JB are you ok
@HydeSnark - your earnest posts are actually quite engaging, if not a tad overdone. I’ll stop poking fun at you and Cue now, lest we get off topic. 
(FYI It’s quite easy to shut down a student protest that gets out of hand and administrators have learned their lessons from a few out-of-control ones over the past few years)
…it’s not shutting it down they’re worried about. You keep missing my point.
In any case, I don’t get your jokes and you don’t get mine. Maybe one day we’ll understand each other.
^ Not to belabor the point, but you clearly believe that the administration has walked on eggshells due to avoid “activating” the student activists, even to the extent of quietly preventing a speaker from showing up on campus. Unless I misunderstood who “they” are in your post #58? You needn’t worry - protests are fine and if they turn to riots (a term you used on another example from your post #54?) the University can shut it down. They’ve codified the limits of inappropriate behavior. There - trying to help you understand. And I do get your sense of humor but you convey a personal opinion in that, just like any poster would. Sorry to hurt your feelings.
Huh? My feelings aren’t hurt. Like I said - maybe one day we’ll understand each other.
Yes, pretty much. Zimmer is running two universities - the university of reality, and the phantom university he pushes to donors. The phantom university doesn’t believe in safe spaces. The real university happily lets student groups use the Center for Identity and Inclusion to create “inclusive spaces” for marginalized populations (also known as safe spaces). The phantom university invited Bannon to talk. Bannon never showed up at the real university. The phantom university guards free expression and open dialogue as its most important ideal. The real university keeps Levi Hall firmly locked and Zimmer as far away from students as possible. The phantom university doesn’t believe in trigger warnings. The real university…there’s no poetic way to say this, the real university has trigger warnings in class. And so on. Bannon is only the latest controversial speaker to mysteriously never come - a few years before, Milo Yiannopolous was invited to speak, accepted, and then never showed up.
You seem to think that I’m suggesting that the problem would be that activists protesting is a problem because the University of Chicago can’t shut it down. I don’t think that at all. The problem is that the phantom university is formed in opposition to other universities. As one of the biggest dupes of all - in the sense that he believes the fantasy wholeheartedly - Bret Stephens, puts it, “the University of Chicago has always been usefully out of step with its peers in higher education.”* Bluntly, I don’t think this is true, and the second UChicago has protests on par with what’s seen at other schools, the illusion will be shattered.
*https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/opinion/robert-zimmer-chicago-speech.html
I also think it’s hilariously ironic that he thinks UChicago is the only school not afraid of “accidentally offending their own students,” when, from my experience, the opposite is true.
@HydeSnark - to a large extent what Stephens says IS true, but you would need the perspective of experience with freedom of expression (or lack thereof) at other universities to understand that. And as we have discussed the presence of “inclusive spaces” in light of a no safe space philosophy in prior threads I won’t repeat that detail except to repeat that there is a difference between announcing a direction and a philosophy, and announcing a mandate. The no safe-space letter doesn’t MANDATE “no safe spaces”. The University of Chicago isn’t about the raid the Center for Identity and Inclusion and bar their therapeutic efforts LOL.
Couldn’t begin to guess why a speaker may not show up - fear of personal safety perhaps? Not an unreasonable concern.
Sorry to lose the levity of this, but I’m not sure I’m getting the point either, Snark. It sounds like you are saying that the administration is keen to foster the image of a school in which no one would protest the appearance of a Bannon. But isn’t the essence of the free speech policy that you get to protest, but you can’t shut down the event? I would think the Administration would be keen to show this if they are motivated only by p.r. considerations. If Zimmer has drunk the Brooksian and Stephensonian Kool-Aid about his greatness, he would actually want to make the point that he is prepared to use the UCPD troops to the extent necessary, thereby showing how unlike he and the University of Chicago are from lesser Presidents and institutions .
My own hope would be that little or no security would be necessary in such a case simply because Chicago students are different from those elsewhere and would not attempt to shut down the event. That’s the ethos and history of the place. However, it might not be so, given that small numbers bent on more extreme measures could dictate otherwise. In any event I’d like to see the free speech policy put to the test.
I don’t think this is true, we absolutely would
To be honest, part of this idea has been formed by me writing about attitudes of students at this university and being subsequently summarily dismissed by parents, alumni, or random uber-posters as…somehow incorrect? I don’t like appeals to authority in general, but this rubs me the wrong way and I’m occasionally flabbergasted to the extent to which UChicago Administration has successfully projected an image of itself that is orthogonal, in so many ways, to its lived reality.
Conservatives repeatedly frame campus protests as threats to free speech. I don’t get it either, and I think the ideology isn’t particularly coherent, but there you have it. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/us/politics/campus-speech-protests.html
“Conservatives repeatedly frame campus protests as threats to free speech.”
