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Campuses must combat growing zeal for censorship
- setpatchaddress 9y agoIt's not censorship, it's filtering fake news. It's telling that it's always far-right conservatives making this complaint.
- chroem- 9y agoPlease be satire.
- musgrove 9y agoCombat it? They could begin by simply not allowing it. They seem to forget who runs these schools, and it's not the students. At least it used to not be. That's a great way to invite disaster. It's not a protagonist/antagonist proposition, but expectations need to be in place from the start. And leadership at places like Middlebury and Berkeley double-checked.
- tuxracer 9y agoThe students are customers. It's a business. If these customers will continue to get themselves into tens of thousands of dollars in debt to pay for something of sometimes questionable value then let them block or have whatever speeches they want. Of course on principle this is a disgusting form a censorship that could come to bite them on the ass if it continues to be culturally accepted. They seem to forget that things like interracial marriage, or people of color even being allowed onto these schools were once unpopular ideas. If they continue to create a culture of violence and intimidation against anyone who dares utter unpopular ideas in their vicinity they'll snuff out any hope of future social revolutions from happening. But this seems to be what they want. It's in some ways an ultra-orthodox, conservative, perversion of left wing ideals.
- drawnwren 9y agoI think you're wrong who the customers are and what the product is. The customers are the Dept of Education (and banks) offering low interest loans in return for guaranteed profit. This would stop if they stopped seeing returns. Unless they aren't allowed to consider academic prestige when giving loans, then I'm completely wrong. Does student censorship affect that directly? Probably not, but students running the school more than teachers certainly could.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThe Department of Education is the entity receiving the majority of profit from student loans, not banks.
- drawnwren 9y agoMy bad, I edited the comment to reflect that.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoNo harm, no foul.
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- ankushnarula 9y agoWhat about the rights of students who wish to listen?
- douche 9y agoFuck the shit-heels that can't deal with ideas that disturb their ideology. Pushing ideas underground isn't all that effective at suppressing them. Even worse is waving their liberal zealotry as some kind of emblem of pride.
- jamescostian 9y agoI feel like this sentence sums up the opinion presented in the article: > When speakers need police escort on and off college campuses, an alarm bell should be going off that something has gone seriously awry. Whether you agree with her political stance or not is immaterial. Let's imagine Hitler (or if you like Hitler, imagine someone you think is/was horrible) was giving the speech. And then imagine Hitler writing a post on Medium talking about how terrible it was that he couldn't explain how important genocide was. Would you feel sorry for him? Or would you tell him that just because he has freedom of speech doesn't mean he's guaranteed a platform to exercise it on a college campus with many students who really hate him?
- dangero 9y agoThe one nuance you are leaving out is that students invited her to speak. If Hitler was invited by students to speak then I would think he needs to be allowed or we have to be honest that we aren't supporting free speech except for ideas we are comfortable with, which is not free speech at all.
- Helmet 9y agoReductio ad Hitlerum The people being barred, and often assulted, are fairly mainstream conservatives, not nazis.
- ivanbakel 9y agoThe point is not the comparison, it's that the article's argument is totally independent of politic. Why should we find it incredible that students might object to a speaker, regardless of who they are?
- stale2002 9y agoI would find it incredible if these students then went around assaulting people who attended these events with baseball bats, yes.
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- datatan 9y agoThe behavior on these campuses is exactly why Democrats have lost over 1000 seats nationwide, lost the House, the Senate and the Presidency. The Democratic party has been getting more and more radical ever since MoveOn.org and the DailyKOS became things. Long time Democrats that I know personally will have nothing to do with the party anymore because the party doesn't hold blatant criminals like ANTIFA accountable and refuses to denounce them. Sad state of affairs. We're heading towards a single party system simply because one side has completely lost their moderate language. Everyone is Hitler, so now no one is.
- Helmet 9y agoShame you're being downvoted, you're absolutely right. I'm one of those many liberals who are done w the party.
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- sctb 9y agoUsers may have flagged this comment because it injects partisan politics which are generally off-topic on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rayiner 9y ago> From the balcony, I saw a petite blonde female walk by, her face covered by a Palestinian head scarf and carrying an amplifier on her back for her bullhorn. Interesting additional context (scroll down to the part about Urban Outfitters and cultural appropriation): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_keffiyeh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_keffiyeh.
