Student “safety” has become a real threat to free speech on campus
economist.com
economist.com
I don't think this author understands the constitution. This may apply on public campuses. However, it most certainly does not apply on private campuses.
Anyone is free to exercise their free speech, but that right does not protect them from being expelled, fired, or censored at a private university.
UI is a public university, but Northwestern is not.
Whether a private university should behave this way is a different proposition. But there seems to be this trend of invoking the constitution like some holy shield against "whatever I disagree with".
I get the censoring , but firing or expulsion would be illegal right?
[0] http://www.salon.com/2015/06/12/jaw_droppingly_racist_mckinn...
It's also hard to be an effective leader of a company when it is known that you desire many of your employees not to have civil rights, and there's no reason for Mozilla to spend its money on an incompetent CEO. (Note that I'm not saying that Eich is incompetent on technical matters, or even incompetent as a manager in the abstract, just an incompetent CEO for the company he was CEO of.)
He "voluntarily" resigned in response to coercive threats against the company he founded and spent 15 years building.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
Since he left ten days after being promoted to CEO, and since the donations were known about in advance, I would argue that he should have known he would have been a compromised leader of Mozilla and if he valued his job, could have stayed CTO as he had been for 15 years. (And if he didn't expect his own employees to write public blog posts calling for his dismissal, then that alone makes him an incompetent and out-of-touch CEO. Whether or not his dismissal was voluntary, if that's the case, he was not qualified for the job.)
As far as whether or not he was capable of running an inclusive company, he once founded what is known to be an inclusive company and was an executive there for 15 years without, to my knowledge, any complaints about how he performed his duties outside of contributing his personal money to a political campaign.
Particularly telling is this part of the FAQ:
> Q: Was Brendan Eich forced out by employee pressure?
A: No.
That less than 10 employees got him removed is outrageous. The people that worked with him knew best whether or not he treated people fairly and the fact that so few of them wanted him to leave tells me the whole thing was a disgrace.
It looks like a loyalty oath, to be sure, but, while one might argue those are undesirable, comparisons with the Holy Inquisition (whether by that one intends the Spanish Inquisition or the Roman Inquisition)...well, to borrow from Pulp Fiction, it ain't the same f-in ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same damn sport.
> either "think this way" or get fired.
I think you are confusing "thinking this way" with "commit to act this way". Two different things.
> I thought it took all sorts to make a world.
Presuming that's perceived as important to the mission of a firm, why would it be unacceptable for a firm to expect employees to commit to act based on that as a condition of employment?
It's not unacceptable, just weird. Many people may not agree that diversity should supercede meritocracy in a company.
If the diversity is viewed by the decision-makers of the company as part of the mission, than actions consistent with it are part of merit in the context of employment with the company. "Merit" isn't a freestanding thing unrelated to the context of employment, it is meaningful only in regard to what the company is hoping to achieve by paying you.
I'm not trying to single you out here, but I see this type of comment all the time whenever free speech issues come up, and I can't help but see it as a middlebrow dismissal. Yes, we all agree that in the USA, the First Amendment only covers government suppression of speech. But perhaps equally important is whether we want to live in a society where the smallest amount of "wrong speech" can subject you to almost unlimited social & economic consequences, none of it state-sanctioned.
Should you lose your job and have to go into hiding and start a new life because you make a joke in poor taste to your 50 twitter followers?
Should you lose your job and get death threats because you take a disrespectful photo at a grave site and share it with 5 friends on facebook?
They're not First Amendment issues, but they are free speech issues.
Unfortunately for your argument, the answer is inevitably a hypocritical restriction of speech. You cannot wish for both free speech and immunity from consequences, since all that is required for those consequences to take place is more speech.
The Constitutional protections in the first amendment of free speech, press, assembly, and petition are all largely motivated by the desire to protect political action, because restrictions on any of those things inhibit political action.
Its an overly restrictive definition of speech that excludes political action.
I think there's enough of a difference between mob-mentality and artistic expression that we can deal with them separately.
You can talk about different kinds of speech separately, but if you are talking about the entrenched American value of free speech, you ought not to separate from "speech" the kind of speech -- that directed at motivating political action -- that that value is first and foremost concerned with.