- Has the university actually made a statement to this effect? Was under the impression the threat was caused by rioting, injury and property damage. Not quite the same thing as a "protest".
Can’t read the NYT article until first of the month so apologize if this specific distinction is addressed in the article.
To bring the thread around the the OP’s original topic: clearly the issue of free expression, in all its forms (including those discussed on this thread) will be a consideration for the new president.
- A minor correction:
It was not token liberal Geoff Stone who recruited Obama to the law school. It was Stone’s successor, Doug Baird – a bona fide right-wing law-and-economics guy. Who expressed great admiration for Obama’s intellect, absolutely wanted him to come on as full-time faculty, and when Obama refused that offered him the same title Judge Richard Posner had. (At the time, I think no one else was using the same title, although maybe Frank Easterbrook was also using it. Obama wasn’t just another adjunct.)
- If Condoleezza Rice were going to be president of a major university, it would have been Stanford and it would have happened, at the very latest, two years ago. She will be 67 when Zimmer retires. That's not an age to take up a new position at a new university. Apart from her time in Washington, Rice has been at Stanford since 1981, and has been a star there since 1981. (I was there in 1981, and heard senior people singing her praises and talking about her as a future university president. She was 27. I was shocked to learn that she hadn't been there more than a few months at the time.)
@JHS , I am quite certain that I read a direct quotation from Stone somewhere or other taking credit for recruiting Obama. Maybe he and Baird did some sort of tag team on it.
I’m surprised that Posner wasn’t tenured prior to his nomination to the 7th Circuit. But Wiki affirms he was - and still is - a Senior Lecturer, same title as Obama.
I was a law student at the U of C in the 1970’s and Posner was a tenured full professor. He had to give that up when he became a federal judge. The Senior Lecturer title was supposed to recognize his part-time faculty status. (He taught advanced anti trust)
^ Ah. thanks @rleaman - that’s consistent with what I remember of Judge Posner. Just thought to check the University of Chicago Law School page and yep, he was a tenured, named prof. prior to his appointment as appellate judge. Here’s what is included in his bio:
“He first came to the University of Chicago Law School in 1969, and was Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law prior to his appointment in 1981 as a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.”
Just for clarification, Obama remained a senior lecturer; however, he was offered a track to possible tenure on several occasions. Had he accepted, he would have had to publish a good deal more than he was doing at the time.
I believe the title that @JHS is thinking of is the one that Posner had until 1981, and Easterbrook after him until 1985 which is the Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law. Only one tenured faculty member at a time can hold that. Both judges gave up their tenured positions upon being named to the 7th Circuit. There are Lee and Brena Freeman Professors Emeritus of Law who are now Senior Lecturers at the law school - perhaps giving up their tenure to pursue other ventures or public service and then returning to an ongoing senior teaching position.
The carrot that Baird actually offered Obama was a fellowship so that he could complete his book (the one that became Dreams of My Father) but still have an affiliation with the law school. He did become a lecturer and then, after getting elected to the IL State Senate was promoted to Senior Lecturer, a title apparently reserved for judges and other faculty with “day jobs” who maintained a teaching affiliation with the school.
Here’s a decent write-up about Obama’s time at Chicago Law.
Thanks for the link @JBStillFlying. The note from Pres. Zimmer congratulating him was nice.
^ And appropriately effusive.
I meant the “Senior Lecturer” title. Of course Posner was a tenured professor before he became a judge. Posner was (and largely remains) a god at the University of Chicago Law School, and the university in general. On a stellar law faculty, he was without question the brightest star. (Justice Brennan, for whom he clerked, often said that Posner was the smartest person he had ever met, notwithstanding that they agreed on very little. And Brennan met a lot of smart people in the course of his career.)
I believe that title had been created for Posner when he became a judge, and Obama was the second (or third, after Easterbrook, a very talented Posner protege) person to use it, but I may be wrong about that. It definitely looks like I was wrong about Baird – Wikipedia says that Obama started teaching at Chicago in 1992, which would have been during Stone’s tenure as dean. I read an article back in 2008 where Baird was saying that he had convinced Obama to teach, and had very much wanted to hire him full time. It may have been that Baird convinced him to continue teaching after he was elected to the state senate.
My general point was only that Obama never had trouble getting along with and winning the respect of politically conservative (and intellectually demanding and arrogant) faculty at the University of Chicago. He would probably be a great university president if he wanted to do that, and Chicago may be the only university that might be attractive to him likely to be hiring a new president during the next 7-8 years. But doubt he wants to do that.
Agree with you JHS on Obama. I believe he could be a very effective President for UChicago. But I believe he wants to keep his options open at this point; there are too many interesting things for him to do. And then there are his daughters, who are still in their formative years. A university presidency like UChicago is a 7x24 job, really, and I doubt Pres. Obama would want that. I think he would be flattered if it were offered and intrigued, but I think there’s no way he’d accept.