17 ms·

Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

92 points by gru232 4y ago

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
That this statement is in any way controversial makes me weep for the future.
WCSTombs 4y ago
From the PDF [1]: > We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious. (...) A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not extend to suppressing or restricting such speakers from expressing their views. Reasonable stance IMO. As far as I can tell, MIT did not adopt the Chicago Statement [2], so it's nice to see a proposal like this, which seems substantially similar. [1] https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/reports/2022-09_Proposed_MIT_Statement_on_Freedom_of_Expression_and_Academic_Freedom.pdf https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/report... [2] https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/FOECommitteeReport.pdf https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/r...
- yanderekko 4y ago
  Reasonable but sadly I expect it to be a dealbreaker. The triumph of safetyism over speech has been so swift and complete in many left-dominated circles that this sort of appeal is subject to being dismissed as being unbearably privileged at best and regressive dogwhistling at worst.
- AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
Metacelsus 4y ago
For context: https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation
redeux 4y ago
[flagged]
- makeworld 4y ago
  I find the differences between these statements minimal. The former implies the latter very easily, making both dangerous.
  - ghusto 4y ago
    The difference is that the first can be easily rebuffed with logic and evidence. The second can too, but it's obvious that logic and evidence aren't at the top of the agenda there. So there's no discussion necessary in the latter, and you can just shut it down. Why allow the first one then? It's about giving them enough rope to hang themselves with, _in public_. The public bit is important, because having them claim persecution and censorship, then saying those things in private anyway without rebuttable, may swing certain people.
  - zajio1am 4y ago
    I can see that difference between these statements can be minimal for collectivists, who consider benefit of society as the most important value. But for individualists, the former does not implies the latter. It is more like: All X are good for nothing leaches on society, but their individual rights and freedom are inalienable and that is more important that their negative effect on society.
    - hirundo 4y ago
      People from the individualist perspective almost always argue for its overall social utility, that the benefits of invididual rights and freedoms have negative and positive social effects that net positive. I've never heard one (and I've heard many) argue that the net social effects are negative but that the policy is still preferrable.
      - prottog 4y ago
neilv 4y ago
That page seems to use Mailjet marketing tracking links. The full message could be: free expression, with intimate surveillance. I'm not saying that's a bad message, and it's happening in practice, in some forms. Maybe people should explore whether that means everyone should take responsibility for their speech. And if so, whether that means responsibility before the audience, the public, or some authority.
jonathanstrange 4y ago
One, perhaps the only, problem with freedom of speech in academia is that can be very actively exploited by bad faith actors, i.e., people who are not interested at all in truth and merely abuse the university system as a platform for furthering political goals and "whitewashing" their position. These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. They often come from a non-academic background, have a party or "think-tank" background with some obvious political agenda, and their funding also comes from corresponding organizations. Some of them are even just politicians. The problem with these kind of speakers is not that they speak at a university. The audience is smart enough not to fall for bullshit and to separate politics from science. The problem is that these people use events to give their name and their agenda some credibility and make it easier for the public to confuse their opinions with science. It's a branding problem, political talks can give a university a seriously bad reputation. Since it would be inconvenient and undemocratic to ban all political speeches and events from universities, I think a trade-off has to be made and some cut-off points are necessary, even if that means that a few interesting talks get lost due to being identified as false positives. It's perfectly fine and reasonable to ban all political speakers from the political fringes (both far right and far left) unless an event clearly serves a scientific purpose and the speaker also has the fitting credentials in terms of actual publications. I understand this goal is hard to reach in the US, though, since many universities there are private and lobbyism has extended its reach to them. But it's an ideal to strive for. The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them.
- roenxi 4y ago
  > The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them. When we talk about these obviously bad actors, are we talking people like Socrates and Galileo? Or are we keeping to strictly political undesirables like Assange, Snowden and the whiny pacifists who nobody likes? The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Everyone you've just mentioned has a highly politically charged position, but is not associated with being a bad faith actor.
neilv 4y ago
One of my favorite incidents involving free speech happened several years ago, and had an MIT connection. Some alt-right people organized a big so-called "Free Speech Rally" in Boston, perhaps as a Trump-emboldened show of force, or publicity effort. But a massive number of counter-demonstrators turned out (including many students and staff from MIT), dwarfing the alt-right people by orders of magnitude, and basically told them "no", in so many accents. "The answer to offensive speech is more speech" doesn't always work that well, nor that literally. And some kinds of speech in a university environment will sometimes call for listening and dialogue, unlike that one demonstration. But that one day, the alt-right people didn't seem to have genuine dialogue in mind, and it was the free speech that they called for (perhaps cynically and disingenuously) that corrected their particular argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Free_Speech_Rally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Free_Speech_Rally