I'll examine why people aren't more tolerant: because it feels good to mob together and knock someone down a peg when they annoy you; show them who's boss. White girl joking about AIDs? Someone pretending to be disrespectful at a patriotic gravesite?[0] Bury them, then we'll feel better. Is that kind of ugly speech really something that should ideally be preserved? Is it the best way to minimize the (also non-ideal) speech it was retaliating against? Who are the people "who have only speech", whose best or only option to protect themselves is to use their smartphone to connect to the internet and gloat "We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time."? What actual threat was there to protect against? Sure, leave the retaliation protected by law, but I think the level they're taking it to is morally reprehensible.
For what it's worth, my original comment was written with those two cases in mind more than, say, posting a Klansman-oriented art installation in public without warning or explanation. That might actually approach "shouting fire in the theater" territory. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the "speaker" was treated as badly as the other cases, so I think I'm justified in not addressing it for now.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...
You're looking to conflate the two, and gain social protections from legal authorities, not social authorities.
> Should you lose your job and have to go into hiding and start a new life because you make a joke in poor taste to your 50 twitter followers?
Yes, if your joke or photo was in such poor taste that it caused all of these other people to exercise their right to freely not associate with you.
> Should you lose your job and get death threats because you take a disrespectful photo at a grave site and share it with 5 friends on facebook?
Again, the First Amendment grants freedom of association. The death threats aren't protected speech, and you can prosecute those who are threatening you. So you can engage legal protection for some of that, but not all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...
She made a fairly lame joke that, interpreted charitably, is skewering her own white privilege.
But people got hold of it and interpreted it to me she was a horrifying racist. They generated a twitter mob and got her employer to fire her.
Freedom of association doesn't enter into it. It was mob justice, and her employer caved.
Social media has resurrected the mob. We as a society haven't figured out how to respond to it.
Do you think that what happened to Justine Sacco was "good" or "fine". Maybe you do, in which case we simply differ on principle.
But I want to make sure you think it's fine for twitter mobs to converge on a single human at random and single them out for extreme social consequences.
(Granted, the Economist article doesn't really touch on this, but it's what the parent poster was referring to. Twitter mobs tend to impose harsh consequences over fairly inconsequential issues.)
Her employers freedom of association does enter into it.
> Do you think that what happened to Justine Sacco was "good" or "fine".
There are lots of exercises of people's freedom of speech and association that I don't find "fine" or "good". And, yes, in many cases that includes exercising freedom of speech to campaign for adverse employment consequences for someone on spurious grounds (whether based on speech or otherwise), or exercising freedom of association to accede to such demands.
OTOH, the problem is not a simple free speech issue, even when the mob reaction is reaction to a speech act -- freedom of speech is involved on both sides.
Her job was literally director of corporate communications for IAC. If she doesn't know how to communicate clearly and without causing offense, what's she doing in that job? Plenty of people manage to be clear (and sometimes even genuinely funny on Twitter).
Also, IAC is not a consumer-facing company. When have you or I ever cared who they employ? I have trouble believing that they caved to a consumer revolt about their director of corporate communications; they would not have lost business, because nobody in this "Twitter mob" was their customer anyway. Perhaps they just realized she was wildly unqualified for the job.
Likewise it's probably true that a director of communications will need to know how not to ever say anything that could fuel such a mob.
I still think it's a bad thing that a mob can elevate a comment not meant for public distribution to an out-of-context, unironic, public statement.
This other comment on the thread clarifies what changed: comments can now be moved from private to public context far more easily than in the past https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=9722990
By the standards of twitters mobs, almost everyone I know has at one point said something at least as "bad" as what Justine Sacco said.
He specifically does not do this.
There are two things I'd like to ask, in this discussion.
The first is whether the social condemnation of "wrong speech" is the problem here, or the social standard of at-will employment for a living. There are a lot of people who have trouble getting good employment for various reasons beyond their control. To worry about those who are already employed, especially when they make "wrong speech" about those who are not (e.g., an IAC executive talking about AIDS victims in Africa), seems to be misplaced priorities. If we truly believe that people should not be losing their living for small mistakes, we should also believe that people should not lose their living for no mistake, either, and we should find a way for everyone to live a comfortable, happy life, whether or not any employer wants to associate with them.
