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Comment by RationalDino | Hacker News Reader

20 years ago I would have reflexively agreed with your statement.

But today, many of the most intolerant people out there are loudly proclaiming their tolerance. And because their intolerance comes clothed in rhetoric about their tolerance, they are blind to the fact of their own intolerance. And so we get people like the guy in Los Angeles a few days ago where a guy kicked his way into a Jewish family's home while yelling, "Kill the Jews," and, "Brown people matter!"

I therefore am left wondering whether I agree with you. Do we agree on which speech is intolerant speech? It's no longer something that I can just take for granted these days.

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You can recognize that this is a very fringe case and not typical behavior of the “cancel culture” crowd, right?

Some people will choose “tolerance” as a convenient cover for objectively bad behavior, but a good number of popular “cancelation” calls are reasonably motivated when you look at them on a case-by-case basis. You’ll likely not agree with all of them, but there’s at least sensible reasoning behind them. Especially in examples like college campus speakers, where an invite for a speaker can be seen as the institution’s endorsement of the speaker’s belief.

Having a speaker's belief being potentially seen as being endorsement by the university for the decision of inviting the speaker to talk is a rather far leap from speech that infringes upon the rights of others to their own speech.

I think we should question why people would associate a university with every guest speaker and everything they say as being authoritative statements of the university and their staff.

Unlike social media platforms, any given university only has so many physical spaces, blocks of time, advertising and logistics resources, etc. to host speakers. They’re selectively chosen and coordinated.

So when a speaker is invited who is, for example, blatantly hostile to the advertised mission of the university, it raises eyebrows. And it paints a contradictory pictures that devalues the university itself. Or worse, if the message is blatantly hostile to a subset of students, it could discourage some people from even wanting to attend!

People work hard to get accepted to universities which they respect, and they have a vested interest in maintaining their university’s respect in the public eye.

Could you elaborate your point in how that infringes upon the rights of others to their own speech?

I can see from your point several value loaded points where students will disagree with each other. The advertised mission of the university being one of them, as people often argue what the point of university training is and how much of education is learning things, research, and social networking. Then there is things like the student theater, which are often not just blatantly hostile to a subset of students and very much discourage some people from wanting to attend to social events. Then we have fraternities and sororities which activity often paints a unfavorable pictures of university life, even going so far as being occasionally borderline criminal in their activities.

What should be a appropriate response to students who disagree on how the university experience should be?

The "kill the Jews" guy is a fringe case? Absolutely!

But from what I see, the cancel culture crowd mostly is the problem. Usually only one side is advocating against free speech, and it isn't generally the controversial speaker.

As for the controversial speakers, invites for speakers historically were not seen that way. They were seen as the university fulfilling its mission to give students the opportunity to encounter a wide variety of views. Furthermore that case demonstrates the problem. The financial problem for universities is that controversial speakers require security. And they require security because of the real threat of a radical mob of students causing physical harm. I'm going to go with the people who are actually trying to keep people from speaking here is the mob who is willing to support using violence to do so.

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