Yeah, free speech bros like Rogan are all of a sudden not so interested.
I doubt that audience has all that much of an historical or political context to have put the obsession with free speech into. They didn’t understand that the Right has never been interested in defending free speech.
This is not a problem with the vast majority of college kids who don’t go to elite Ivy League schools yet the media treats those students/schools as representative of all. That only serves to strengthen the right’s fearmongering narrative.
In the late 60s at my very liberal east coast college some students were really extreme opponents of of the war who advocated violence but they were a tiny minority. Yet it was those types of students that the media portrayed as representative of my generation. That also helped strengthen the right
I am leaning in. This summer, I’m completely revamping my main class to confront the times more directly. If students don’t know history, politics, ethics… the Humanities… we are screwed. I’ve never let anyone interfere with my classes, and I’m not going to now.
Almost like that entire conversation was as manufactured as the constant “but what about the debt” bullshit. It’s a hammer that is used as a political tool and anybody who entertained it was a useful fool helping to advance the fascist’s agenda.
In the not so distant past "counter culture" classes were taught as reading and discussion groups, not as a formal part of the curriculum. We may be back there now.
TBF, FIRE has done a few events critiquing the current attacks on academia. I suspect they didn't do much exploration of their own contribution to the current environment.
i have similar questions about the “teaching in the multicultural classroom” course i teach. it’s required of our education majors. will we have to change the whole damn major too? that process generally takes at least a semester, if not a year, to go thru all the requisitions committees.
The dominance of transactional relationships between higher education and students has set the stage for the dissolution of higher education as an opportunity for all in society. The “elite” fantasize that they and only they will be able to read the ruins in the future.
We forgot how fragile Free Speech is. There's a reason it's the First Amendment. The founders knew it, but what happens when the government no longer protects it?
Either you teach history or you teach science fiction. The facts never change even if the administration wants to "white" wash it.
"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." - Robert Heinlein
Yes! Where are all the “freedom loving” right wingers and the civil libertarians now??? 🦗🦗🦗Where are the “lock her up” peeps to comment on n the the Signal scandal???
For over a century really.
My local university in Canada 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 has a campus police force... 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯!
They're there to enforce the 𝘭𝘢𝘸𝘴 of the land not the 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴 of the land!
Their attitude to the Gaza protests last year was for containment, not punishment.
Protesters got to make their point.
A decade ago it felt like every other op ed was about the moral imperative of allowing neo nazis to speak on college campuses, and suddenly that enthusiasm has vanished when it's time to advocate for liberal free speech.
I wrote last year about the moral panic and how that might lead to the kind of free speech crackdown that we are seeing now. Alternately incurious and hyperbolic, the media helped set the stage for our current predicament.
Nice write up. At the time, the media missing the ball on UCLA was insane, sometimes intentional.
One of the primary counter protestor agitators who spread the IM BEING BLOCKED A JEW GETTING TO CLASS wildfire tried for 3 days to film antagonizing rage bait and carried pepper spray.
Another pro Israel protestor faked being knocked unconscious when she tried to grab a Palestine flag and dove head first into a fence. She then blamed pro Palestinian protestors and Fox News stopped showing her when it was found out to be BS.
SCOTUS weighed on this almost 100 years ago, noting that the freedom to choose what shall be taught and how it is taught is one of the 4 essential freedoms of the university.
Free speech to the Right is their freedom to use any denigrating language they choose about women, minorities or opponents and not bear any personal or social consequences. It negates “hate speech.” Suppressing their opponents is a feature, not a bug, of right wing “free speech.”
It doesn’t have anything to do with academic freedom: this was akin to a phishing effort or 419 scam that successfully targeted credulous reactionary centrists and fellow travelers like David Brooks, who now ask how were they to know the general’s widow wasn’t on the level.
I am appalled that the US government is cracking down on free speech by a presidential diktat. (I'm from the UK, it could not happen here).
Nevertheless I see things such as critical race theory and DEI as codswallop and I would wish to see such ideas to slowly fade away - unaided by Trump.
