Hate Speech on Campus

06-17-2018

Hate Speech on Campus

[caption id="attachment_19771" align="alignleft" width="300"] By Pax Ahimsa Gethen - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0[/caption] Jeremy Waldron is the most persuasive writer in favor of hate speech regulation. Most important in Waldron’s argument is his articulation of the harm in hate speech. When a Jewish father must explain flags with Swastikas to his child, when an African American mother must explain why the state house flies a confederate flag, and when a Muslim parent must explain anti-Muslim posters, there is a real danger that these hateful acts that persist unpunished in public undermine the assurance that minority groups have of their equal belonging in society. For Waldron, it is part of the dignity each of us possess as a citizen that we have an equal right to be full members of our political community. Having to confront public hate speech that is unpunished is, he argues, an affront to that dignity. An important part of Waldron’s argument is that  speech itself is different from signs, public pamphlets, and enduring symbols in society. While speech is fleeting, hateful symbols and signs in public attack the dignity of those belittled and attacked by hateful public speech. When hate speech is public, tangible, and lasting, it undermines the equal dignity due all of us in constitutional democracy. In an essay this week in the New York Review of Books, Waldron considers the question of hate speech on college campuses. He makes an analogy with legislation that disallows activities that cause a “hostile workplace environment.”

“Certainly, in our assessment of student activism, we need to bear in mind the history of exclusion. Some of our students may feel a little shaky about their right to be on campus, or about others’ perceptions of their right to be there. In living memory, some of our colleges were explicitly race-restricted institutions. And that sort of history doesn’t just evaporate with the good intentions of highly paid administrators. Think about racist songs, “blackface” parties, and white supremacist processions and put that alongside images of crowds jostling and jeering young men and women like the Little Rock Nine coming into colleges and high schools to desegregate them in the 1950s. Those who dismiss the concerns of twenty-first-century minorities by calling them “snowflakes” and telling them to cultivate “thicker skins” should imagine being nineteen and living in a world that did not always seem fair or unthreatening. When the Middlebury American Enterprise Institute Club invited Charles Murray to speak on campus in 2017, it could defend the invitation as part of an open and reasoned debate. (Chemerinsky and Gillman note that it was free criticism, back and forth, that led to the discrediting of The Bell Curve in the years after its publication.) The club no doubt relished the element of provocation as their liberal opponents rose to the bait of the invitation. But revulsion against speakers of this ilk is not just intolerance on the left. If we remember the history of inclusion and exclusion then, as Professor Ben-Porath observes, Charles Murray’s very presence on campus, even if to speak about matters unrelated to The Bell Curve, was seen as undermining the dignity of African-American students, robbing them of their standing as full and equal members of the campus community. Civil rights law requires us to be alert to the danger of what is called “a hostile workplace environment.” Why not on campus as well? In 2016 Jay Ellison, dean of students at the University of Chicago, wrote a letter to freshmen announcing that the university does not “condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” But safe spaces on campus for minority groups are not incompatible with there also being places on campus—classrooms, for example—where the same people have no choice but to face up to views with which they disagree.”

Waldron is correct that one can both argue for safe spaces where like-minded individuals can congregate in private and also insist that classrooms are a different kind of space, a space safe for the kind of rigorous thinking that requires we hear and respond to views that challenge our basic convictions. If one takes such a non-controversial stance, then the only question is that of where the boundary is between the academic spaces safe for discussion and the private spaces subject to demands of comfort. The answer to that question on a college campus concerns whether the activities in question are part of the academic mission of the college. Waldron seems to suggest that most of the free speech controversies over campus lectures are irrelevant to academics. He writes:

“Is the free research of mathematicians or philosophers or physicists really in peril because of how one group of students responds to an invitation to Ann Coulter or Milo Yiannopoulos? Most of the free speech issues on campus have nothing to do with the lectures, laboratories, or seminars in which academic freedom is implicated.”

