Comment by dpkonofa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpkonofa | Hacker News Reader

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How is that in any way materially different from my point? The survey still isn't about what actions any of the schools have taken or whether the schools' policies allow for free speech. That makes it completely irrelevant in a discussion about whether the President of the school was committed to free speech. The survey asks students their opinions. FIRE actually has a separate tracker for disinvitations and, based on population sizes and breakdowns by political lean, conservatives request more disinvitations than should be expected for the population of students that consider themselves conservatives.

>A second ago you said that

Yes... and I also said that, as someone else pointed out also, it was irrelevant to a private university that is allowed to remove anyone from campus that it wants. Allowing Westboro to stay on campus shows that their policies on free speech extend to objectionable speech regardless of what ideology is stating it. That's not the same thing as students choosing not to invite or hear views from people whose views are readily available on the internet nor is it the same thing as student opinions overriding the actual actions of schools.

>The survey still isn't about what actions any of the schools have taken or whether the schools' policies allow for free speech. That makes it completely irrelevant in a discussion about whether the President of the school was committed to free speech. The survey asks students their opinions.

In cases like this though, perception is probably closer to reality than actual activity. For instance, I think it's pretty fair to say that society is pretty against robberies. If you did a survey asking how comfortable people are with robbing people[1], I think most people would answer "Very uncomfortable". However, if you look at FBI crime statistics[2], you see that majority of robberies don't result in arrests. If we were applying your logic, we'd conclude that clearly society/the police don't have a policy of catching robbers.

[1] For the purposes of this argument, we can further presume we're robbing a Bad Person (eg. anti-abortion protesters if you're a liberal) to get past any ethical considerations

[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

>If we were applying your logic, we'd conclude that clearly society/the police don't have a policy of catching robbers.

No we wouldn't. My logic is that we'd have stats regarding how many crimes were documented, whether they were solved or not. And, as you've shown, we do.

No police department will have a 100% closure rate but that doesn't mean at all what you're claiming should be the conclusion based on that fact. The conclusion would be to look at how many cases of free speech issues were reported and what was done as a result. Transparency is what's needed, not misleading and inappropriately applied surveys.

If there is a climate where people expect that exercise of free speech will result in retaliation, then people will self-censor before there can even be an incident to report. This phenomenon is known as a Chilling Effect.

This is why people's beliefs about whether speech is properly protected or not are relevant. If people don't believe that free speech is protected, speech can effectively be curtailed even with few actual incidents.

The complaint is that liberals are reporting conservative viewpoints they disagree with. If the school was doing that, why would the liberals be self-censoring? You’re not making any sense.

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