9 ms·

Let's see how this pans out but, if I were a student and deciding between MIT or Standford I'd likely choose MIT if Standford didn't have the equivalent of this

Let's see how this pans out but, if I were a student and deciding between MIT or Standford I'd likely choose MIT if Standford didn't have the equivalent of this. However, I don't have much faith in this actually happening or being implemented without carveouts or exceptions.

lofatdairy 4y ago
I honestly don't think statements like these mean that much, nor do I think speech policing quite takes the form people expect. Columbia's president Lee Bollinger is well known as being a free speech advocate and scholar, but Columbia usually strikes people as having a more social-justice sort of climate (if I'm not mistaken Latinx as a term originates from Columbia). Usually, I believe that undergrads are typically the source of protest and these sort of policies. These policies really just indicate whether the university will formalize student demands, but de jure doesn't really do much when you'll still have tenured faculty doing their own thing and students protesting regardless. Additionally, I don't know if many students will share your convictions. Chicago has long had a free-speech policy, but even though they're probably the most academically serious/legitimate institution alongside Princeton and Caltech, I think their usnews ranking has done more for their applications than free speech. Still a good thing, but I'd think it'd be more meaningful if MIT brought back stallman
- version_five 4y ago
  > undergrads Anecdotal only - when I was in university (20 years ago) a lot of the student protest stuff was coming from the student equivalent of professional politicians. They were undergrad mostly (a few grad students) but usually had been in university for like 8 years and were ideologically motivated to stick around pursuing political aims, rather than just be there to advocate for their fellow students. I was marginally involved in student government, and there was a big difference between the (majority) that were there to make sure their faculty/department got representation, and those that were trying to co-opt student government for some broader political aim. Unfortunately, there is rarely enough of an opposing force on these people, and inevitably they have an outsized influence. So I wouldn't really think of it as undergrads as a whole, more like some 30 years old taking 1/4 course load and pushing their politics.
  - philippejara 4y ago
    are there no maximum time for a course in the US? where i'm from if you take more than 50% of the time the course would normally take you just lose it
    - malwrar 4y ago
      I’ve encountered a few… obsessive people like what OP describes. College costs too much to maximize your time in it, but between taking a bare minimum number of courses and staying below the retake limit there were some really strange people who managed to stick around longer than 4 years. One guy was a personal thorn in my side for my entire tenure as president of a hobby student org because he had some beef with a previous administration years prior of whom all were long graduated. Found out later he was like 9 years into his degree yet spent most of his time trying to be influential among hobby student orgs.
      - philippejara 4y ago
        longer than 4 years is normal, expected even, but when you start going into >7 years it gets...weird.
- asleepawake 4y ago
  I would encourage you to read why Stallman resigned from MIT [1]. The emails that were “leaked” were not private discussions. They were sent to email lists that included everyone in CSAIL and to be frank, were awful. Here is a link to the emails [2]. [1] https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec210794 https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21... [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-described-epstein-victims-as-entirely-willing https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scient...
  - cultureswitch 4y ago
    Still now I fail to see how these emails could be intrepreted any other way than someone being pedantic with legal terms. Not good timing, yes. But there is no trace of malice. You'll read this as a defense of epstein or child trafficking if you want to read it as such, not if you're reading what's written. Are people incapable of keeping their heads cool and holding off their a priori judgments when reading something?
  - nverno 4y ago
    He apologized for all this, though. His initial comments read, to me, as basically someone who is pretty clueless about those topics. But this is the exact kind of speech that should be protected- he wasn't trying to offend or antagonize people, but voicing his philosophy/opinions. He then heard other people's perspectives and they seem to have led him to him reassessing his own, which is how this sort of thing should work, instead of publicly shaming or what have you.