- Zigurd 4y ago
  Are you implying the alt right employs bad faith trolling? Cry bullying? Way too often, free speech debates are hijacked to normalize a fascistic movement in American politics. The left is feckless because they don't think like Peter Thiel or Steve Bannon. Certainly there are days when the mass of normal opinion outweighs the straussian tactics of the right because the position of the right has gone ridiculously too far and it is obvious that it isn't normal. But it is difficult to count on that happening reliably.
  - neilv 4y ago
    Agreed, visible mass of public opinion isn't a panacea. And there seems to be a widespread anti-intellectualism movement, from multiple directions, that's turning all of us into bickering reactionaries. Someone has to start bringing us back to aspiring to sophistication of intellect and character, to both engage in genuine dialogue, and to recognize when someone else isn't. MIT, as one vanguard, doesn't have the last word on this (it has its own biases), but IMHO not surprising to see them taking a confident stand for a kind of intellectualism that's in a relatively good direction. We need the influence of others, to address concerns/perspectives that are not as much on the radar of MIT.
tablespoon 4y ago
> We saw this last fall with the wide range of views around the Carlson lecture. If anyone else was wondering what was being referenced above, I'm guessing it's this: https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation: > Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Department Head Robert van der Hilst canceled the department’s annual John Carlson Lecture due to controversy surrounding the invited speaker, Professor Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, and his views on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts within academia.... > In a Newsweek op-ed titled “The Diversity Problem on Campus,” published August 2021, co-authors Abbot and Stanford Professor Iván Marinovic wrote that DEI in academia seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups, violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment, compromises the university’s mission, and undermines the public's trust in universities and their graduates.
- akomtu 4y ago
  "University of Pisa has canceled the Prof. Galileo's lecture on celestial bodies due to the controversy surrounding his views on heliocentrism, after continued protests by the students who reject the unholy idea that the planet they live on isn't the center of the Universe. Department of Heresy and Inquisition has temporarily suspended Galileo and referred him to Church."
  - superb-owl 4y ago
    This is a false equivalence. Galileo was concerned with physical fact, whereas this professor's controversial opinions are sociological and fairly subjective--they boil down to a value judgement. That's not to condemn (or defend) the professor. This just isn't a fair characterization of the debate.
    - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
      A fact not yet widely verified and an opinion cannot, in general, be distinguished
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
todd8 4y ago
I was at MIT over 50 years ago. I used to give them money, not a huge amount, but enough to create what has become a permanent endowment under my name. However years ago, I had lunch with the then president of MIT and realized that MIT had changed. It was no longer the MIT I experienced. The student body was different, and clearly, they had tweaked the knobs and selected for a different profile of student. It made me sad because I remember my fellow students, some rich, some poor, some from Philips Exeter, some like me from inner city Detroit schools, some from Asia some from Southern California. The thing was though, they weren't at all well rounded, the very trait that the president seemed so proud of in the current student body. My classmates were eccentric, creative, nerdy, and most of all so intelligent. My math classes were full of genuses and savants. I still remember a fellow student in my second semester real analysis class (prerequisite chain was five semester long to get into the class: 1yr Calc -> 1 Semester DiffEq -> 1st semester real analysis -> 1 semester complex analysis); he was a Freshman and the best student in the class. Was he well rounded? I don't think so, but he was good at pinball and math. Then the tragic Aaron Swartz affair. They didn't sign the Chicago Letter [1]. I started meeting other MIT alumni that are disappointed with the direction MIT went as well. Every year they still call me asking for more money. Take back MIT. [2] [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/29/u-chicago-letter-new-students-safe-spaces-sets-intense-debate https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/29/u-chicago-let... [2] https://youtu.be/ZK5r9OZ73Xg https://youtu.be/ZK5r9OZ73Xg
- angrais 4y ago
  What do you gain by donating money to the university? Is there a tax break for such donations? What good came out of your donations? Is there traceability and accountability of each dollar donated? I ask as I simply cannot fathom donating money to a university where the overarching aim is often to make money.
  - todd8 4y ago
    I understand what you are saying. Back then, I felt that donating money to a research University would indirectly provide benefits to the entire world by accelerating the advancement of science and technology. Like other charitable contributions in the US, it is tax deductible. What that means is donating $100,000 has an after tax cost of around $50,000 depending upon one's tax bracket. Yes there is accountability, and I usually receive a nice note from a couple of the undergraduates that have their undergraduate research projects funded by my modest endowment.
gaze 4y ago
So, how far are they willing to go? Will they host neo-nazis? Will they host far right conservatives? I wonder if they'd be up for hosting pro-BDS speakers or out-and-out socialists or communists. Freedom of speech is never, ever given out equally, no matter what they say. At some point, something crosses the line into "crying fire in a movie theatre" for just about everyone. This is effectively a statement that some professors didn't like the threshold that the students set with the Carlson lecture, but surely the professors/administration have some threshold that will come out in due time.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  Why go to university if the free exchange of ideas is so terrifying to you?
10g1k 4y ago
Western universities are an embarrassment.

