Offensive Speech On Campus Is A Good Thing
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, points out that things that are tough for us, that challenge us, are precisely the things that make us better.
Speech you disagree with is speech that helps you hone your thinking and better debate the disagreeable ideas and speech. Speech that is silenced and shoved underground leaves you like a bunny about to get picked off by the wolf -- once you leave what's now becoming the protective womb of college.
Mark Yudof, the former president of the University of California, argues against this sort of campus -- the campus as giant protective parent. Yudof writes in the Dallas Morning News that students wanting universities to act as parents is going to lead to results the students won't like -- and results that will be damaging for us as a culture:
Universities are being asked to act as parents. Parents have broad moral authority over their children. If a parent may determine a child's access to the internet, decline to invite racist Uncle Charlie over for dinner, impose a curfew on date nights, or celebrate a boys-only birthday party, why can't a university perform a similar function?I suspect the new paternalists would be far less enthusiastic about some of these measures; they are for selective application of the in loco parentis doctrine. It applies only when one disagrees with the speaker. In this view the First Amendment is at best an inconvenience and at worst an excuse for protecting insulting speech. Apparently some campuses are irony-free zones.
A recent survey found that more than two-thirds of college students support the idea that disciplinary action is appropriate in response to racist, homophobic and other offensive speech. Why has this view taken hold? Some think it is because students were often indulged by their permissive families; they lead privileged lives. I am skeptical. Students and their families went through the Great Recession and often face economic hardships and an uncertain job market. Students of color often face particular challenges. And student upset with offensive speech goes back many decades. Speech has often been perceived as hurtful. Consider, for example, the adoption of racial harassment codes in the 1980s -- which generally were declared unconstitutional by lower courts.
My view is that much progress has been made in addressing overt acts of discrimination by universities. Now the target has moved from hateful action to perceived hateful speech. It is an understandable evolution, though it reflects an ignorance of constitutional traditions. The evolution is in part sustained by an intellectual movement focusing on dog whistle discrimination, implicit bias and sensitivity to micro-aggression. As University of California, Irvine professors Howard Gillman and Erwin Chermerinsky have written, students are now "deeply sensitized to the psychological harm associated with hateful or intolerant speech, and their instinct is to be protective."
Only, whoopsy, let's look at the "implicit association test."
And Lilienfeld has a thing or two to say about the "microaggressions" research ("Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence.")
The microaggression research program (MRP) rests on five core premises, namely, that microaggressions (1) are operationalized with sufficient clarity and consensus to afford rigorous scientific investigation; (2) are interpreted negatively by most or all minority group members; (3) reflect implicitly prejudicial and implicitly aggressive motives; (4) can be validly assessed using only respondents' subjective reports; and (5) exert an adverse impact on recipients' mental health.A review of the literature reveals negligible support for all five suppositions. More broadly, the MRP has been marked by an absence of connectivity to key domains of psychological science, including psychometrics, social cognition, cognitive-behavioral therapy, behavior genetics, and personality, health, and industrial-organizational psychology.
Although the MRP has been fruitful in drawing the field's attention to subtle forms of prejudice, it is far too underdeveloped on the conceptual and methodological fronts to warrant real-world application.
I conclude with 18 suggestions for advancing the scientific status of the MRP, recommend abandonment of the term "microaggression," and call for a moratorium on microaggression training programs and publicly distributed microaggression lists pending research to address the MRP's scientific limitations.
Yudof continues:
But universities are not homes, administrators are not parents. University students are not children. Students should not be protected from ideas and communications that they find disturbing. Robust speech, protected by the First Amendment, often may offend or chill or disrupt the conventional wisdom. That is good. Universities should work to protect students from sexual and physical assaults and other harms. They should not be safe havens from disturbing ideas and discourses. It is one thing to condemn and quite another to censor or punish.We live in an era in which people can easily isolate themselves ideologically. Not only may the home be a vacuum-sealed bubble, but people can go only to the websites or the cable news channels that reinforces their points of view. They can hang out largely with fellow ideologues. Behavioral economists call this confirmation bias. But universities are one of the few places (the work place should be another) where one encounters others with different points of view and engages in robust debate.
