The University of Austin: Fewer administrators, more intellectual openness | Hacker News Reader

The University of Austin: Fewer administrators, more intellectual openness

wsj.com

29 pointsjseliger9 comments

The founders recently were on the podcast Intelligence ² US. I really liked the idea, but at one point they were asked about a recent controversy that was described as a professor writing that not all pedophiles are offenders. They were asked if that kind of speech would be allowed, and they gave a very unclear answer.

To be fair I didn’t look up all what that professor said, but if you claim to be a bastion of free speech but already think there’s a line somewhere that can’t be crossed before your university is up and running… That doesn’t bode well for how things will actually turn out.

Is it controversial to state that not all paedophiles are molesters?

I just looked it up. They advocated changing the terminology to “minor-attracted persons/people.”

I agree with the critics in that seems like a way to destigmatize pedophiles, but I also think our current policies on pedophilia do nothing but force them underground. If the end goal is to prevent children getting molested, we need to somehow break down the barrier of treatment. I don’t know much about this, but I would think that treatment would be medications that suppress their sex drive. I guess I would personally advocate a way for those medications to be taken anonymously.

That’s neither here nor there, of course. Free speech isn’t free speech if it isn’t absolute, and as long as there was a good argument with the above I would think it would be welcome at this university. Apparently not, though.

https://archive.md/J1wUg

The school seems deceptively named to make it sound like The University of Texas at Austin.

A lot of schools have similar sounding names. Pretty frustrating but very normal.

You mean like the University of San Diego is named similarly to the University of California San Diego? Come on, I don't think anyone is being deceived here.

On the topic of intellectual openness, a nonprofit doing great work in this area is Heterodox Academy (https://heterodoxacademy.org/). Their definition of the problem evident in Western academia (particularly the US) is worth checking out: https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-problem/

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is also doing good work to protect those who go against academic orthodoxy.

https://www.thefire.org/

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