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It seemed to me like the actual problem was not intolerance of free expression per se, but rather that the administration had adopted a position of submission w

It seemed to me like the actual problem was not intolerance of free expression per se, but rather that the administration had adopted a position of submission with respect to student activism. As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw. Frankly, as though they were terrified of their own students. The loss of academic freedom follows from that, but only as a consequence of the administration losing their grip and being unable (or unwilling) to sustain it. Others in this thread are, I think, safely predicting that this declaration will turn out to be toothless — if so, I think the explanation will be that you can't drive from the back seat.

xwowsersx 4y ago
Right. The fact that the administration, like so many others, has simply given the loudest radical students carte blanche — is definitely crucial to understand and to acknowledge. I am encouraged though to see language in this statement that they won't disallow speech even if it "may be harmful to some." I feel like this is a direct blow to the safetyism and "words are violence" that has taken over some college campuses. They seem to be preemptively taking the legs out of attempts to quash speech by claiming it's "harmful."
- skissane 4y ago
  > The fact that the administration, like so many others, has simply given the loudest radical students carte blanche I don’t think it is purely about how loud and radical some students are, it is also about how they align with the pre-existing ideological dispositions of the average university bureaucrat. Imagine, hypothetically, that the loudest and most radical students on campus were right-leaning rather than left-leaning: somehow, I doubt the same university administrators would be so quick to give in to their demands.
  - version_five 4y ago
    I disagree. Bureaucracy as an institution is psychopathic and only cares about power. If the establishment was right wing (as it had been in the past and still is in some places) the bureaucrats would line up behind it. It's about power, institutional power, not about ideology.
    - skissane 4y ago
      Let me put it this way: assuming the current situation in which most university bureaucrats lean centre-left, I think they are far more likely to resist the demands of loud and radical right-leaning students than loud and radical left-leaning students. Now, if we are talking about a different situation, in which most university administrators were centre-right, then it could well be the other way around. Bureaucrats respond much better to activists who (in broad outline) agree with their ideology, but who claim they are failing to live up to it, than to activists who are promoting a very different ideology instead.
      - WaxProlix 4y ago
        I'm having a hard time conjuring that - what sorts of demands would these right leaning students be making, in general? Under what pretenses?
        skissane 4y ago
        Many of the demands which radical left-wing students make - such as cancellation of events, or that academics be fired - could also in principle be made by radical right students, just with different individual targets and justifications For example, right-wing students might demand an art exhibition at the university be cancelled because they believe it to be “blasphemous” or “obscene”. Or they might object to a Marxist being allowed to deliver a guest lecture on the grounds that it is insensitive to the victims of communism.
        WaxProlix 4y ago
        I guess that makes sense. I don't think of there being a lot of prominent marxists or whatever in economics circles, but surely they're around somewhere.
- hexane360 4y ago
  Surely that statement admits the possibility that some words are 'violence'. It just specifies that the signatories think that harm is a necessary cost of the speech. If the signatories instead thought that words were incapable of violence, there would be no worry of speech which is "harmful to some". I would also argue that that view severely downplays the power of speech, both for good and evil.
version_five 4y ago
That's the problem with bureaucracy- risk aversion wins because the administrators end up only caring about their own jobs and power and lose sight of the original point of their jobs. It's happened everywhere in society. Once you're number one priority is minimizing risk, you've failed the core mission.
- givemeethekeys 4y ago
  This happens when titles, prestige or unfairly high compensation gets attached to any otherwise easy job. People hold on for dear life, because they know they're getting out way more than they're putting in.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    I think that observation is far more wise than it initially seems.
- mfer 4y ago
  Let’s not forget that administrators who allow views unpopular to some are attacked and harassed with some who will try to destroy their livelihoods and future.
- rdl 4y ago
  MIT admin specifically have repeatedly shown themselves to be cowards who don't care about students/values/etc on issues other than free speech, so it's not like they're being inconsistent here. (the aaronsw situation, drinkordie, war on student life after the scott krueger alcohol death, etc.)
  - GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
    At least they've removed letter grades for freshmen! I had 7 people in my MIT class commit suicide my freshman year in 2003!
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Your claim is that MIT doesn't care about students, and the proof is that MIT tried to stop students from being manslaughtered?
pannSun 4y ago
If the students are united against this statement, and only the administration and current faculty are for it, then the battle is already lost. Because the students of today are the faculty of tomorrow, making this statement a temporary patch that masks how bad things have gotten.
- xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  I don't think that's necessarily true. Some of the students of today are the faculty of tomorrow; in my experience the students that eventually become profs are not representative of the student body as a whole. For example, much of the funding available in US physics is DoD funding. Many students (and grads / postdocs) have ethical issues with working on DoD projects. However, refusing DoD funding is not a good move for early-career researchers. So in my experience successful new profs tend to be more "hawkish" than grad students in general.
justin66 4y ago
> As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw. Frankly, as though they were terrified of their own students. How familiar are you with the students and the faculty of MIT? Are the students even pressuring faculty enough on any given issue that we could characterize this statement from MIT as capitulation?
xvedejas 4y ago
This seems so opposite to me to the only example of student activism at MIT that I'm aware of, which was against the closing of Senior House. Administration didn't care about students raising an issue. Students felt totally unheard and disrespected. What's the difference here? Different, better-connected students? A campaign that better aligns with the broader zeitgeist in our society? Something administration _wanted_ to capitulate over?
- dmlerner 4y ago