The second is that I don't believe that this is actually happening. There's been a certain scientist in the news recently, who resigned from his job, but has kept his knighthood and Nobel Prize. This does not seem like unlimited consequence and going into hiding and starting a new life. It certainly does not seem like a poor-taste joke made to 50 Twitter followers; the comment in question was given in an invited speech at a conference with a worldwide audience.
I believe there is certainly an incentive for the powerful to weave a story that regular innocent people are losing their lives for an honest mistake, since they want to protect their power (the same reason they have the opinions that people find distasteful: they act in accordance with those opinions, to protect their power). But I think we should be skeptical of this tale.
This article[0] posted elsewhere in this thread reveals a high school principal recently lost his job for saying "He did nothing wrong. He was afraid for his life, I commend him for his actions." in response to the McKinney story. So not only is it happening, it's apparently getting worse.
[0] - http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fla-principal-sacke...
The job of high school principal is one, also, where I think there should be space for someone's private opinions to qualify or disqualify them for the job, just because of the enormous trust and power we place in them. I'm not sure what I think about these comments, but in general I think it's fine for us to be more cautious with schoolteachers. Especially because he currently has a job with the same school district on "administrative duties", I expect that if he expressed the same opinions as a back-office employee with the district, or in many other individual-contributor careers that do not involve management or oversight, he would have been fine.
I'm curious how we can measure that it's getting worse. In 2003, this teacher was fired after sending an e-mail (we had no Facebook back then) with certain distasteful remarks about race, and claimed to be a "victim of political correctness":
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1696&dat=20030308&id=...
In 1995, this teacher was fired for making a single, though completely unacceptable, comment to some students with racial slurs:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2519&dat=19950130&id=...
When a principal gets fired for calmly saying he agrees with Interpretation A of events it's clear that he's being fired for having the wrong belief system. The fear is we're not just removing words from our lexicon but attempting to eradicate entire belief systems. The problem with that is who gets to decide what the right belief system is?
In the 1800s, you could talk in public straight-up about how black people are naturally suited to not having the rights to life, liberty, and property. That belief system is all but gone today. And that does not strike me as a great loss. Historically, the arc of history seems to have been bending towards justice: I have not really found belief systems in history that are unspeakable today that I think would actually be cool.
This is true, but why is it just for a majority to censor belief systems out of existence. Your example is obviously extreme, but what about something like censoring a religion out of existence?
>I have not really found belief systems in history that are unspeakable today that I think would actually be cool.
Do you not think that would be a natural side effect of the people in charge of censoring things also applying their censorship powers to history?
Take communism for example. It is quite conceivable that people hating the general idea will heavily conflate the idea with the poor implementations when writing history. Then people studying it in the future will wonder why anyone in their right mind would have ever wanted anything to do with communism.
This should be getting much harder with the Internet and the easy storage of information, but it's likely to have been quite prolific throughout history. Especially when governments wanted to make sure a belief system that was a threat to its existence never rose up again.
So, the arc of history seems to have been bending towards justice because that's the way the arc of history was intended to be written.
Basically, given empirical evidence that a certain approach is actually having good effects for the world, and a complete lack of empirical evidence that it's having bad effects of the world, I think it's somewhat misplaced to worry about potential bad effects, unless we can come up with a way to maintain the good effects.
It takes some pointed questioning to get people to go from "we're banning words" to "we're banning racism" and finally to "we're banning thoughts that we don't like." The last statement is where the problem becomes evident. We give our government the right to kill but in theory they don't have the power to act against a religion, group or philosophy. On the other hand we have this nebulous, almost rogue entity we let wield this power and somehow it's almost beyond critique.
I agree there are situations where giving a group the power to shape discourse and language might be a reasonable thing to do. I don't believe in giving a group that power and letting them use it to make questioning or critiquing themselves impossible. That's exactly what the social justice movement's doing when anybody who disagrees with them is cast as sexist, racist, bigot, ignorant, etc.
As hueving notes, history is written by the winners. Even Howard Zinn spoke of how hopelessly biased history will always be. He who controls the past controls the future, and all that. Part of why I don't like the social justice movement is I think their version of history is self-serving to the point of being inaccurate.
