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Comment by xwowsersx | Hacker News Reader

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."

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> 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.

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.

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.

I'm having a hard time conjuring that - what sorts of demands would these right leaning students be making, in general? Under what pretenses?

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.

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.

There are some prominent Marxist academics – just off the top of my head, Adolph L. Reed Jr (professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania). Although he is probably one of the Marxist academics right-wingers are least likely to want to cancel, because he's actually very critical of the contemporary "social justice" left. Reed (who is African-American) attacks Black Lives Matter as making the fundamental mistake of viewing race-based oppression as more fundamental than class-based oppression, when in his view it is actually the other way around.

https://daily.jstor.org/adolph-reed-jr-the-perils-of-race-re...

I knew of Reed but didn't know he was a Marxist. I guess it's not terribly surprising. The closest thing I could think of would have been David Graeber, but he's dead now.

I don’t think Graeber identified as a Marxist. He identified as an anarchist, and Marx and the anarchists were opponents of each other. I’ve read an interview with him in which he expresses sympathy for some aspects of Marxism, but also says Marx and his later followers got some fundamental things wrong (which is pretty much what you’d expect a left-anarchist to say)

Thinking of contemporary academic Marxists - how did I forget Slavoj Žižek. Another is the Marxist feminist Nina Power (although I’m not sure if she still identifies as a Marxist). Both, however, like Reed, are the kind of contrarian leftists who are probably more useful to the right uncancelled.

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.

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