8 ms·

Are you for free speech or against it? Where is the line drawn? These are hard questions to answer, especially in the manner they were "asked." And it's probab

• The5thElephant 3y ago
  Yes but it was an obvious trap and self-inflicted wound. Is giving the technically correct answer alone actually better considering the resulting consequences? Would have been smarter to give both the desired answer (calling for genocide is bad) AND follow it with the technical answer to make it clear she understood both what the schools rules are as well as what was happening in that hearing and why.
• throwaway-blaze 3y ago
  Only someone as credentialed as a Harvard president would think this is a hard question to answer. You can be for free speech and not deliver a word-salad answer that basically sounded like "maybe" to most of the people listening.
  • dpkonofa 3y ago
    It is a hard question to answer because the school has a policy of allowing and supporting free speech. The question isn’t black and white. If you support free speech, you have to support objectionable speech that you disagree with, unless it moves from being speech to being targeted or actionable. That was the whole crux of her answer and why it was a completely dishonest question. Harvard allows the Westboro Church to say “God hates f*s” and “death to queers” despite many not liking it because it’s free speech until someone takes action on that. It’s even more ludicrous considering that the people attempting to push the question dishonestly are the same ones who like to cry about free speech on Twitter, a private platform, while saying free speech should be curbed if it’s objectionable in this case at a university that takes public funding.
    • dudul 3y ago
      > It’s even more ludicrous considering that the people attempting to push the question dishonestly are the same ones who like to cry about free speech on Twitter How do you know they are the same people?
      • dpkonofa 3y ago
        Because Elise Stefanik, the Congresswoman in question, cosponsored the “Protecting Free Speech” Act and the “Restoring Academic Freedom on Campus” Act which are supposedly meant to “prevent colleges and universities from stifling the free expression of diverse viewpoints”. As usual, it’s only to prevent stifling the viewpoints they agree with.
    • dekhn 3y ago
      I think "death to queers" doesn't fall under freedom of speech because it seems to directly call for violence- speech doesn't need to lead to actions to be considered uncovered by free speech rules. The other example you gave is free speech, because it's not a call to violence. (I am applying my own interpretation of free speech laws, as well as the general understanding of legitimate free speech in the US; please assume I have a reasonable level of education on this).
      • dpkonofa 3y ago
        It’s already been ruled that “death to queers” is allowed as long as it doesn’t target individuals or amount to a “true threat” which exactly what Gay’s point was during the hearing. The speech itself is protected unless it’s targeted (which “from the river to the sea” or whatever it is and the word “intifada” likely wouldn’t be) and actionable which it definitely isn’t. It would need to be proven that the people making the speech had the intent of directly or indirectly harming the people they had targeted. All this discussion does is prove that there’s nuance to the question and that it’s not black and white which is exactly why I believe it was a dishonest question to begin with.
        • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
• telotortium 3y ago
  Are you for free speech? Is Gay? We all know Harvard would attempt to discipline students for opinions they perceive as "racist" or "transphobic".
  • insickness 3y ago
    Is that true, though? I know colleges bar speakers that espouse disagreeable views but do they prevent students from espousing disagreeable opinions?
    • elp 3y ago
      >Is that true, though? ... do they prevent students from espousing disagreeable opinions? In Harvard's case yes. They have an appalling record of trying to suppress views they don't like for students, speakers, and staff. https://www.thefire.org/news/harvard-gets-worst-score-ever-fires-college-free-speech-rankings https://www.thefire.org/news/harvard-gets-worst-score-ever-f...
• someuser2345 3y ago
  If someone at Harvard was publicly advocating for killing black people, I have no doubt that they would be immediately expelled. So freedom of speech doesn't apply here.
  • dekhn 3y ago
    Even saying "All Lives Matter" was effectively fatal to several academic careers even though it's a positive affirmation.
    • runarberg 3y ago
      The context is important. “All Lives Matter” sprung up as a reaction to “Black Lives Matter”. It was hardly ever said outside of the context of Black Lives Matter, and if it was, it was probably referring to something unrelated, such as animal rights. The only reason people say “All Lives Matter” as a response to “Black Lives Matter” is to void or nullify the latter statement, and as such a very obvious dog whistle for something which is hate speech.
      • dekhn 3y ago
        That's not correct: many people who said All Lives Matter meant it in good faith and not to nullify BLM. Claiming otherwise is .... not a realistic assessment of their intent. And in fact, in saying so,m you're basically trying to shut down discussion by calling people racist.