92 points by gru232 4y ago

That this statement is in any way controversial makes me weep for the future.

From the PDF [1]: > We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious. (...) A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not extend to suppressing or restricting such speakers from expressing their views. Reasonable stance IMO. As far as I can tell, MIT did not adopt the Chicago Statement [2], so it's nice to see a proposal like this, which seems substantially similar. [1] https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/reports/2022-09_Proposed_MIT_Statement_on_Freedom_of_Expression_and_Academic_Freedom.pdf https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/report... [2] https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/FOECommitteeReport.pdf https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/r...

yanderekko 4y ago
Reasonable but sadly I expect it to be a dealbreaker. The triumph of safetyism over speech has been so swift and complete in many left-dominated circles that this sort of appeal is subject to being dismissed as being unbearably privileged at best and regressive dogwhistling at worst.
AndrewUnmuted 4y ago

Metacelsus 4y ago

For context: https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation

redeux 4y ago

[flagged]

makeworld 4y ago
I find the differences between these statements minimal. The former implies the latter very easily, making both dangerous.
- ghusto 4y ago
  The difference is that the first can be easily rebuffed with logic and evidence. The second can too, but it's obvious that logic and evidence aren't at the top of the agenda there. So there's no discussion necessary in the latter, and you can just shut it down. Why allow the first one then? It's about giving them enough rope to hang themselves with, _in public_. The public bit is important, because having them claim persecution and censorship, then saying those things in private anyway without rebuttable, may swing certain people.
- zajio1am 4y ago
  I can see that difference between these statements can be minimal for collectivists, who consider benefit of society as the most important value. But for individualists, the former does not implies the latter. It is more like: All X are good for nothing leaches on society, but their individual rights and freedom are inalienable and that is more important that their negative effect on society.
  - hirundo 4y ago
    People from the individualist perspective almost always argue for its overall social utility, that the benefits of invididual rights and freedoms have negative and positive social effects that net positive. I've never heard one (and I've heard many) argue that the net social effects are negative but that the policy is still preferrable.
    - prottog 4y ago

neilv 4y ago

That page seems to use Mailjet marketing tracking links. The full message could be: free expression, with intimate surveillance. I'm not saying that's a bad message, and it's happening in practice, in some forms. Maybe people should explore whether that means everyone should take responsibility for their speech. And if so, whether that means responsibility before the audience, the public, or some authority.