Surely. But the issue at hand is whether people should lose their living for a small mistake; why do you feel discussing that takes something away from support for people who lose their living for no reason?
In the article about the school principal linked elsewhere in the thread, the "fired" principal actually got a desk job elsewhere in the school district. I think that's a remarkably mature position to take (provided that compensation is not wildly lower): it's certainly excessive for that person to be unable to pay rent/mortgage or provide for his family, but not excessive to be unable to supervise children and teachers.
In the story about Brendan Eich, the CTO position was available for him to step back into (and available for him to have kept from the beginning). Even if we allow that he was forced out of the CEO role less than voluntarily, it seems much clearer that he left employment with Mozilla voluntarily, since there were no calls for his resignation while he was CTO. But it still gets reported that he was sacked.
In the story about Sir Tim Hunt, he resigned (possibly voluntarily, but no matter) from an honorary professorship at UCL, while maintaining his day job at Cancer Research UK. But the media spin is that he lost his job as a professor.
I would absolutely agree that people should not lose their living for a small mistake. I would disagree that any of these are examples of that, and I would strongly disagree that an employer should feel compelled to maintain public ties with someone they wish to distance themselves from, just because they feel an ethical responsibility for providing that person's living. That would compromise freedom of speech and association, namely that of everyone else at the company.
Here's one of the secrets of the world: companies don't really care who they associate with. They don't really care about much of anything, to be honest. They're businesses, they exist to make money, and most of them don't care beyond that. So to say that a company "wishes to distance themselves from [someone]" is a bit disingenuous. It's not like the company decided "yeah, we don't like X anymore". Maybe people inside the company feel that way! But companies don't have much of an opinion about that. What they do care about is, are there people angry with the company about X? If so, they're going to fire X, or demand their resignation (if firing them would make the company look bad), or if they can't get rid of them, shuffle them off into a corner where nobody notices them. But it's definitely not, the company has a crisis of conscience, and doesn't want to be involved with X anymore.
In some cases, they might actually be more aggressive about it, since usually they care about something, and so quick to drop things that interfere with that thing. Take World Vision, for instance. They're a non-profit devoted to supporting orphans. They changed their policy to allow homosexual employees—but a campaign from their primarily evangelical Christian supporters cost them millions of dollars in donations, so they reversed the policy after two days. Did they still feel that allowing homosexual employees was correct? Almost definitely. But they cared more about their work supporting orphans, so anything that got in the way was removed.
If we have a situation where either one employee feels like their freedom of speech cannot be exercised lest they lose their livelihood, or other employees feel like their freedom of association cannot be exercised lest they lose their livelihood, then we have done a terrible job, as a society, of structuring our framework around livelihoods to make the freedoms of speech and association realistic.
Whether this was the right decision for Mozilla is still an orthogonal question from whether he unjustly lost his livelihood. If bowing to public pressure is bad for corporate health, let's talk about that, and avoid dragging the emotional "but he lost his job!" into it.
As for death threats, I don't think those are ever justified outside a self defense scenario.
Your home is very different from a private university, and both are very different from a privately owned, open-to-the-public business.
You'll be disappointed if you hold the general public to a higher intellectual standard.
Should you lose your job? Depends on what your job is, and what the impact on your employers business is, I suppose.
Should your employer be prohibited from taking your job as a result of that, regardless of what your job is and what the impact of that act on their business is?
> Should you lose your job and get death threats because you take a disrespectful photo at a grave site and share it with 5 friends on facebook?
I think most people would agree that death threats are generally undesirable and even the kind of thing that should generally be restricted by law and punished, almost independently of the motivation.
> They're not First Amendment issues, but they are free speech issues.
And free association issues. As in, are people free not to choose to associate with you based on your speech.
So you and parent both agree that the economist is wrong by invoking the constitution?
I find it annoying when the Constitution is invoked as a shield in lieu of a substantive argument.
Twenty years ago the context a message was fairly well known to the sender. Either the sender writes a press release, and can not use irony, or he is talking in private, and irony is acceptable. Since the situation was clear, he could craft the message accordingly. By contrast, today a message can be retweeted and basically dragged from a private into a public space and it looses a lot of context in the process. ( Note that this happens after the sender crafted and send the message. )
The reactions we see today are not really a free speech issue, speech was never free from criticism or consequences, but senders can no longer control the context of their message. The situation is somewhat analogous to joking too loud in a bar, everybody at your table laughs, but the guys at the other table demand a apology. So we do not need free speech protections, we need a way of buying the other guys a beer.