This "robust debate" should be preserved, not removed from the equation under the notion that it's racist and "mean."
Also, see how this plays out on what is taught. (As in the "Wizard of Oz"...click twice to make it readable.)
"[W]hat happens when a censor looks over a teacher's shoulder," per the dissent of Justices Douglas and Black. Adler v. Board of Ed. (1952). pic.twitter.com/IPhaoh7P9I
— Will Creeley (@WillatFIRE) January 12, 2017
Sometimes when a popular figure holds a indefensibly weak position on an important topic, it indicts their insights about everything else.
Crid at January 12, 2017 11:34 PM
I can appreciate Mencken's words despite his being an anti-Semite. Being an adult means parsing these things -- looking at the value of work itself. Taleb is right on anti-fragile, and frankly, it's not a unique idea; he just stated it well.
I write about it here:
http://www.advicegoddess.com/ag-column-archives/2016/09/look-on-the-alw.html
Amy Alkon at January 13, 2017 6:08 AM
Faulty logic, Crid.
Just because someone is wrong/right about X does not mean they're also wrong/right about Y.
For values of X and Y that are independent of each other.
I R A Darth Aggie at January 13, 2017 6:34 AM
There's a passage in the Lilienfeld quote in which he, probably without meaning to, provided an apt demonstration of the nature of the problem. It is this statement: "Although the MRP has been fruitful in drawing the field's attention to subtle forms of prejudice..."
This was after, in the previous paragraph, he just got through saying that there is no evidence that any such thing exists. Why, then, would he say it? It's pretty obvious: if he doesn't make a statement of fealty to the orthodoxy, his academic career will be in jeopardy. I think this illustrates the nature of the problem even more than his actual quoted statements about microagression research do.
Cousin Dave at January 13, 2017 6:57 AM
> Just because someone is wrong/
> right about X does not mean
> they're also wrong/right
> about Y.
When X is so consequential, and you're that wrong about it, it will be difficult to regard your perceptions as trustworthy in any context... And much easier to find a better champion (or critic) for them.
Crid at January 13, 2017 7:27 AM
Depends exactly what X and Y are. I haven't heard any complaints about Ben Carson as a doctor, but anyone unscientific enough to flirt with the idea of the earth being created in six days is not someone I'd recommend as a surgeon. (OK, so he's over 65 anyway, when surgeons typically have to retire anyway - some are forced to retire earlier.)
lenona at January 13, 2017 8:56 AM
On the other hand, "IRA Darth Aggie," if you wanna stumble through your idiot life following heroes who, having flattered your idiot presumptions one way or another, could not (therefore) be wrong about anything ever, go right ahead.
Let us know how that works.
"Faulty logic, Crid."
You a logician!
Crid at January 13, 2017 9:02 AM
Crid: still mostly harmless.
I R A Darth Aggie at January 13, 2017 9:17 AM
It should not always be the case that one should seek even to "answer speech you don't like with more speech". Perhaps, the speech of someone lets you know their values and needs and those values and needs should be respected. So perhaps the point of view of stay-at-home moms, or people who like the suburbs, or those who value lower taxes vs a new bike path need to be listened to. Perhaps a compromise is possible. Perhaps everyone's needs can be met somehow. This winner-take-all mentality is destructive.
cc at January 13, 2017 9:37 AM
One of the assumptions of all the anti-hate-speech efforts is that hate and discrimination are flowing all around us all the time. That white people are actively discriminating. While this no doubt was true when there where colored water fountains, is it really true today? I saw a video of a young black man who decided to dress white. He put on a sport coat and tie (and not even expensive--I think he wore bluejeans with it) and went about his day. He reported that everyone treated him really great. He seemed baffled by it. I saw an account by a white dude. Big, burly, heavy beard. He said that when in grubby clothes people kind of edged away from him and gave him the eye (and he admitted that if he saw himself like that he would be wary also because he looks dangerous) but if he dressed up, no problem. There is in fact a reasonable fear that grubby dirty crazy looking people are dangerous, whatever their race, and people respond to this. Are we to pretend that the world isn't dangerous? this isn't even racism. The effort to look nice and act civilized is not that hard. I know a number of successful immigrants of various minority-type nationalities and they always dress nicely. Coincidence? I think not.
cc at January 13, 2017 9:46 AM
The problem is not that the snowflakes are demanding.
