Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

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My comment was meant as an example of how the connection between the two should not be rejected out of hand. It was certainly not meant as a complete analysis.

> I seriously doubt that students in the 1990s, the era of the X-Files and Art Bell, were out protesting “pseudoscience”.

Interesting. On what do you base your doubt?

I drew my specific example from being a student in the 1990s, and remembering the protests against the racist psuedoscience of "The Bell Curve". For example, from

https://archive.org/details/bellcurvedebateh00jaco/page/170/...

"""Rushton describes student protests against him: "They have a large number of blacks parading the halls with bullhorns, shouting, banging on the walls. If four or five skinheads with swastika armbands showed up outside my class, there would be tanks on campus to get them off and into jail. If you've got, quote, disadvantaged groups, a band of blacks and left wingers, the university will cave in."""

Here's a bio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton

Now, that's in Canada, but similar things happened in US universities. Do I need to find specific examples or will you trust me on that?

> Why don’t the students seem to go after any datacenters

Ahh, you mean the "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" approach?

Quite simple - polls are warning signs, and data center owners, like pipeline owners, have a lot of money and security, and with the government backing them up.

The civil rights movement started decades before MLK Jr.

Ah, well the Bell Curve may be the main counterexample, and I’d actually forgotten that was even a thing. I assumed you were referring to flat earthers, Uri Geller, quack doctors, and the like. That stuff was everywhere and nobody cared.

Even though it’s still pseudoscience, I mentally have “racist pseudoscience” in its own unique category, because it feels distinct.

Regardless, I think the nature of older protests was often different. Rather than attempting to prevent the speaker from speaking, in my experience protests were most often either counterspeech or silent objection. I did some quick research that seems to bear this out. The largest protest against him, at Harvard, was a counterspeech rally. A later Harvard protest involved a silent walkout. An MIT protest involved flyering.

Now you could say that these protests were an implicit attempt to disinvite the speaker. For instance, the flyers apparently “claimed that MIT was insulting all minorities by inviting Murray to speak” [0]. But there’s no record that I can find of organized attempts to stop him from speaking. IMHO that’s the big difference versus today, and that’s what I am opposed to. Protest through counterspeech is a great thing. Silent protest also makes a great statement. Physically blocking, threatening, or attacking speakers is never ok.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20211203153624/http://tech.mit.e...

Anyway, if the students get violent on campus, the campus gets violent in response, and everyone loses some liberties in the process. Campus may be a “soft target” for now, but this kind of escalation is one reason that they too are becoming like prisons.

The reason I didn't want to pick out specific examples is because each choice could be nitpicked, because I haven't done any systematic study, and because my point is that college administration has changed over the last few decades.

The issue isn't "if the students get violent on campus, the campus gets violent in response", it's that recent history shows that even if students stay non-violent, the campus still gets violent in response, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incident .

It is hard to stay non-violent when the power structure opposed to you becomes increasingly violent.

FWIW, I recall student protests during the 1990s to deplatform Henry Kissinger due to his war crimes and abuses against humanity. There were student anti-war protestors in the 1990s too - I seem to recall Stanford students were opposed to her becoming provost. I'm also sure that if I looked I could find students opposed to a visit by Kurt Waldheim, due to his association with the Nazi Party.

Of course college administration has changed. Increasingly it’s become incredibly risk-averse, top heavy, and obsessed with both money and disembodied metrics over academic merit. (I don’t mean “merit” as in “meritocracy”, I mean merit as in are we actually tangibly advancing student and public knowledge.) It’s probably changing again, likely into something worse. That still doesn’t justify violence! It may however justify voluntary disenrollment, which is beginning to happen, especially given how bloated tuition costs are feeding oversized budgets.

Regarding your examples, the UC Davis thing was an outlier from over a decade ago, during the slow shift in institutional power as we moved away from the Bush era. The Chancellor was dismissed and replaced a few years later. I find it hard to connect that to anything current, in the same way that Kent State isn’t particularly relevant, or UW student involvement in the Battle for Seattle.

Being opposed to someone becoming provost is not the same as blocking them from speaking. I’d be interested to see if you can dig up something on actual deplatforming attempts versus protests for the other instances you gave. Again, peaceful protest is always acceptable.

Anyways, it sounds like you’ve had very different experiences than me, and maybe some different foundational beliefs. It’s hard to square the two.

Oh, right - Rice was part of Gulf War 2. The petition calling for her resignation because of her involvement in war crimes was in 2009. https://purl.stanford.edu/zp453xb1376 .

And according to the methodology, calling for someone's resignation at a university is not considered deplatforming, while calling for an art piece to be taken down ... is.

Which I think is a bizarre definition.

I'm a programmer. What you're asking for is far from my expertise. My observation is this FIRE study does not appear sufficient strong to support the conclusions you want to draw from it. I am not able to present evidence which might convince you that your conclusions are right or wrong.

And it is far easier for you to criticize any specific examples I come up with, than for me to do the research you want me to present, which seems rather unfair, given that your only supporting evidence is this FIRE report.

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