Its not "may". It most certainly does apply on public campuses. I point you to https://www.thefire.org for a fuller explanation.
Now, if he was rejected from putting it up at the university art show or if other forms of art, signage, etc. were allowed in that area..it'd be a clear violation.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2015/01/12/376788864/supreme-court-hears-...
P.S. The Facebook event page for the rally might be interesting: https://www.facebook.com/events/338643562987236/ Also: https://storify.com/DearSplenda/serhat-tanyolacar-terrorizes...
[0] http://dailycaller.com/2015/01/06/did-anyone-at-university-o...
I am aware of the popular notion that legality and morality are completely separate conversations, but morality does actually inform legality, albeit in a very flawed and incomplete way. The Bill of Rights is one of those rare legal documents that's seen as a valuable reflection of morality, even today.
Agree with it or not, the author isn't attempting to form a legal argument here, so pointing out the lack of a legal standing for the Bill of Rights at Northwestern is kind of missing the point, I think.
Anyone is free to exercise their free speech, but that right does not protect them from being expelled, fired, or censored at a private university.
http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/charlotte-laws-hunte...
Is this a sentiment you support?
Strangely, I've never seen any of the people pointing out that the constitution only applies to the government (in the context of conversations like this) expressing similar sentiment on the topic of revenge porn, doxxing homosexuals, or similar things.
You still have the right to free speech in whatever arena you wish to exercise it.
I'm not sure what relevance your link has to my statement. Virtually all of the things described in that post are illegal. Death threats, harassment, stalking, breaking and entering.
Are you suggesting that my telling someone to exit my property (for whatever reason) is the moral equivalent of threatening to kill them?
I realize that some folks (both SJWs, revenge porn fans, 4chan doxxing a homo) take that too far, but I'm not discussing those particular actions. I'm sticking strictly to advocating for firing (and actually firing) women who post pictures of themselves, folks who advocate for or are outed as homosexual, etc.
What I'm suggesting is that there is more to this discussion than merely interpretation of the law.
It's true that in many cases economic pressure on some colleges have become heavier over the years as public funding has evaporated, but economic pressure is still economic pressure and has always existed with the same natural result. Money talks. Counteracting that natural trend with mechanisms like tenure is much more important and lastingly useful then trying to apply bandaids to any particular trend of the day. With a strong basic framework ensuring that debate can continue even in the face of popular consensus, there is a much higher chance that the marketplace of ideas will succeed and prevent any permanent fall into a local minima. It's somewhat disappointing that The Economist of all places would fail to explore this, with even the very word "tenure" not showing up at all.
The point about 'safe' environment is that university is a stressful (and fun) time with a lot going on. By condoning shit like this, you make it harder for a subset of students, who now have to deal with worrying about a political agenda that other students don't.
In any event, the artist shouldn't complain, because he got exactly what he wanted: a dialogue on race. He simply didn't like (expect?) the contents of that dialogue. The cynic in me likes that, that he hid behind a generalised "oh, trying to start a dialogue" motif, and then had problems when he didn't like the specifics.
This is an excellent point. There was a lot of freedom of speech and expression. Unfortunately, that expression was apparently so traumatic for the artist that he left his job. Nobody forced him to leave. Certainly nobody forced him to leave his entire academic career.
Maybe we should institute "safe spaces" for faculty who don't know how to start conversations on race in a useful way, so they can be shielded from criticism.
Is freedom of speech today significantly more hindered than it was twenty years ago?
[0] I read the book after seeing a recommendation on Hacker News. I enjoyed it a great deal and would strongly recommend it also. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo1814074...
While certainly not the sole reason, social media giving a voice to disturbed people and resurrecting the "lynch mob" may have played a big part.
However, it is pretty clear the intent of the academic in question was to promote discussion and debate about racism. The fact that is not an idea worth defending because the manner in which it was done offends people is really depressing.