  Admin just doesn't care that much which speakers are allowed on campus. Like many progressive things students loudly champion, it's pretty immaterial and easy to just give in. It's not like it affects MIT's status or funding as a world-leading research institute. By contrast, Senior House was a significant legal liability due to large, public parties with a habit of sending people to the hospital for more interesting reasons than booze. That, the institute has financial, practical, concrete reasons to care about. It's unclear to me that SH created more liability than frats and alcohol, but maybe, and it was certainly the perception.
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    >By contrast, Senior House was a significant legal liability due to large, public parties with a habit of sending people to the hospital for more interesting reasons than booze. That, the institute has financial, practical, concrete reasons to care about. Did they think about putting Senior House on probation or something like that?
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      Their goal wasn't to be fair, it was to decrease liability.
    - dmlerner 4y ago
      I honestly forget. I don't think they were ever on probation per se, but it's not like SH was blindsided. There was plenty of awareness that admin was increasingly unhappy. What I won't claim to understand is what pushed them over the line to actually doing it. I think it was more slow, evolutionary decreasing of tolerance for everything than any particular incident. I'm bitter about the whole thing, and also the upcoming [renovation of EC](https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/nfpumq/east_campus_is_getting_renovated_in_2022/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/nfpumq/east_campus_is_...) (the next dorm over, physically and culturally). The building is realistically past due for some TLC, but it's hard not to feel like it's motivated from more than that.
jancsika 4y ago
> It seemed to me like the actual problem was not intolerance of free expression per se, but rather that the administration had adopted a position of submission with respect to student activism. Contrast this "capitulation" to activism to, say, UC's lengthy reluctance to capitulate to the grad student union's wage demands. Even more instructive: compare it to UC Davis' outright refusal to allow a handful of students to camp out on a grassy area in front of the dining hall on a Friday. Student activists barely have sufficient solidarity and numbers to successfully demand something as universally desired as a higher wages. And they didn't have sufficient leverage to even complete a successful sit-in at Davis (and similar "occupy" groups got easily shut down at other universities). Yet in your assessment, there are enough students in lock-step against free speech to terrify the admin into working against its own professed principles. How did that organizing prowess happen-- seemingly without any struggle-- in the latter case but not in the former cases? This doesn't pass the smell test IMO. Alternative explanation: an administration vastly prefers less chance of unpredictable controversy over a dissident speaker, less chance of run-ins between dissident students and law enforcement, less chance of lawsuits over a prof's material, etc. It's not capitulating-- rather, the admin would naturally support any student move that limits the kind of speech that could potentially cause problems for the university. If it were my first day fresh out of college admin boot camp, that's the first thing I would do to try to rise up the ranks. It's a no-brainer.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  Alternative explanation. They are happy to fall over to student demands about issues related to "social justice" and the culture war because it costs them nothing and they don't care and they know there is nothing to be lost or effort on their part. In contrast things like grad student wages becomes a very painful thorny issue that actually bothers them and would inconvenience them so then they'll put the foot down. Basically rainbow capitalism or focusing and elevating issues that are less likely to have a direct impact in order to divert us from meaningful change.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  >Yet in your assessment, there are enough students in lock-step against free speech to terrify the admin into working against its own professed principles. How did that organizing prowess happen-- seemingly without any struggle-- in the latter case but not in the former cases? This doesn't pass the smell test IMO. I think you want to consider the admin as individual agents, and think about their career downside risk. Remember how James Bennet had to resign after publishing the Tom Cotton editorial in the NY Times? Imagine if L. Rafael Reif had taken a stand on the Dorian Abbot lecture. Students start calling for his head, fellow admin say "you're on your own bud". He goes the way of James Bennet. Then just like Bennet, his personal brand is tarnished. He struggles to find further work in academia.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
varenc 4y ago
The report from the MIT faculty working group on freedom of expression, who originally proposed this statement, touches on this topic: "Recommendation 5: The chair of the MIT faculty should explore how to develop a faculty-governed resource for the MIT community when contested matters of speech arise. " The faculty-governed aspect seems to be a counterpoint to the administrators. Though in this proposal they clarify that this would just be a resource and wouldn't have "adjudicatory responsibilities". Link to the full report and all their recommendations is here: https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/reports/2022-09_Final_Report_of_the_Ad_Hoc_Working_Group_on_Free_Expression.pdf https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/report...
dotnet00 4y ago
It isn't that they're terrified of their own students, but rather that the free expression things are easier to just surrender on instead of having it potentially blow up, since usually there isn't enough opposing sentiment (either because students don't want to risk their careers or because they're just busy trying to move on to paying back their loans). I've noticed similar behavior at my own university over the years. There are always several emails from the university president and the mental health office promising assistance when anything even slightly likely to matter to some of the student body happens anywhere in the world. IIRC some time ago they sent out an email to the entire student body about something scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall. Yet it took a lot of protesting and boycotting to get fair action taken back when Covid was just getting started (IIRC they tried to kick everyone out of the dorms without refunds and without enough time to arrange for alternative housing, which was especially bad given the large international student body and lack of clarity on student visa handling at the time). Similarly, the graduate student union has been gradually dialing up its activism just to get the university to pay enough to keep up with local cost of living with no acknowledgement from the university.
ttiurani 4y ago
> As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw. If the students and their parents pay the administrators' salaries, they are in charge. These clashes between students and faculty tend to be much more maintainable in countries with free public education, because the students aren't customers.

