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A university president makes a case against cowardice

(www.newyorker.com)
451 points pseudolus | 4 comments | 03 Apr 25 12:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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necubi ◴[03 Apr 25 23:48 UTC] No.43576821[source]▶
Oh hey, Wesleyan on HN! I’m an alumnus (matriculated a year or two after Roth became president). Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

I’ve had a few opportunities to speak with Roth since the Gaza war started, and I’ve always found him particularly thoughtful about balancing freedom of expression with a need to provide a safe and open learning environment for everyone on campus. In particular, he never gave in to the unlimited demands of protestors while still defending their right to protest.

In part, he had the moral weight to do that because—unlike many university presidents—he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020, which then were turned against the left over the past year.

I don’t see any particularly good outcome from any of this; the risk of damaging the incredibly successful American university system is high. Certainly smart foreign students who long dreamed of studying in the US will be having second thoughts if they can be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained.

But I hope the universities that do make it through do with a stronger commitment to the (small l) liberal values of freedom of expression , academic freedom, and intellectual diversity.

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kevingadd ◴[04 Apr 25 06:27 UTC] No.43578928[source]▶
People are being abducted off the street for writing tame op-eds and we're still complaining about the left chilling speech post-2020? What are we doing here?
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decimalenough ◴[04 Apr 25 07:24 UTC] No.43579250[source]▶
The left banning the use of certain words and the right banning the use of certain words are flip sides of the same coin.

Of course, if you point that out, you get yelled at by both sides.

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hellotheretoday ◴[04 Apr 25 07:43 UTC] No.43579360[source]▶
Except one side of the coin complains on twitter and maybe gets you fired from your job whereas the other side of that coin systematically removes over a hundred million dollars of research grants based on language and is literally disappearing people for their writing

but yeah, same thing. sorry someone put you through the absolute hell of saying they/them at work

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emptysongglass ◴[04 Apr 25 08:56 UTC] No.43579792[source]▶
Your attitude and inability to see anything but your own view is exactly the problem we've seen in the new left.

"Maybe gets you fired from your job" is someone's entire livelihood you're trivializing.

Any attempt to control speech and silence opposition is wrong, no matter how you slice it. "Your side" isn't any better than the other's.

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slg ◴[04 Apr 25 16:56 UTC] No.43585057[source]▶
>"Maybe gets you fired from your job" is someone's entire livelihood you're trivializing.

>Any attempt to control speech and silence opposition is wrong, no matter how you slice it.

I don't know why "Hey company, this person you employ sucks, you should fire them" doesn't qualify as speech that should be protected. It shows that you aren't asking for free speech, you are asking for speech without consequences.

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mancerayder ◴[04 Apr 25 17:57 UTC] No.43585764{3}[source]▶
Not part of the rest of the conversation, just narrowing in on the idea of speech being free if there are consequences. That sounds like some sort of 1950's-era doublespeak. If there are consequences, how would speech be free? It's a very American-centric perspective that "Free Speech" is defined as "1st Amendment". Free speech means not getting fired, jumped, killed, poisoned, expelled, etc. Fired is something that would happen in Soviet Times as well, in the USSR, and in the McCarthy era, in the U.S.

Apologies for the "two sidesism".

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slg ◴[04 Apr 25 18:42 UTC] No.43586243{4}[source]▶
How do you define which speech is speech worthy of protection and which speech is a consequence of speech and therefore not worthy of protection?

For example, imagine some CEO says something politically objectionable, as is their right granted by allowing free speech. Do I have the right to protest or boycott their company as part of my free speech rights or would that be illegal because I'm rendering a consequence for the CEO's speech?

I just have trouble conceptualizing what you think a world with consequence free speech would actually look like.

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1. noworriesnate ◴[04 Apr 25 20:07 UTC] No.43587116{5}[source]▶
This is a good question that would require a long debate to answer, but the answer obviously is neither of these two extremes:

- Every entity except the US govt is allowed to enforce consequences for speech

- there should never ever be any consequences for any speech ever

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2. slg ◴[04 Apr 25 21:32 UTC] No.43587808[source]▶
It is funny to see this type of comment downthread of a criticism of bothsidesism. You set up a spectrum in which one "extreme" is the status quo of American culture going back generations and the other "extreme" is a seemingly impossible to achieve idea for which I have never seen a single reasonable person advocate. One of those is a lot more extreme than the other. The only reason we are even having this conversation in this thread is because the Trump administration is trying to be more extreme than your first "extreme" by having the US government inflict consequences for speech.
3. bluGill ◴[05 Apr 25 00:36 UTC] No.43589209[source]▶
Fire in a crowded theator is the type of speech often used as an example serious terrorism plans should be stopped before they turn into acts.

i don't know how you enforce the above though.

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4. int_19h ◴[05 Apr 25 02:34 UTC] No.43590127[source]▶
"Fire in a crowded theater" was originally a strawman introduced by the Supreme Court to justify their ruling in Schenck v. United States. To remind, Schenck was a Socialist Party member who was distributing flyers encouraging resistance to the draft during WW1, and was convicted for the same under the Espionage Act of 1917.

SCOTUS affirmed his conviction, saying that "the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils".

Here's the flyer itself, in case you want to read those very dangerous words for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States#/medi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States#/medi...

So, all in all, a good reminder that not only the slippery slope very real, but sometimes it's there from the get go.