The 10 Worst Colleges For Free Speech: 2017

[Corinthian]

@Hunt see: https://www.thefire.org/liberty-universitys-values-and-jerry-falwell-jr-s-pro-free-speech-statements-dont-add-up/

[Hunt]

That’s an interesting piece, Corinthian. I think I noted above that what FIRE apparently criticizes in private institutions is not so much suppression of speech, but hypocrisy about it, and that’s pretty much what that article says.

[Corinthian]

@Hunt I’d refer you back to my response to you at post #23. It’s not just hypocrisy about free speech but also hypocrisy about freedom of association. Harvard certain holds itself out as a strong supporter of values like freedom of speech and association. Normally Liberty does not, until Jerry Fallwell Jr. tried to claim the mantle of a free speech defender. As soon as he did, FIRE called him out on it.

[Corinthian]

Interesting article about FIRE in the Chronicle of Higher Education. http://www.chronicle.com/article/In-a-Polarized-Climate/239530?key=-tzCsJT7grPRhQ3W3kE8WsYnI7hllZmPs8bA3zIYCv9ihm-KEH7OHRW0Mhg8ljydSENwMVZtRVJTZ05hODBWNmFWUmdNVVdUcTRtcmFSdEliNHdPX2s3OU9VYw. Seems like a pretty balanced article to me.

[marvin100]

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/opinion/sunday/political-correctness-and-its-real-enemies.html

What motivates it is not the defense of free speech, but an ideology that condemns “politically correct” activists and administrators and dubiously recommends “free markets” as the best guarantors of such rights.

http://www.alternet.org/education/what-campus-free-speech-crusade-wont-say-0

The real enemy of open inquiry and expression is the over-financialized, corrupt investment that the FIRE and its funders never question and, indeed, are out to defend.

[Ohiodad51]

You realize both articles are by the same guy, right? He’s the same guy who spent last year arguing that FIRE was responsible for shrieking girl yelling at her professor at Yale.

[Corinthian]

Regarding Jim Sleeper: https://www.thefire.org/new-york-times-corrects-jim-sleeper/. Note that Sleeper made false claims that the NY Times had to correct. I encourage anyone whose opinion isn’t already hardened into stone to read the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which seems to me to at least try to take a thoughtful but challenging look at FIRE and its work.

[alh]

FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff, about to release a documentary, Can We Take a Joke? and while participating in a free speech panel at Yale, made a deliberately provocative joke about burning down Indian villages. Then he wrote about the reaction.

Does the ACLU insert themselves into the free speech debate in the same way? My impression is that they watch from the sidelines until they see a need for involvement, but I don’t know if that is correct. Of course, I guess they are always on the look out for test cases.

It seems to me, in at least a few cases, FIRE manufactures a controversy, which is representative of a particular free speech issue. Does ACLU do this as well?

Hunt, is there a difference here?

[Hunt]

Well, no defenders of civil liberties are entirely pure, not even me.

[Ohiodad51]

@alh, you mean like this?

“We will bring all the lawsuits necessary to defend these rights,” Romero said. “We’ll do the work in the courts. You do the work in the streets. People are motivated. They want to be engaged.”

For a recent example of the ACLU “inserting” themselves, see the whole article at http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ACLU_RESISTANCE_TRAINING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-03-11-12-03-42

I don’t think FIRE has ever been quite that aggressive, although I agree that the organization has often affirmatively sought examples of issues they want to pursue. I don’t know that I would go as far as saying they manufacture issues, but I haven’t honestly looked into it that closely. Maybe others without an axe to grind have.

And saying that Lukanoff “deliberately made a joke about burning down an indian village and then wrote about the reaction” is a pretty strained interpretation of what occured. This is from his article in the WaPo:

When I described just how fierce the students’ reaction to Erika’s e-mail had been, the audience seemed skeptical, so for emphasis I said, “You would think that given the reaction to what she had written that she had actually wiped out an Indian village.”

Shortly after, I paused when I heard commotion on the other side of the room: a student appeared to respond to my comments and began putting up posters. I couldn’t make out much of what he said as he fought with the security guard who asked him to leave (the student was not registered for the event), but I agreed he could post the posters and attempted to continue my speech.

As the guard struggled to lead him to the exit, the student yelled, “You people speak like you don’t know the history of the country you pretend to love! And you talk about burning Indian villages, which gets a lot of laughs!”

Word of my “offensive” comment spread quickly. Over 100 students gathered to protest the event, chanting and holding signs reading “Genocide is not a joke.”

One of the event attendees reported to the Yale Daily News that he was spat upon.

The point of my dark quip was to illustrate that students were reacting to Christakis’s e-mail as if she had committed some unspeakable evil, rejecting context, and displaying a burning desire to be offended and censor.

[Hunt]

Well, Lukanoff’s “dark quip” was a stupid thing to say, even if it wasn’t intentionally provocative. I don’t find his defense to be very persuasive.