    - chonkerz 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - michaelmrose 4y ago
        Whose careers did her harm, how, and why would I care about his personal grooming or cleanliness?
      - 4y ago
- lazyeye 4y ago
  Most students are at that stage of life where they are too stupid and ignorant to know how stupid and ignorant they are. This is why the primary responsibility to protect free speech lies with the faculty. And as we know, they often fail miserably at this.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  >Usually, I believe that undergrads are typically the source of protest and these sort of policies. Statements like this one probably serve to discourage some of the more censorious undergrad applicants though. Basically telling undergrads what they can expect and what they're signing up for.
seaourfreed 4y ago
100%. This is the anti-Woke censorship agreement that they are approving.
jdkee 4y ago
Stanford is apparently regressing. https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/opinion/2022/12/21/stanford-universitys-list-of-problematic-words-shows-why-our-institutions-of-higher-learning-are-failing-our-young-folks.html https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/opinion/2022/12/21/sta...
carrionpigeon 4y ago
I, too, am suspicious of this statement. It brings to mind the context of the similar one issued by the University of Chicago a few years ago. While the administration was publicly affirming its commitment to free speech, individual departments and organizations within the university were unobstructed in contravening it. My sense is that, at the time, a number of wealthy private schools had made the national news for the nonsense in which their students were engaging. Rich parents started balking at sending their kids to them, so enrollment (and thus vast sums of tuition money) declined. The University of Chicago put out that statement to buttress its public reputation as an elite, exclusive private school without ever enforcing it. My sense is that this MIT statement serves a similar purpose in that it panders to the sensibilities of parents paying the tuition bills. However, if their conviction is, in fact, sincere, I think there is one good way to demonstrate it --- officially sanction professors and students engaging in behavior contrary to the free expression of their peers. Has MIT ever done this? If not, I cannot think of this announcement as little more than an advertising stunt.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  >While the administration was publicly affirming its commitment to free speech, individual departments and organizations within the university were unobstructed in contravening it. This is really interesting, do you have a source for this?
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > Rich parents started balking at sending their kids to them, so enrollment (and thus vast sums of tuition money) declined This is almost certainly not correct. Top schools get far more applications than they have seats, and so can choose their enrollment. If some rich people don’t want to send their kid to school, there are other rich people to take their place. There’s really no shortage of them.
texaslonghorn5 4y ago
is there a reason you're calling it Standford?
ajvs 4y ago
> if Standford didn't have the equivalent of this A few days ago Stanford published some guide on words you can't say like "American" and "grandfather", so it seems the universities are total opposites in their stances now.
- its-summertime 4y ago
  The guide was a proposal of how materials put out by a single department's website at Standford should be structured. https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/news/update-elimination-harmful-language-initiative-stanfords-it-community https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/news/update-elimination-har... It took only a couple of minutes to find this out.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - joenot443 4y ago
    Given it was still published by the Stanford (not "Standford") admin and the link you posted doesn't do much to disavow its contents, I'd say it's pretty clear that the spirit of the guide is still very aligned with the political spirit of the university. If Stanford wanted to do the right thing, they could very easily distance themselves and say that this kind of language policing isn't something they support. Instead, they double down. "Its aspiration, and the reason for its development, is to support an inclusive community" It took only a couple minutes to find this out :)
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      The document says it’s about education, not policing. Insofar you can consider it to police anything, it would apply to the Stanford IT department, not Stanford students or faculty. All departments that communicate with the outside world police their language, whether explicitly or implicitly. That a department has a list of words they don’t want to use in their communications is not surprising or interesting.

