is problematic.

There is no speaker in existence that at least one student at a university won't have a problem with. Just stop having speakers, I guess.

 

That would probably be why I did not contend the mere presence of objections was necessarily sufficient grounds to not book a speaker and instead stated that I was sympathetic to the desire to voice displeasure with the way university funds were being handled. Administrations are (theoretically) supposed to be able to navigate the push and pull of student objections with university interests; if students "throwing fits and getting their way" is a problem, the onus is not on students to stop having an opinion about how and where their money is spent.

 

You don't think students are babied, Ramza?

I think it's absolutely the most insular bubble imaginable, and I know someone who got a PhD in religious studies who went to work in university admin because she couldn't handle the world outside the university.

 

OH YEAH WHAT ABOUT MY WEIRD PERSONAL ANECDOTE RAMZA

QED, AS YOU MATH PEOPLE SAY

 

This.

 

From the pure, legal standpoint, the onus is of course on the university, not the students. That doesn't mean we can't discuss the students having opinions, which is part of the conversation.

 

This is certainly an issue that I've been thinking about a lot, with me currently being in my first year of college.

I'm what you call a right-libertarian: I hold more conservative values personally but I don't want those values imposed by the states, and I don't want the government to tell people who they can and can't marry, what they can and can't put in their body, who they can and can't associate with, etc. Colleges are generally very liberal, especially depending on where they are, which in my case, is western Washington State, so I'm in the minority when it comes to ideological viewpoints.

What really disturbs me is that colleges are disinviting speakers who holds views that don't agree with what the majority on campus think, such as Germaine Greer or most recently Richard Dawkins [1]. I've always seen colleges as places where radical ideas should be explored and debated, not banned. Now you could argue that these colleges, in particular private institutions, have the right to choose who comes to speak, but that's irrelevant. The question at hand is whether or not it's the right thing to do, and I say no.

No matter how bigoted one may perceive someone's views, that does not mean that they don't have the right to a platform of some sort to voice that viewpoint. You don't have to approve of what their saying, but they have just as much of a right to express their views as you do. And what many colleges are doing is discouraging debate and stunting the growth of the minds of young adults.

[1]. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/r...rence-for-offending-feminists/article/2581704

 

I neither know nor care about the answer to that question, would be more my point. I refuse to subscribe to an ethical calculus wherein someone is obligated to financially support the proliferation of speech that they disagree with but is criticized for voicing their objections to that use of their money. Furthermore, I think the fact that we analyze student objections as if these arguments were occurring in a vacuum is an oversimplification.

 

I thought the point of college was to have your beliefs challenged.

 

im dead