So my controversial opinion is that the trend represented by those disinvitation incidents was bad for campus speech and that the climate of speech on campus is not ideal.
It's just that the administration vanishing students into the gulag is a MUCH BIGGER and more immediate problem.
It's just that the administration vanishing students into the gulag is a MUCH BIGGER and more immediate problem.
Reposted from
Michael Hobbes
Old enough to remember when 30 campus speaker disinvitation attempts were a grave threat to free speech
Comments
I experienced a self-selection issue where student interest groups formed uniform ideologies and simply wouldn't interact with other groups outside of low-stakes discussions in student govt.
If someone says, "thing X is very much not equal to thing Y," no equivalence has been drawn.
I was told by four different mentors across three different campuses to keep my blandly center-right politics secret for the sake of my career.
Again, there is no equivalence here to the iron boot of state force being lawlessly deployed today, but two things can be true at once.
It isn't all purely directed right-ward.
This is how we avoid becoming like them.
https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-nation/
The right has moved to much and it feels like you hold to tigjt to to many principles they have abandoned. Unless i misread you on gender and
I do not have much sympathy for the idea that we are only ever allowed to speak about the most important issue at any given time.
Is that really a trend?
The current US right and its ideas, is, in fact an existential threat to democracy and minority populations and their advantage in simplicity gives them an advantage.
But also THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE RIGHT NOW.
More than one thing can be true at the same time.
Advice which, to judge from efforts to poll the question, was broadly correct: https://www.thefire.org/news/fire-survey-only-20-university-faculty-say-conservative-would-fit-well-their-department
We students, of course, had our own opinions about who we agreed with.
Framing that speech as a problem for free speech was deceptive preparation for suppression of speech.
I think almost no speech should be "chilled" on campus, but I struggle defining the almost part.
These two ideas were maliciously conflated by right wingers.
But who to invite is always a judgment call; many people and viewpoints are never invited for paid speaking engagements in large venues.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/science/archaeology-papyrus-tax-fraud-trial.html?smid=url-share
I don't think those two things are related... or relevant.
Campus speech is just good, in itself, as an end-goal.
If Milo Yiannopoulos is a pointless, idiotic rightoid grifter, then it should have been easy to expose him as an idiot, and yet nobody managed to do so.
Fascists have the advantage that their messages are simple, memeable, and Hit right at our most basic, ragebased, animal brain parts.
Its not at all clear that social Media, free speech and democracy can coexist.
Its possible there is no more alluring leftwing Alternative because reality is messy and the desire to blame, other and hurt people unlike you is to deep a Part of humanity.
Yes. That much is obvious. So obvious, that "The Left can't meme" is, in itself, a meme.
I still believe that that is a failure on the left.