lofatdairy 4y ago

I honestly don't think statements like these mean that much, nor do I think speech policing quite takes the form people expect. Columbia's president Lee Bollinger is well known as being a free speech advocate and scholar, but Columbia usually strikes people as having a more social-justice sort of climate (if I'm not mistaken Latinx as a term originates from Columbia). Usually, I believe that undergrads are typically the source of protest and these sort of policies. These policies really just indicate whether the university will formalize student demands, but de jure doesn't really do much when you'll still have tenured faculty doing their own thing and students protesting regardless. Additionally, I don't know if many students will share your convictions. Chicago has long had a free-speech policy, but even though they're probably the most academically serious/legitimate institution alongside Princeton and Caltech, I think their usnews ranking has done more for their applications than free speech. Still a good thing, but I'd think it'd be more meaningful if MIT brought back stallman

version_five 4y ago
> undergrads Anecdotal only - when I was in university (20 years ago) a lot of the student protest stuff was coming from the student equivalent of professional politicians. They were undergrad mostly (a few grad students) but usually had been in university for like 8 years and were ideologically motivated to stick around pursuing political aims, rather than just be there to advocate for their fellow students. I was marginally involved in student government, and there was a big difference between the (majority) that were there to make sure their faculty/department got representation, and those that were trying to co-opt student government for some broader political aim. Unfortunately, there is rarely enough of an opposing force on these people, and inevitably they have an outsized influence. So I wouldn't really think of it as undergrads as a whole, more like some 30 years old taking 1/4 course load and pushing their politics.
- philippejara 4y ago
  are there no maximum time for a course in the US? where i'm from if you take more than 50% of the time the course would normally take you just lose it
  - malwrar 4y ago
    I’ve encountered a few… obsessive people like what OP describes. College costs too much to maximize your time in it, but between taking a bare minimum number of courses and staying below the retake limit there were some really strange people who managed to stick around longer than 4 years. One guy was a personal thorn in my side for my entire tenure as president of a hobby student org because he had some beef with a previous administration years prior of whom all were long graduated. Found out later he was like 9 years into his degree yet spent most of his time trying to be influential among hobby student orgs.
    - philippejara 4y ago
      longer than 4 years is normal, expected even, but when you start going into >7 years it gets...weird.
asleepawake 4y ago
I would encourage you to read why Stallman resigned from MIT [1]. The emails that were “leaked” were not private discussions. They were sent to email lists that included everyone in CSAIL and to be frank, were awful. Here is a link to the emails [2]. [1] https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec210794 https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21... [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-described-epstein-victims-as-entirely-willing https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scient...
- cultureswitch 4y ago
  Still now I fail to see how these emails could be intrepreted any other way than someone being pedantic with legal terms. Not good timing, yes. But there is no trace of malice. You'll read this as a defense of epstein or child trafficking if you want to read it as such, not if you're reading what's written. Are people incapable of keeping their heads cool and holding off their a priori judgments when reading something?
- nverno 4y ago
  He apologized for all this, though. His initial comments read, to me, as basically someone who is pretty clueless about those topics. But this is the exact kind of speech that should be protected- he wasn't trying to offend or antagonize people, but voicing his philosophy/opinions. He then heard other people's perspectives and they seem to have led him to him reassessing his own, which is how this sort of thing should work, instead of publicly shaming or what have you.
  - chonkerz 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      Whose careers did her harm, how, and why would I care about his personal grooming or cleanliness?
    - 4y ago
lazyeye 4y ago
Most students are at that stage of life where they are too stupid and ignorant to know how stupid and ignorant they are. This is why the primary responsibility to protect free speech lies with the faculty. And as we know, they often fail miserably at this.
ShredKazoo 4y ago
>Usually, I believe that undergrads are typically the source of protest and these sort of policies. Statements like this one probably serve to discourage some of the more censorious undergrad applicants though. Basically telling undergrads what they can expect and what they're signing up for.

seaourfreed 4y ago

100%. This is the anti-Woke censorship agreement that they are approving.

jdkee 4y ago

Stanford is apparently regressing. https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/opinion/2022/12/21/stanford-universitys-list-of-problematic-words-shows-why-our-institutions-of-higher-learning-are-failing-our-young-folks.html https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/opinion/2022/12/21/sta...

carrionpigeon 4y ago

I, too, am suspicious of this statement. It brings to mind the context of the similar one issued by the University of Chicago a few years ago. While the administration was publicly affirming its commitment to free speech, individual departments and organizations within the university were unobstructed in contravening it. My sense is that, at the time, a number of wealthy private schools had made the national news for the nonsense in which their students were engaging. Rich parents started balking at sending their kids to them, so enrollment (and thus vast sums of tuition money) declined. The University of Chicago put out that statement to buttress its public reputation as an elite, exclusive private school without ever enforcing it. My sense is that this MIT statement serves a similar purpose in that it panders to the sensibilities of parents paying the tuition bills. However, if their conviction is, in fact, sincere, I think there is one good way to demonstrate it --- officially sanction professors and students engaging in behavior contrary to the free expression of their peers. Has MIT ever done this? If not, I cannot think of this announcement as little more than an advertising stunt.

ShredKazoo 4y ago
>While the administration was publicly affirming its commitment to free speech, individual departments and organizations within the university were unobstructed in contravening it. This is really interesting, do you have a source for this?
ModernMech 4y ago
> Rich parents started balking at sending their kids to them, so enrollment (and thus vast sums of tuition money) declined This is almost certainly not correct. Top schools get far more applications than they have seats, and so can choose their enrollment. If some rich people don’t want to send their kid to school, there are other rich people to take their place. There’s really no shortage of them.

texaslonghorn5 4y ago

is there a reason you're calling it Standford?

ajvs 4y ago

> if Standford didn't have the equivalent of this A few days ago Stanford published some guide on words you can't say like "American" and "grandfather", so it seems the universities are total opposites in their stances now.

its-summertime 4y ago
The guide was a proposal of how materials put out by a single department's website at Standford should be structured. https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/news/update-elimination-harmful-language-initiative-stanfords-it-community https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/news/update-elimination-har... It took only a couple of minutes to find this out.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- joenot443 4y ago
  Given it was still published by the Stanford (not "Standford") admin and the link you posted doesn't do much to disavow its contents, I'd say it's pretty clear that the spirit of the guide is still very aligned with the political spirit of the university. If Stanford wanted to do the right thing, they could very easily distance themselves and say that this kind of language policing isn't something they support. Instead, they double down. "Its aspiration, and the reason for its development, is to support an inclusive community" It took only a couple minutes to find this out :)
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    The document says it’s about education, not policing. Insofar you can consider it to police anything, it would apply to the Stanford IT department, not Stanford students or faculty. All departments that communicate with the outside world police their language, whether explicitly or implicitly. That a department has a list of words they don’t want to use in their communications is not surprising or interesting.