> The reaction among some black students was to fear for their safety, and that is not surprising. What is more of a puzzle—for anyone outside American academia, at least—is that students and UI bosses continued denouncing Mr Tanyolacar for threatening campus safety even after the misunderstanding was cleared up. In vain did the Turkish-born academic explain that he is a “social-political artist”, using Klan imagery to provoke debate about racism.
We can't bubble wrap the world for the adults that live in it. We can only provide support groups, make sure they aren't discriminated against in the marketplace, and other measures to help them cope.
The Internet - yes, that other one with all the SJWs and their vapid twitterings - has a saying it is wise to take to heart: "Intent is not magic." The particular intent cited has even less magic than most, precisely because it's so often used as a defense by people who are essentially trolling under cover of art.
(I look forward to finding out over the next decade how many plain facts I can quote that I will then hear repeated back to me as a label for "that crowd.")
Words can't act, but they can compel, coerce, and intimidate. It absolutely _is_ a safety issue. You can argue over the applicability to this particular situation, but to imply that words are harmless is a disservice to rights guaranteed us under the first amendment.
But their power is also why the first amendment only applies to the government not being able to persecute you. Why should people have the right to speech without consequence of any sort?
Which is why the story about a public university is disturbing. Or the story of a statute for equality being abused in an attempt to silence someone.
Yes. Above and beyond things that are horrifically traumatic, those groups who have been marginalized in society ought have that privilege. When you spend decades or centuries having the deck stacked against you, it is a completely appropriate approach to attempt to swing the balance back in the other direction.
> I (seriously) get triggered when i read arguments like yours.
My apologies. It's my mistake, as I forgot who the _real_ marginalized people are in society - Hacker News posters. Please forgive me.
There are a lot of people promoting discussion and debate about racism without invoking Klan imagery. There are a lot of people promoting discussion and debate about racism while being respectful and attentive to the concerns of historic targets of racism in their community. If this particular academic could not figure out how do so, it's nobody's responsibility to continue hiring an incompetent teacher (excuse me, "social-political artist"). Hire someone who can do it better. There are thousands of them.
Oh wait...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_(politician)#Civil_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Lynching_in_the_United_State...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trayvon_Martin
[4] http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/23/us/cleveland-police-verdict/
Consider a paralell situation: I gather a vast number of texts condemning Nazism and fascism, and fashion them into the shape of a giant Swastika, which I then install across the street from a Synagogue. The small-scale content (the individual anti-fascist textual works that pattern the surface) are not going to deliver anything like the same impact as the large overall shape, which (like the figure of the Klansman) is still a potent historical symbol of oppression and intimidation. Making a large thing that is guaranteed to elicit a fearful reaction and then complaining that people should have approached the fearful thing for a closer look before complaining about it doesn't strike me as a very effective way to communicate.
Or an even simpler parallel: if I run at you brandishing a knife, you probably won't appreciate any subsequent explanation that it's performance art designed to shake you out of your complacent ways and teach you how to live in the moment, even though it may turn out to have such an effect. I'm not in favor of speech codes, but given the increasingly high cost of university education and the consciousness among students that they are financing a good deal what appears to be a pretty cushy academic environment, I don't find it so surprising that they expect to be offered a comfortable campus. Insofar as we've commoditized education, is it surprising that students exhibit consumer behavior?
Of course that is what it is but that isn't the same thing as something we should censor as a society. It was pretty clear he wasn't trying to actively intimidate people.
> Consider a paralell situation: I gather a vast number of texts condemning Nazism and fascism, and fashion them into the shape of a giant Swastika, which I then install across the street from a Synagogue. The small-scale content (the individual anti-fascist textual works that pattern the surface) are not going to deliver anything like the same impact as the large overall shape, which (like the figure of the Klansman) is still a potent historical symbol of oppression and intimidation. Making a large thing that is guaranteed to elicit a fearful reaction and then complaining that people should have approached the fearful thing for a closer look before complaining about it doesn't strike me as a very effective way to communicate.
Simply because it wasn't effective isn't the same thing as it should be censored.
The core problem with your argument is you are escalating in both parallel situations. Colleges are intended to be places of learning and for such "social artists" [no matter how shitty they are at it] to put things on display. He didn't go and seek out a Church that primarily services the African American community and put it across the street.