[alh]

Hunt, thanks for responding in #108. That was actually very helpful to me.

It would seem to me a genocide joke is obviously free speech, as is the protest against it.

Ebert wrote an interesting, to me, review of FIRE’s documentary, Can We Take a Joke?, but I don’t have the ability to link.

[tonymom]

Oh the dreaded “shrieking girl”!!!
personally found the creepy FIRE guy video taping the whole scene more offensive. No one in that encounter was innocent and in some respects I hold the professors to a higher standard. That whole episode did it for me with the FIRE folks. They lost all credibility in my book.

[alh]

Tonymom, that was my take as well, as you may remember from the cc discussions at the tiime, but Hunt’s response makes me reconsider discounting the entire organization because of Lukanoff.

[hebegebe]

Oh the dreaded “shrieking girl”!!!
personally found the creepy FIRE guy video taping the whole scene more offensive. No one in that encounter was innocent and in some respects I hold the professors to a higher standard.

I don’t remember the professors throwing out F-bombs to the students.

And what exactly was wrong with taping the incident? There were plenty of people doing so at the time.

[Zinhead]

^^^ Videos taken by people other than Lukianoff have popped up on youtube. Lukianoff apparently only recorded a small part of the overall “conversation” with the students with a total of about seven minutes of video.

Here is the video that Lukianoff posted:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvIqJIL2kOMefn77xg6-6yrvek5kbNf3Z

For instance, the following 22 minute video captures a different part of the incident from a different POV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiMVx2C5_Wg

The incident would have gotten out regardless if Lukianoff had posted his video or not.

[Corinthian]

There have been lots of threads on CC about the Yale Halloween incident. I strongly object to the term “shrieking girl” because I think it’s very sexist. Also it was not a label ever used by FIRE. And as @hebegebe said, plenty of people were videotaping the incident, including the Yale Daily News, so I don’t see anything creepy about Lukianoff doing the same. People videotape confrontations to create a record that is more objective than individual memory. Here’s Lukianoff’s response in an interview about the taping incident:

I wrote an article for The Washington Post about this experience. And, yes, it was just a complete coincidence that I was on campus. Nicholas and Erika Christakis had invited me to talk to their students in the Silliman dorm way back in July 2015; the incidents in those videos took place in November.

When the confrontation in the courtyard took place, I was staying in the dorms and getting ready to give a lecture at those very dorms about freedom of speech that night. I showed up at what turned out to be the tail end of an apparently hour-long confrontation between Nicholas and a crowd of students. There were many other people videotaping it, including the Yale Daily News, which I believe got the entire incident on tape. But I decided to start recording myself because I wanted to make sure that I documented how Nicholas handled himself. It’s been my experience that particularly fraught culture war situations can devolve into a case of “he said/she said”, so you need documentation. Otherwise people may claim, or even possibly misremember, a narrative that fits their existing conclusions. That’s just a simple way of saying I believed that if I didn’t document the confrontation, Nicholas could find himself fired, and I wanted people to see that he conducted himself patiently and responsibly. I was not confident that other students would share their videos of what happened, so I decided to record it myself.

You can tell I am not very good at videotaping by the fact that I did not know to hold my phone in the right orientation. What’s more is I actually thought I had been taping for a good 10 minutes when I realized I had hit the pause, not the record button. If I had gotten that original footage, it would have given better context to the confrontation and shown that it was not just that one student yelling at Nicholas that he was disgusting and should lose his job.

We posted every video I took completely unedited specifically because we knew that if we didn’t, people would accuse us of selectively editing the tape. Nonetheless, a couple of people on Twitter still tried to make that claim. I had no idea the video was going to blow up as much as it did.

I would like to take the opportunity to once again condemn anybody who directed threats or intimidation at the young woman depicted in that video. Threats are not protected speech, nor should they be. Also I thought it was absolutely the wrong decision by The Daily Caller to reveal that student’s name and information in a subsequent article.

The truth is that if the Yale Daily News were to release its video of the entire incident, as I believe they should, you would see that many students were acting in a similar way towards Nicholas. The story should never be about one student, but about the consequences of even mildly critiquing a campus consensus.

http://mimesislaw.com/fault-lines/cross-greg-lukianoff-lighting-the-first-amendment-fire-on-campus/7510

[tonymom]

@hebegebe
Where did I say professors were cursing?

And it was discussed adnauseum why it would be inappropriate for the FIRE friend who was visiting as a guest of the professors to tape a student within the courtyard of a RC.

My point is this guy certainly had an agenda and motive and took advantage of the situation. In my book that’s a creep and doesn’t bode well for the organization he was representing.

[Ohiodad51]

Well, it is good to see that no one has changed their mind over the last year, lol.

[tonymom]

Students taping each other is very different than a professor taping students and comes with different sets of boundaries. Anyone working at a school understands that.