xwowsersx 4y ago

Right. The fact that the administration, like so many others, has simply given the loudest radical students carte blanche — is definitely crucial to understand and to acknowledge. I am encouraged though to see language in this statement that they won't disallow speech even if it "may be harmful to some." I feel like this is a direct blow to the safetyism and "words are violence" that has taken over some college campuses. They seem to be preemptively taking the legs out of attempts to quash speech by claiming it's "harmful."

skissane 4y ago
> The fact that the administration, like so many others, has simply given the loudest radical students carte blanche I don’t think it is purely about how loud and radical some students are, it is also about how they align with the pre-existing ideological dispositions of the average university bureaucrat. Imagine, hypothetically, that the loudest and most radical students on campus were right-leaning rather than left-leaning: somehow, I doubt the same university administrators would be so quick to give in to their demands.
- version_five 4y ago
  I disagree. Bureaucracy as an institution is psychopathic and only cares about power. If the establishment was right wing (as it had been in the past and still is in some places) the bureaucrats would line up behind it. It's about power, institutional power, not about ideology.
  - skissane 4y ago
    Let me put it this way: assuming the current situation in which most university bureaucrats lean centre-left, I think they are far more likely to resist the demands of loud and radical right-leaning students than loud and radical left-leaning students. Now, if we are talking about a different situation, in which most university administrators were centre-right, then it could well be the other way around. Bureaucrats respond much better to activists who (in broad outline) agree with their ideology, but who claim they are failing to live up to it, than to activists who are promoting a very different ideology instead.
    - WaxProlix 4y ago
      I'm having a hard time conjuring that - what sorts of demands would these right leaning students be making, in general? Under what pretenses?
      - skissane 4y ago
        Many of the demands which radical left-wing students make - such as cancellation of events, or that academics be fired - could also in principle be made by radical right students, just with different individual targets and justifications For example, right-wing students might demand an art exhibition at the university be cancelled because they believe it to be “blasphemous” or “obscene”. Or they might object to a Marxist being allowed to deliver a guest lecture on the grounds that it is insensitive to the victims of communism.
        WaxProlix 4y ago
        I guess that makes sense. I don't think of there being a lot of prominent marxists or whatever in economics circles, but surely they're around somewhere.
hexane360 4y ago
Surely that statement admits the possibility that some words are 'violence'. It just specifies that the signatories think that harm is a necessary cost of the speech. If the signatories instead thought that words were incapable of violence, there would be no worry of speech which is "harmful to some". I would also argue that that view severely downplays the power of speech, both for good and evil.