> Or an even simpler parallel: if I run at you brandishing a knife
Once again, you are comparing apples to oranges by escalating.
He is from a country with a history where minorities such as Alevis and Armenians are commonly (and increasing) subjected to non-physical intimidation techniques, such as having red X arrows drawn on their doors or being tagged as "minority" in public sphere (i.e. government) communiques.
I am going to go so far as suggesting that he either knew what he was doing or should have understood the reaction he was getting once it started pouring down from the students. Intimidation is a fucked up thing to experience for those who have a history of experiencing that intimidation followed by a massacre soon thereafter.
The administrators, bah. Those exist to prevent lawsuits, not to protect the students, as they have demonstrated time and again, so what they did is besides the point.
But I do have higher standards for faculty.
>Unfortunately for them, something called the American constitution strongly protects free speech, whether divisive, upsetting or not.
That hasn't stopped many from throwing up "free speech zones" and attempting to ban activism in common areas.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/university-of-iowa-pulls-cont...
I think the Economist article is a bit one-sided. Is it really fair to blame students for being scared when an effigy in the style of those displayed by a group that is known for advocating and sometimes conducting violence against a certain racial group, is displayed on campus? As far as I can tell, this particular effigy wasn't clearly distinguished from one that might actually be displayed by the KKK.
Sure, people have the right to display things that make other people uncomfortable, but there must be a line somewhere, and this seems perilously close to it.
All the article claims happened, as far as I see, is that the art was taken down, and the school apologized they didn't take it down earlier. The language the school used in its apology seems a little hyperbolic, but whatever. Assuming this is the sum reaction against the artist (and maybe there are more repercussions), then I think that's all a reasonable risk that an artist takes and the artist should take his punches and move on.
Creative defacement of the art would have been a more interesting in-kind response, but I suppose that ship has sailed.
So on the basis of all the examples the highly respected Economist magazine can scrape together, this appears to be almost entirely invented scandal.
You on the other hand seem to have knowledge of a wide-ranging campaign of terror and intimidation against free speech, maybe you should write up an article about it and we could discuss that instead.
> Students should beware of winning too many victories. A perfectly safe university would not be worth attending.
What? Why? Is there anything in this article that even attempts to be an argument for this point (let alone a good argument)?
And isn't the voluntarily departure of of Mr Tanyolacar a sign that the university is in fact not safe, as the author wants? It seems like he faced some "ideas or imagery that might prove distressing" from students, and chose to leave the academy. Well, good for him, not everyone is cut out for a free-speech environment where students are free to say that they disagree with poorly-done stunts from faculty.
If you're "triggered" by history lessons - do we need to rewrite history? Is it even considered history at that point?
Who's "safety" should we prioritize? What if two students ideas of safety conflict? How would that be resolved?
Should we focus on teaching or "student safety" from ideas? Which is more important in an academic setting?
For instance, do the trigger warnings on historical content imply a way for students to avoid that content and still graduate the class? Or does it merely say what material will be covered, just as a syllabus does, so that students can be mentally prepared?
Have there been conflicting ideas of safety? Concrete examples may be helpful to figure out what we're talking about.
What's a good basis for determining what needs to be taught? I can imagine, for instance, a top-notch CS curriculum that involves no classes about history. (MIT's graduation requirements, for instance, don't require any history classes.)
The article doesn't talk about any of this, and instead spreads FUD about the impending destruction of the academy.
Quite literally what a syllabus is for, so I imagine the former rather than the latter. If it were the latter - they already have the syllabus so what's the problem?
>Have there been conflicting ideas of safety? Concrete examples may be helpful to figure out what we're talking about.
I feel more safe with security/cops on campus. Certain individuals may feel less safe with security/cops on campus given recent events and media coverage over the past 2-3 years especially.
Just one plausible example. Not to say that issue has come up in any notable cases - but it is one I can imagine playing out given recent events.
>The article doesn't talk about any of this, and instead spreads FUD about the impending destruction of the academy.
In my personal opinion, academia is already screwed. Not every field and not every campus - but an increasingly number of them. But my opinions aren't important here.