jonathanstrange 4y ago

One, perhaps the only, problem with freedom of speech in academia is that can be very actively exploited by bad faith actors, i.e., people who are not interested at all in truth and merely abuse the university system as a platform for furthering political goals and "whitewashing" their position. These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. They often come from a non-academic background, have a party or "think-tank" background with some obvious political agenda, and their funding also comes from corresponding organizations. Some of them are even just politicians. The problem with these kind of speakers is not that they speak at a university. The audience is smart enough not to fall for bullshit and to separate politics from science. The problem is that these people use events to give their name and their agenda some credibility and make it easier for the public to confuse their opinions with science. It's a branding problem, political talks can give a university a seriously bad reputation. Since it would be inconvenient and undemocratic to ban all political speeches and events from universities, I think a trade-off has to be made and some cut-off points are necessary, even if that means that a few interesting talks get lost due to being identified as false positives. It's perfectly fine and reasonable to ban all political speakers from the political fringes (both far right and far left) unless an event clearly serves a scientific purpose and the speaker also has the fitting credentials in terms of actual publications. I understand this goal is hard to reach in the US, though, since many universities there are private and lobbyism has extended its reach to them. But it's an ideal to strive for. The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them.

roenxi 4y ago
> The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them. When we talk about these obviously bad actors, are we talking people like Socrates and Galileo? Or are we keeping to strictly political undesirables like Assange, Snowden and the whiny pacifists who nobody likes? The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Everyone you've just mentioned has a highly politically charged position, but is not associated with being a bad faith actor.

neilv 4y ago

One of my favorite incidents involving free speech happened several years ago, and had an MIT connection. Some alt-right people organized a big so-called "Free Speech Rally" in Boston, perhaps as a Trump-emboldened show of force, or publicity effort. But a massive number of counter-demonstrators turned out (including many students and staff from MIT), dwarfing the alt-right people by orders of magnitude, and basically told them "no", in so many accents. "The answer to offensive speech is more speech" doesn't always work that well, nor that literally. And some kinds of speech in a university environment will sometimes call for listening and dialogue, unlike that one demonstration. But that one day, the alt-right people didn't seem to have genuine dialogue in mind, and it was the free speech that they called for (perhaps cynically and disingenuously) that corrected their particular argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Free_Speech_Rally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Free_Speech_Rally

Zigurd 4y ago
Are you implying the alt right employs bad faith trolling? Cry bullying? Way too often, free speech debates are hijacked to normalize a fascistic movement in American politics. The left is feckless because they don't think like Peter Thiel or Steve Bannon. Certainly there are days when the mass of normal opinion outweighs the straussian tactics of the right because the position of the right has gone ridiculously too far and it is obvious that it isn't normal. But it is difficult to count on that happening reliably.
- neilv 4y ago
  Agreed, visible mass of public opinion isn't a panacea. And there seems to be a widespread anti-intellectualism movement, from multiple directions, that's turning all of us into bickering reactionaries. Someone has to start bringing us back to aspiring to sophistication of intellect and character, to both engage in genuine dialogue, and to recognize when someone else isn't. MIT, as one vanguard, doesn't have the last word on this (it has its own biases), but IMHO not surprising to see them taking a confident stand for a kind of intellectualism that's in a relatively good direction. We need the influence of others, to address concerns/perspectives that are not as much on the radar of MIT.