But this is an unhelpful argument. If a mathematician or scientist brings a renegade speaker, someone who believes in cold fusion, someone who questions the consensus on climate science, or claims to have solved an insolvable proof, preventing such speakers on the grounds that they are dangerous to the consensus views would be opposed to the academic principle of reasoned engagement. If the offensive ideas are wrong, they should be heard and criticized. If they contain a grain of truth, those who oppose them may amend and improve their own understandings. An invitation to Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos, Linda Sarsour, or Louis Farrakhan has nothing to do with math or physics. Just as dissident scientists and mathematicians helpfully force faculty and students in those fields to re-visit widely shared assumptions, so too dissident speakers in the humanities and social sciences require that the campus community interrogate their own verities. Such talks also allow faculty and students to argue with these speakers—in any academic talk, there must be ample time to question the invited speaker. It is more than possible to admit that there is a harm in hate speech as Waldron argues and also to argue that the very premise of an academic community forbids excluding such harms. The liberal arts college is not simply a technical school in the pursuit of disciplinary truths. The college is also place where students and faculty learn how to think and question given truths; part of critical thinking means learning about the fullness and plurality of the world in which we live. Such an encounter with the world means encountering difficult and even offensive ideas that are part of the world in which we live. Hannah Arendt argued for the essential importance of free speech as the only way to encounter the fullness of our common world:  “no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective.”  Arendt adds:

“Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides...politics and freedom are identical, and wherever this kind of freedom does not exist, there is no political space in the true sense.”

Politics is founded upon the fact of human plurality, that in politics we deal with the “coexistence and association of ?different ?men.” If a college is to study politics, let alone if it is to prepare students for political life, it must create an intellectually rigorous safe space for the encounter with plurality. —Roger Berkowitz

Form more information visit: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/brave-spaces-campus-free-speech/

When Nothing is True

[caption id="attachment_19773" align="alignright" width="216"] 1EN-625-B1945 Orwell, George (eigentl. Eric Arthur Blair), engl. Schriftsteller, Motihari (Indien) 25.1.1903 - London 21.1.1950. Foto, um 1945.[/caption] Masha Gessen observes some essential features of totalitarianism noticed by both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt.

“Orwell was writing in 1946, five or seven years before scholarly works by Hannah Arendt, on the one hand, and Karl Friedrich, on the other, provided the definitions of totalitarianism that are still in use today. Orwell’s own “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which provides the visceral understanding of totalitarianism that we still conjure up today, was a couple of years away. Orwell was in the process of imagining totalitarianism—he had, of course, never lived in a totalitarian society. He imagined two major traits of totalitarian societies: one is lying, and the other is what he called schizophrenia. He wrote, “The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as it is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.” The lying entailed constantly rewriting the past to accommodate the present. “This kind of thing happens everywhere,” he wrote, “but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” He goes on to imagine that “a totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist.” Orwell was right. The totalitarian regime rests on lies because they are lies. The subject of the totalitarian regime must accept them not as truth—must not, in fact, believe them—but accept them both as lies and as the only available reality. She must believe nothing. Just as Orwell predicted, over time the totalitarian regime destroys the very concept, the very possibility of truth. Hannah Arendt identified this as one of the effects of totalitarian propaganda: it makes everything conceivable because “nothing is true.””

Form more information visit: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-george-orwell-predicted-the-challenge-of-writing-today

Seduction and Consent

Laura Kipnis asks if there is a future for seduction. In the aftermath of #metoo, are our desires changing? Kipnis explores how the old tropes of romantic pursuit are being re-written to fit the script of contemporary politics, while calling attention to the varying expectations men and women have during courtship.

“the conversation got me thinking about the future of seduction. Does it have one? It seems dubious. Coaxing people into things they’re initially reluctant (though might secretly yearn) to do in the realm of sex and romance, though a time-honored ritual of literature, movies, and perhaps a few well-burnished memories, has become rather suspect. HR officers are standing by. Also the internet. Charm itself smells a little rapey: an illegitimate exercise of power. Should we be saying good riddance, because seduction was always a con and the imprudent sometimes got hurt? Perhaps, in other words, discrediting seduction should be counted among the many unassailable gains of the #MeToo movement. Or should we lament its passing, because imprudence is what make us human, and what’s life without illusions? Even when things went well, seduction had its perils. To be seduced meant opening yourself up to something you hadn’t anticipated — allowing your will to be penetrated by the will of another, your boundaries to be ignored, if not trampled. Certain realities must be suspended for the duration. You become a little foreign to yourself, which is no doubt why so many classic seduction tales take place in foreign locales. You’re an explorer of unfamiliar landscapes (your own included), but travel is precarious: The language is confusing, you’re scammed by wily locals. Valuables get pilfered.”

Form more information visit: https://www.thecut.com/2018/06/laura-kipnis-on-the-future-of-seduction.html