version_five 4y ago

That's the problem with bureaucracy- risk aversion wins because the administrators end up only caring about their own jobs and power and lose sight of the original point of their jobs. It's happened everywhere in society. Once you're number one priority is minimizing risk, you've failed the core mission.

givemeethekeys 4y ago
This happens when titles, prestige or unfairly high compensation gets attached to any otherwise easy job. People hold on for dear life, because they know they're getting out way more than they're putting in.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  I think that observation is far more wise than it initially seems.
mfer 4y ago
Let’s not forget that administrators who allow views unpopular to some are attacked and harassed with some who will try to destroy their livelihoods and future.
rdl 4y ago
MIT admin specifically have repeatedly shown themselves to be cowards who don't care about students/values/etc on issues other than free speech, so it's not like they're being inconsistent here. (the aaronsw situation, drinkordie, war on student life after the scott krueger alcohol death, etc.)
- GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
  At least they've removed letter grades for freshmen! I had 7 people in my MIT class commit suicide my freshman year in 2003!
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Your claim is that MIT doesn't care about students, and the proof is that MIT tried to stop students from being manslaughtered?

pannSun 4y ago

If the students are united against this statement, and only the administration and current faculty are for it, then the battle is already lost. Because the students of today are the faculty of tomorrow, making this statement a temporary patch that masks how bad things have gotten.

xmcqdpt2 4y ago
I don't think that's necessarily true. Some of the students of today are the faculty of tomorrow; in my experience the students that eventually become profs are not representative of the student body as a whole. For example, much of the funding available in US physics is DoD funding. Many students (and grads / postdocs) have ethical issues with working on DoD projects. However, refusing DoD funding is not a good move for early-career researchers. So in my experience successful new profs tend to be more "hawkish" than grad students in general.

justin66 4y ago

> As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw. Frankly, as though they were terrified of their own students. How familiar are you with the students and the faculty of MIT? Are the students even pressuring faculty enough on any given issue that we could characterize this statement from MIT as capitulation?

xvedejas 4y ago

This seems so opposite to me to the only example of student activism at MIT that I'm aware of, which was against the closing of Senior House. Administration didn't care about students raising an issue. Students felt totally unheard and disrespected. What's the difference here? Different, better-connected students? A campaign that better aligns with the broader zeitgeist in our society? Something administration _wanted_ to capitulate over?

dmlerner 4y ago
Admin just doesn't care that much which speakers are allowed on campus. Like many progressive things students loudly champion, it's pretty immaterial and easy to just give in. It's not like it affects MIT's status or funding as a world-leading research institute. By contrast, Senior House was a significant legal liability due to large, public parties with a habit of sending people to the hospital for more interesting reasons than booze. That, the institute has financial, practical, concrete reasons to care about. It's unclear to me that SH created more liability than frats and alcohol, but maybe, and it was certainly the perception.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  >By contrast, Senior House was a significant legal liability due to large, public parties with a habit of sending people to the hospital for more interesting reasons than booze. That, the institute has financial, practical, concrete reasons to care about. Did they think about putting Senior House on probation or something like that?
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    Their goal wasn't to be fair, it was to decrease liability.
  - dmlerner 4y ago
    I honestly forget. I don't think they were ever on probation per se, but it's not like SH was blindsided. There was plenty of awareness that admin was increasingly unhappy. What I won't claim to understand is what pushed them over the line to actually doing it. I think it was more slow, evolutionary decreasing of tolerance for everything than any particular incident. I'm bitter about the whole thing, and also the upcoming [renovation of EC](https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/nfpumq/east_campus_is_getting_renovated_in_2022/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/nfpumq/east_campus_is_...) (the next dorm over, physically and culturally). The building is realistically past due for some TLC, but it's hard not to feel like it's motivated from more than that.