        • runarberg 3y ago
          If “All Lives Matter” is used outside of the context of BLM, then it is harmless. If it is used inside the context of BLM it is a racist dog whistle. That said, I stand by what I said that most of the time it is being used in the latter case. Wikipedia has an article about the latter case, not the former. Searching the term in any search engine will have you scroll very far down before you see it outside the context of BLM.
• gnicholas 3y ago
  The issue is that elite universities have not actually been protectors of free speech/academic freedom in recent years, so it becomes difficult for them to make legalistic claims about how calls for genocide are not technically against their policies.
• EA-3167 3y ago
  Free speech in what sense? Freedom from government sanction (outside of the realm of things like incitement, defamation, breaking classification, etc) or freedom from any accountability and consequences? The former I support entirely, the latter is simply not a real thing and never has been. People who frame their desire to be free from a public reaction to what they say as "free speech" make me suspect their motives in making those claims.
• bsaul 3y ago
  I have no idea what the rules are in american universities, but all the recent stories i've read regarding eg gender pronouns, and how people should behave on campus in general made me think free speech is quite a remote consideration. If i'm wrong however and people really are allowed to say absolutely anything they want, then it would have been a very simple statement to make "we are free speech absolutists, we believe people shouldn't be punished for what they say, no matter how offensive it is, only for what they do". In which case i would have been 100% supporting her.
  • vb6sp6 3y ago
    [dead]
  • SauciestGNU 3y ago
    So her answer was complicated in testimony because the pro-Israel side has been trying to frame the words "Free Palestine" and "from the river to the sea" as a call for genocide against Jewish people. Maybe for some people that's what those slogans mean, but for many others those slogans mean a one (secular) state solution with equal civil rights for Jewish Israelis and no military occupations or apartheid. To others it means the establishment of a Palestinian state around the 1967 borders. The problem is the pro-Israeli right was out to "scalp" Gay (Christopher Rufo said exactly that). Her testimony was bad, but largely because she was not being asked questions in good faith.
    • tptacek 3y ago
      Nothing Chris Rufo says matters. He'd claim responsibility for Sam Altman's ouster from OpenAI if it somehow suited the grandiose public profile he's attempted to craft for himself. Certainly no matter who was serving as president of Harvard, and no matter what they'd said, Rufo would love nothing more than to associate himself and his "movement" with their failure. It's nobody's fault but Rufo's opponents if an Ivy League university administrator somehow becomes a cause celebre and a major 'L' for the left. He's a gigantic troll and there is no reason to empower him. There's no reason to concede the culture war framing in the comment you responded to. We have in fact extraordinarily clear evidence that Gay engaged repeatedly in (perhaps minor, perhaps major) instances of plagiarism. Nobody has a divine mandate to serve as Harvard president; no cause depends on a particular person holding that role; no great injustice can be done by someone losing it who has, for whatever reason, become a liability to the institution. Claudine Gay will be fine. Someone else will be Harvard president.
• eli_gottlieb 3y ago
  These are not hard questions to answer. To the standard of bullying and harassment that private universities are legally permitted to regulate in their Student Code of Conduct, calling for genocide is in fact bullying and harassment. To the standard of constituting a crime for which an offender can be arrested and tried in court, calling for genocide is not a crime. Public universities are, as institutions of the state, required to scrupulously uphold the First Amendment, and have an entire toolkit of time-tested ways to do that without making campus life unlivable for whomever the undergrads go on a moral crusade against this semester. I went to a public school that encountered some of the same controversial issues Harvard, Penn, and MIT flubbed, and did a lot freakin' better by standing for the letter of the law in distinguishing between private speech and student conduct in the course of campus activities (eg: in a classroom). You wanna call for genocide in a campus newspaper editorial? As a hypothetical, it's free speech if the newspaper agrees to print your piece. You wanna mob someone's dorm room or community center calling them a genocidaire (much closer to what Harvard and MIT students are actually doing!), without letting them go in and out of their own space undisturbed? That's harassment insofar as you prevent any specific individual from going about their normal life, including its public component as a student (of a university) or employee (of a firm). You don't get to walk into a random office building downtown and force the security desk to take you upstairs to the 15th floor so you can hold placards and yell slogans at desk-jockeys working for Web Marketing Firm #23. You don't get to barge into a classroom where course lectures are being given to do that either.
• SilasX 3y ago
  The problem was that the tolerance of "kill all Jews" didn't arise from a principled defense of freedom of speech in general. Harvard clamps down on a lot of speech, but then hand-wrings and carefully looks for "context" when the particular group attacked is Jews. That's not even-handed, or a case of biting the bullet in hard cases of free speech.