tablespoon 4y ago

> We saw this last fall with the wide range of views around the Carlson lecture. If anyone else was wondering what was being referenced above, I'm guessing it's this: https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation: > Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Department Head Robert van der Hilst canceled the department’s annual John Carlson Lecture due to controversy surrounding the invited speaker, Professor Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, and his views on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts within academia.... > In a Newsweek op-ed titled “The Diversity Problem on Campus,” published August 2021, co-authors Abbot and Stanford Professor Iván Marinovic wrote that DEI in academia seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups, violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment, compromises the university’s mission, and undermines the public's trust in universities and their graduates.

akomtu 4y ago
"University of Pisa has canceled the Prof. Galileo's lecture on celestial bodies due to the controversy surrounding his views on heliocentrism, after continued protests by the students who reject the unholy idea that the planet they live on isn't the center of the Universe. Department of Heresy and Inquisition has temporarily suspended Galileo and referred him to Church."
- superb-owl 4y ago
  This is a false equivalence. Galileo was concerned with physical fact, whereas this professor's controversial opinions are sociological and fairly subjective--they boil down to a value judgement. That's not to condemn (or defend) the professor. This just isn't a fair characterization of the debate.
  - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    A fact not yet widely verified and an opinion cannot, in general, be distinguished

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

todd8 4y ago

I was at MIT over 50 years ago. I used to give them money, not a huge amount, but enough to create what has become a permanent endowment under my name. However years ago, I had lunch with the then president of MIT and realized that MIT had changed. It was no longer the MIT I experienced. The student body was different, and clearly, they had tweaked the knobs and selected for a different profile of student. It made me sad because I remember my fellow students, some rich, some poor, some from Philips Exeter, some like me from inner city Detroit schools, some from Asia some from Southern California. The thing was though, they weren't at all well rounded, the very trait that the president seemed so proud of in the current student body. My classmates were eccentric, creative, nerdy, and most of all so intelligent. My math classes were full of genuses and savants. I still remember a fellow student in my second semester real analysis class (prerequisite chain was five semester long to get into the class: 1yr Calc -> 1 Semester DiffEq -> 1st semester real analysis -> 1 semester complex analysis); he was a Freshman and the best student in the class. Was he well rounded? I don't think so, but he was good at pinball and math. Then the tragic Aaron Swartz affair. They didn't sign the Chicago Letter [1]. I started meeting other MIT alumni that are disappointed with the direction MIT went as well. Every year they still call me asking for more money. Take back MIT. [2] [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/29/u-chicago-letter-new-students-safe-spaces-sets-intense-debate https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/29/u-chicago-let... [2] https://youtu.be/ZK5r9OZ73Xg https://youtu.be/ZK5r9OZ73Xg

angrais 4y ago
What do you gain by donating money to the university? Is there a tax break for such donations? What good came out of your donations? Is there traceability and accountability of each dollar donated? I ask as I simply cannot fathom donating money to a university where the overarching aim is often to make money.
- todd8 4y ago
  I understand what you are saying. Back then, I felt that donating money to a research University would indirectly provide benefits to the entire world by accelerating the advancement of science and technology. Like other charitable contributions in the US, it is tax deductible. What that means is donating $100,000 has an after tax cost of around $50,000 depending upon one's tax bracket. Yes there is accountability, and I usually receive a nice note from a couple of the undergraduates that have their undergraduate research projects funded by my modest endowment.

gaze 4y ago

So, how far are they willing to go? Will they host neo-nazis? Will they host far right conservatives? I wonder if they'd be up for hosting pro-BDS speakers or out-and-out socialists or communists. Freedom of speech is never, ever given out equally, no matter what they say. At some point, something crosses the line into "crying fire in a movie theatre" for just about everyone. This is effectively a statement that some professors didn't like the threshold that the students set with the Carlson lecture, but surely the professors/administration have some threshold that will come out in due time.

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
Why go to university if the free exchange of ideas is so terrifying to you?

10g1k 4y ago

Western universities are an embarrassment.