jancsika 4y ago

> It seemed to me like the actual problem was not intolerance of free expression per se, but rather that the administration had adopted a position of submission with respect to student activism. Contrast this "capitulation" to activism to, say, UC's lengthy reluctance to capitulate to the grad student union's wage demands. Even more instructive: compare it to UC Davis' outright refusal to allow a handful of students to camp out on a grassy area in front of the dining hall on a Friday. Student activists barely have sufficient solidarity and numbers to successfully demand something as universally desired as a higher wages. And they didn't have sufficient leverage to even complete a successful sit-in at Davis (and similar "occupy" groups got easily shut down at other universities). Yet in your assessment, there are enough students in lock-step against free speech to terrify the admin into working against its own professed principles. How did that organizing prowess happen-- seemingly without any struggle-- in the latter case but not in the former cases? This doesn't pass the smell test IMO. Alternative explanation: an administration vastly prefers less chance of unpredictable controversy over a dissident speaker, less chance of run-ins between dissident students and law enforcement, less chance of lawsuits over a prof's material, etc. It's not capitulating-- rather, the admin would naturally support any student move that limits the kind of speech that could potentially cause problems for the university. If it were my first day fresh out of college admin boot camp, that's the first thing I would do to try to rise up the ranks. It's a no-brainer.

kneebonian 4y ago
Alternative explanation. They are happy to fall over to student demands about issues related to "social justice" and the culture war because it costs them nothing and they don't care and they know there is nothing to be lost or effort on their part. In contrast things like grad student wages becomes a very painful thorny issue that actually bothers them and would inconvenience them so then they'll put the foot down. Basically rainbow capitalism or focusing and elevating issues that are less likely to have a direct impact in order to divert us from meaningful change.
ShredKazoo 4y ago
>Yet in your assessment, there are enough students in lock-step against free speech to terrify the admin into working against its own professed principles. How did that organizing prowess happen-- seemingly without any struggle-- in the latter case but not in the former cases? This doesn't pass the smell test IMO. I think you want to consider the admin as individual agents, and think about their career downside risk. Remember how James Bennet had to resign after publishing the Tom Cotton editorial in the NY Times? Imagine if L. Rafael Reif had taken a stand on the Dorian Abbot lecture. Students start calling for his head, fellow admin say "you're on your own bud". He goes the way of James Bennet. Then just like Bennet, his personal brand is tarnished. He struggles to find further work in academia.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

varenc 4y ago

The report from the MIT faculty working group on freedom of expression, who originally proposed this statement, touches on this topic: "Recommendation 5: The chair of the MIT faculty should explore how to develop a faculty-governed resource for the MIT community when contested matters of speech arise. " The faculty-governed aspect seems to be a counterpoint to the administrators. Though in this proposal they clarify that this would just be a resource and wouldn't have "adjudicatory responsibilities". Link to the full report and all their recommendations is here: https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/reports/2022-09_Final_Report_of_the_Ad_Hoc_Working_Group_on_Free_Expression.pdf https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/report...

dotnet00 4y ago

It isn't that they're terrified of their own students, but rather that the free expression things are easier to just surrender on instead of having it potentially blow up, since usually there isn't enough opposing sentiment (either because students don't want to risk their careers or because they're just busy trying to move on to paying back their loans). I've noticed similar behavior at my own university over the years. There are always several emails from the university president and the mental health office promising assistance when anything even slightly likely to matter to some of the student body happens anywhere in the world. IIRC some time ago they sent out an email to the entire student body about something scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall. Yet it took a lot of protesting and boycotting to get fair action taken back when Covid was just getting started (IIRC they tried to kick everyone out of the dorms without refunds and without enough time to arrange for alternative housing, which was especially bad given the large international student body and lack of clarity on student visa handling at the time). Similarly, the graduate student union has been gradually dialing up its activism just to get the university to pay enough to keep up with local cost of living with no acknowledgement from the university.

ttiurani 4y ago

> As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw. If the students and their parents pay the administrators' salaries, they are in charge. These clashes between students and faculty tend to be much more maintainable in countries with free public education, because the students aren't customers.