The problem is that the "people in charge" are in agreement w/the demands.
This stuff would go away pretty quick if the existing mores of the "real" world were enforced.
Bob in Texas at January 13, 2017 10:13 AM
I agree Bob.
I think the whole problem is enablers.
Ppen at January 13, 2017 11:55 AM
cc: There IS a middle ground. Journalist Lena Williams wrote in 2000 that just once, she'd like to go shopping while wearing jeans or some such, instead of wearing a dress or a skirt as if it were a special occasion. But if she did that, she said, she'd get shadowed by the clerks. (She was 50 at the time - so it's not likely she was being mistaken for a teenager.)
And it's been pointed out at least once that often, it seems as though minorities are the only ones who DO dress up for weddings and funerals anymore.
lenona at January 13, 2017 2:09 PM
> Still mostly harmless.
It's great to have been born in a stream of so many easy calories that you can be peckerheadedly sarcastic about it with just a few words, right? I totally get it! Concision is an important part of comedy, because timing. Totally "logical," "IRA Darth Aggee"!
> This stuff would go away pretty
> quick if the existing mores of
> the "real" world were enforced.
Let's translate: When you say "'real' world," what you mean precisely is "competitive wealth creation."
Academics have never in their lives had to fight for their earnings in a market where customers can make free choices. Faculty meetings are as bad as it gets for them, but there's one thing every faculty member agrees upon: We don't want to compete for the judgment of consumers with options. They don't want to take something that's worth 99 and turn it into something that's worth $1.02. Tenure, itself ever less tenable to the rest of us, is the lens of their worldview.
18-year-old fuckbabies whining about pronouns or what-have-you is not really a challenge— The money spent to mollify the illiterate bastards will never be their own.
Crid at January 13, 2017 2:24 PM
I want to make sure I have your train of thought correct crid.
If some guy on the street claiming to be Napoleon and eating a dead cat claims 2+2=4 we are not to trust that?
lujlp at January 13, 2017 5:03 PM
I want to make sure I have your train of thought correct crid.
If some guy on the street claiming to be Napoleon and eating a dead cat claims 2+2=4 we are not to trust that?
lujlp at January 13, 2017 5:03 PM
Correct. First you verify that the claiment is operating in base 10.
I'm largely with Crid on this issue. Anyone who latches onto the GMO hysteria is more than likely operating from some crackpot paranoid fantasy.
Doesn't mean that they won't be accidentally right every once in a while, on a few issues, but it makes their thought process and their authority suspect.
This is why it is so important to both examine the data, and make them show their work.
Isab at January 13, 2017 5:22 PM
"Academics have never in their lives had to fight for their earnings in a market where customers can make free choices."
Umm, yes, they have - and they do. Their customer is just not you, or me, damn them, huh? History is full of famed academics operating at the whim of a sponsor. Lesser academics now just wallow in amorphous money clouds sourced in uncertain ways.
"First you verify that the claiment(sic) is operating in base 10."
Sure, but you should do that for every statement you can. Peter Drucker's "arrogance of the learned" applies everywhere, as a majority appears to assume that because they make a decent living doing {thing}, they are then expert on {unrelated thing}. For example, see any loud Hollywoodian - and yes, I know there are many capable and reasonable actors.
The first comment is still true. It's tough to get a gem out of the dirt.
Radwaste at January 13, 2017 10:27 PM
> Umm, yes, they have -
> and they do
Umm, no, they haven't —
and they don't.
Crid at January 14, 2017 8:52 AM
Oh, FFS. Sometimes it's better when you shut up.
It's history. There wasn't an academic class until those who had made themselves comfortable asked someone else to find out how things worked and recognized that utility, and where an economy collapses, effort returns to grubbing out a living.
Radwaste at January 14, 2017 10:21 AM
There may be commissions and inquiries, pointed questions and angry challenges, but all for naught: No one on the surface of our planet will ever comprehend what point you intended to make.
Crid at January 14, 2017 3:56 PM
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