A syllabus covers high-level topics/concepts, not specific types of content students would like warning about, so I can definitely see room for a policy about adding something like "involves discussion of sexual assault" next to "students will read and discuss works of fiction about life in the Southern states during Reconstruction", if you're reading The Sound and The Fury. (It's been a while since I read that book, please don't take this as a claim that the book needs a trigger warning.) If there are multiple choices of classes to fulfill a literature requirement, students could just choose to take a class without such a content warning -- they already have that choice of class.
But, you're imagining and I'm imagining. It'd be nice if we had some actual journalism here to answer that question!
I can't see that Tanyolacar was wronged in any way. The article doesn't mention that he was personally disciplined; the university has not attempted to censor his speech. He hung a racist symbol on public property, with no indication that it was intended as art, and it was removed. Is that censorship? If actual Klansmen had set up a burning cross in the middle of campus, should we let it burn because it might have been intended to be art? If someone spraypainted swastikas on the walls, should they be left untouched as free expression of political views?
He made a statement (and if art is speech, than it can clearly be a statement) that was both not his actual belief and deliberately calculated to provoke an entertaining reaction. We call people who do that "trolls." He wanted to offend people, he succeeded, and now he's complaining about it. What did he expect to happen? What does he think should have happened?
Okay.
A couple other articles in a similar vein;
"I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" - https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afrai... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9654710)
"My Title IX Inquisition" - http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/06/my-title-ix-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9626970)
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/5/8736591/liberal-professor-identi...
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8753721/college-professor-fear
The first one points out, in passing, that the only actual complaint the liberal professor received was from a conservative student, who thought the professor was too soft on (perceived) communism. But it makes the more general point that the root problem with academic liberty, insofar as there is a problem, is with the tenure process and the rise of adjunct positions, not with liberal students. It's a very interesting analysis.
Although it's reasonable for a black person to interpret a KKK message as primarily anti-black, and my opinion would be discounted on the basis of my own race/gender/orientation... it's just sad to see rampant labeling and subdividing of people even among self-professed shared victim classes, assigning out who has legitimate pain and who doesn't, narrow-minded focus on one's own problems while simultaneously professing a motivation to help others, etc. We all have pains, we've all been somebody's victims, we're all aggressors sometimes.
P.S. I find the work in poor taste, and it sounds like it at least should have been labeled better. This is merely a comment on the tactics used to dismiss and discredit the artist.
Of course there is. You are free to not acciciate with those who offend you by leaving. You do not however, have the right to stop people from offending you by assiciating with them.
(Or maybe it doesn't. I dunno, really.)
There's a point past which trigger warnings are silly; Klan hoods in the quad aren't past it. That professor's an idiot at best, and The Economist has again chosen a revealing bedfellow.
If you look to the end of the article, it is clear that he had been insensitive at best.
>> The Economist has again chosen a revealing bedfellow
Your choice of language is antagonistic. It seems like you are implying the writer's and the publication's racist tendencies are slipping out. If so, I don't know what is the basis of that assertion.
As for my admittedly prejudicial feelings towards The Economist, it's been a long ride and I couldn't point to anything specific. I've just developed a tendency not to be surprised when they don't regard certain things as important, or certain other things as fallible.
Such an argument pretty much necessitates an unpleasant exemplar.
Read the obituary of Bob Randall currently on their front page for one instance of the Economist decrying institutional racism in a thoroughly heartfelt manner.
At the start of this thread, others had tried to make your voice irrelevant by down-voting your comment. Presumably because they disagreed with you. More recently, I have received down-votes against my first reply to you. In both cases, (and for the same reasons as this discussion) I think it would have been better for those who disagreed to say why they disagreed, not to attempt to shut down dissent. Disagreement is fine, as long as it is in the open. Silencing critics (jerks even) may feel good at the time, but the precedent is insidious.
Did you read that obit yet? http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21653997-bob-randall-... Adjusted your view of TE editorial policy on racism after doing so?
Contexts that don't regard certain classes of people - those with a history of this lack of regard - as full human beings are going to be considered obsolete by today's undergraduates. That's just a given. Repair these contexts and universities would see a lot of these problems go away.
There are, of course, contexts you can't repair - namely, works that have value but were made in, or contain, obsolete contexts. The recontextualization work here can be difficult, it's true, but universities and professors that don't do it are going to be hearing about it.