- douche 9y agoOr, you know, they could simply discipline students who have blatantly broken their disciplinary codes. I'm still waiting on a decent explanation of why there were no expulsions after the Dartmouth Black Lives Matter protest last year...
- JustBirk 9y agoMaybe we should let the free market decide. Start your own conservative university and spout whatever nonsense you want there. Not giving you a megaphone for your hate is not censorship.
- apsec112 9y agoThe majority of universities being discussed are government institutions.
- tstactplsignore 9y agoNo, a majority are distinctly private- CMC, Middlebury, and Dartmouth. The UC schools are the only public schools with high profile deplatforming debates recently. Let's be real, a very large portion of the conservatives in this debate wish to squeeze their ideology into private universities where the majority of faculty and students don't want a thing to do with it.
- nilkn 9y agoMany of these speakers are actually invited by students. So I don't think it can easily be concluded that the majority of students don't want a thing to do with them. The majority of students are not involved in these violent protests.
- JustBirk 9y agoSo what? Do you get to stand on the desk at the DMV and yell at minorities because it's your right to free-speech? The reason that conservative ideas aren't well represented in universities is because universities are places of higher thinking. The reason conservatives are attacking it is not because they care about free-speech, it's because they care about their speech. If the tables were turned you can bet on their silence.
- JJJJJJSsss 9y agoShakespeare once wrote to suspend one's belief in someone's accusations until you ask the accused about them. The accuser has a lawyerly attention to detail and wrote an interesting story that is sure to bring political outrage, but what does the other side have to say in their defense?
- rendall 9y ago>> Shakespeare once wrote to suspend one's belief in someone's accusations until you ask the accused about them. << I could totally use that quote in an essay I'm writing. Do you have it?
- BadassFractal 9y agoI enjoyed Jonathan Haidt's lecture from Duke on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8
- adekok 9y agoOr Thunderf00t's deconstruction at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5MPzQnokMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5MPzQnokMU
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- pbiggar 9y ago> “Yes,” Mac Donald replied. “And do black children that are killed by other blacks matter to you?” Infuriating! The problem with all this "oh, but free speech" bullshit, is that incredibly illiberal people are using it as a tool to attack liberalism. Fox News is crying about "snowflakes", while the snowflakes and protestors know what HN doesn't seem to know: they are using our liberal views as weapons against us.
- pbiggar 9y agoFrom a NYTimes article [1] on the topic: "Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good. "In such cases there is no inherent value to be gained from debating them in public. In today’s age, we also have a simple solution that should appease all those concerned that students are insufficiently exposed to controversial views. It is called the internet, where all kinds of offensive expression flourish unfettered on a vast platform available to nearly all." and also "While Yale bemoaned the occasional “paranoid intolerance” of student protesters, the university also criticized the “arrogant insensitivity” of free speech advocates who failed to acknowledge that requiring of someone in public debate to defend their human worth conflicts with the community’s obligation to assure all of its members equal access to public speech." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/opinion/what-liberal-snowflakes-get-right-about-free-speech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/opinion/what-liberal-snow...
- wallacoloo 9y agoThis post was flagged and removed from the front page. Now, I don't know all of HN's policies - I know political posts were not allowed here around election time, and maybe the flagging was due not to the content of the article but rather the exceptional negativity of its comments - but doesn't this seem, on the surface, at least somewhat ironic?
- notgood 9y agoA few of the HN mods are SJW or at least their sympathizers; clearly not @paulg but a few of the younger members.
- safek 9y agoCurious; who are the HN mods?
- dang 9y agoMods didn't flag that post. As for 'SJW', when people accuse us of moderating HN ideologically their logic typically goes like this: 1. I agree with X. 2. An X was flagged. 3. Mods did it. 4. Mods are anti-X. There's more than one non sequitur in that.
- notgood 9y ago
- jrjf940 9y agough, you had me until: > “There is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police.” I'm sure there's a way that this statement could be true but that's only if every other gov't agency has literally zero dedication.