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> MIT buckled, becoming yet another major institution in American life to demonstrate that the commitment to free speech it trumpets on its website The what?

by geofft 5y ago

> MIT buckled, becoming yet another major institution in American life to demonstrate that the commitment to free speech it trumpets on its website The what? I'm an MIT alum and I cannot remember anything about a commitment to free speech on the website. I don't see one now, and I can hardly see any relevant search results for `"free speech" site:mit.edu` - a few blogs and research papers, but nothing about a commitment, certainly nothing trumpeted. I certainly did not see one when I applied. I applied to a school that claimed to be good at science and engineering. If you want to argue that MIT or any other institution or perhaps all institutions should champion free speech, sure. If you want to hold people accountable for promises they did make (cf. a Reddit co-founder claiming that Reddit wasn't intended to be a "bastion of free speech" years after describing it as exactly that, Twitter calling itself the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party"), by all means hold people accountable. But the idea that everyone should be on exactly your side of what is actually a complex and multifaceted question because that particular view is obviously what everyone in our culture believes is, frankly, illiberal.

wepple 5y ago
I agree that it doesn’t seem trumpeted, and the author is really pushing his point quite far, but your point that they don’t seem to take a stand on free speech would appear to be incorrect: https://handbook.mit.edu/expression https://handbook.mit.edu/expression
- geofft 5y ago
  Fair - but my reading of that page is that it's actually not a commitment to free speech (as the author would see it, at least), it's basically saying that insisting on exercising your right to freedom of expression when you know people would be offended is unwise and discouraged in this subculture. If anything, the incident described in the article is pretty consistent with this page.
- whitexn--g28h 5y ago
  Did you even read the second sentence of that page?
pessimizer 5y ago
I think that there's a subconscious belief that US institutions should be loyal to the white race, especially as expressed through the American spirit of our forefathers and their ideals of fair play, and that any cancellation based on expressing the same racial beliefs as the country was built on is basically sedition as a prelude to white liquidation. Some white people feel like they're going to be forced out of the US like the US was forced out of Vietnam and Afghanistan. Instead it's a workers' rights issue primarily (it shouldn't be so goddamned easy to fire people), and secondarily it's a problem of the commons that every venue for free speech is managed by an authoritarian institution solely motivated by its own survival and prosperity rather than any animating belief or core ethics. This is your culture on laissez-faire. Whether it's MIT or Facebook managing your culture, you're still free to give your opinion in the shower every morning.
- iammisc 5y ago
  There's also a conscious belief on behalf of immigrant families like my own that the reason we came to this country is for the free speech, so when we see American institutions that do not seem to care, we wonder if America actually lives up to its promises.
  - LeoNatan25 5y ago
    Spoiler: it doesn’t, and it hasn’t for a very long time.
    - iammisc 5y ago
      Okay that's great, but it doesntm mean we ought to abandom those values out of some made up historical notion that only white people want such things.
      - LeoNatan25 5y ago
        Of course not. But that’s what the wave of woke left wing Twitter mobs (and the likes of AOC, etc.) are pushing for. You have authoritarians on the left and authoritarians on the right, and an ever shrinking center. Not sure how we get out of this predicament.
q1w2 5y ago
It is iconic that ivy league schools don't even claim to respect the notion of free speech. When I was a student many many years ago, it was such an accepted truism, that it didn't even need to be mentioned.
- geofft 5y ago
  First, MIT isn't Ivy League, which I don't just mean as a pedantic point about a football league - the Ivy League are all liberal arts schools. MIT is a technology school. It makes sense that there are institutions whose purpose is to provide a platform to any speaker. It does not make sense that every institution should do that. That's my complaint - this author who claim to care that distinct points of view are well-represented has rounded off a specific school into Generic University With The Same Classical Liberal Worldview As Every Other University. Two, please tell me how many times in the history of your Ivy League school, since its founding until your attendance, they invited an African-American speaker.

geofft 5y ago

I'm a child of immigrants. I grew up watching my non-white parents adopt white mannerisms and cultural norms, join a white church, live in a white neighborhood, etc. in a very racially diverse town because any other choice would put them at a disadvantage. My complaint is not that this country fails to live up to its promises, my complaint is that the promise itself is twisted. There are many ways you can value "free speech." This author has a particular one in mind, and thinks that everyone should agree with that specific interpretation. I, too, value free speech, and an introductory step there is that people can and perhaps should have different opinions on what exactly that means. As an extreme example, if one person, motivated by a desire to uphold free speech, says that invited speakers may use racial slurs because words shouldn't be censored, and another person, motivated by a desire to uphold free speech, says that speakers may not use racial slurs because they insult people for who they are which is antithetical to meaningful debate, both of those views seem to me like they are valid approaches to "free speech." What I object to is the view that exactly one of those interpretations is right and that there must not even be debate about it. It's a short step from there to saying that certain racial slurs or (less egregiously but more insidiously) stereotypes or assumptions are within the bounds of free speech and other ones are not, that certain attacks are noble and others are blasphemous, etc. That's the road that gets us to calls to cancel e.g. the 1619 Project from people who two minutes earlier were complaining about "cancel culture." That's how we get the fundamental dishonesty that makes a lot of people feel like "free speech" is a tool of white supremacy or whatever - because an actual illiberal approach to society is being called "free speech" and nobody is willing to call it what it is.

iammisc 5y ago
> both of those views seem to me like they are valid approaches to "free speech Except they're not. One vision is quite literally very controlled speech. It may be appropriately called 'civil speech' or 'appropriate speech' but it is not free speech. You cannot take a thing, call another thing that thing, and then attempt to claim the first thing is actually the second thing. The first view you espoused does not preclude the second view from being discussed within its framework, whereas the second one does preclude the first. This very salient difference means that even by your metrics the first is superior. The 1619 project should be allowed, it should just be mocked for being completely made up, and the newspaper that published it should be relegated to the garbage bin of history for printing something do devoid of reality. That doesn't mean it should be canceled.