I'm teaching my black freedom struggle senior seminar class in the fall. I have absolutely no plans to change it, water it down, mask it, or depart from the hard lessons it teaches whatsoever. I feel so helpless in the big picture but THIS I can do.
I will again teach my course on Power & Privilege.
And even more proudly next semester, since many of the readings I have used for years have now been removed from the library of the U.S. Navel Academy.
If anyone has an issue with it, take it up with my students who, regardless of their personal or political positions will know more about this topic than anyone who banned those books!
And to think that there are still people that think the dems were trying to take away their rights. If it wasn't so sad, it would be funny to see the look on faces when it's explained to them what is happening under their noses. I say it has to be explained because I don't think they're very smart.
It's because they're owned by Oligarchs who use "news" as a tool to promote *their* interests, not report the news, and all they care about is money at the expense of our lives, liberties, and pursuit of happiness.
Academics in FL and TX have been here for several years now. My only advice: double down on “don’t comply in advance” at least for tenured profs. I won’t change what I teach until someone points out what exactly in my syllabus violates whatever law they’ve adopted. Hand waving isn’t enough.
“Oh, nonono, you misunderstand. I said it was wrong for there to be negative consequences for right-wing speech, this is targeting left-wing speech so it’s totally different”
Of course! It was a ruse. It always was. And when liberals pointed this ruse out, bad-faith actors said those warnings were examples of just the kind of repression in question.
Nope. Those same bad-faith actors are quiet now, because they got what they were looking for: silencing their critics.
As a high school teacher who labored for years in the shadow of a hopelessly vague* prohibition against teaching "divisive concepts" in my social studies classes...yeah.
(*Held unconstitutionally so by the district court, now on appeal to the 1st Cir.)
Unfortunately, Democrats fed into the false claims of antisemitism. They laid the groundwork for what we're seeing now. Remember when Jeffries said, weeks ago, that Dems should oppose the illegal kidnapping of a student *even though he's a dirty piece of shit Hamas supporter*?
It was never about academic freedom and free speech. It was always about wanting to smother and snuff out voices and expression that so-called “conservatives” found inconvenient to their desired agenda …. the agenda we are seeing put in place now.
It's like States' Rights going back to before the Civil War. It only mattered to conservatives when it benefited their desire for power. As soon as it is about anyone else, they don't care.
It's because the fucking Democrats also 1. buy into "cancel culture", 2. unquestioningly support Israel, and 3. want stiff penalties for those espousing support for Palestinians or criticism of Israel.
LBJ wielded enormous influence as president, but not at every level of government and society. In contrast, Trump's destructive influence has been permanently tattooed on all U.S. foreheads for a generation or three.
If possible, litigate it all repeatedly. They’re not invincible and as recent evidence suggests, they will cave with pushback. We can’t let them steamroll us.
Remembering the time (earlier this year) I quit a bookclub full of credulous twits waxing poetic about Jonathan Haidt and the 'crisis' of campus free speech.
That stupid see you next Tuesday has been shutting down free speech on campus since she was an undergrad at Columbia. How she EVER was taken semi seriously as a “free speech absolutist” 😵💫😵💫😵💫 is totally beyond me
Comments
I doubt that audience has all that much of an historical or political context to have put the obsession with free speech into. They didn’t understand that the Right has never been interested in defending free speech.
Can you teach a course while racist? Absofuckinglutely.
https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/ronald-kl-collins-first-amendment-news/executive-watch-breadth-and-depth-trump
"Read the ruins" is some delicious Bone-apple Tea though.
Institutional racism is now being codified.
Talking about institutional racism is being criminalized.
Now tell me once again how white supremacy did not rig the twenty twenty four so called election.
#Blacksky #JimCrow
"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." - Robert Heinlein
My local university in Canada 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 has a campus police force... 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯!
They're there to enforce the 𝘭𝘢𝘸𝘴 of the land not the 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴 of the land!
Their attitude to the Gaza protests last year was for containment, not punishment.
Protesters got to make their point.
I wrote last year about the moral panic and how that might lead to the kind of free speech crackdown that we are seeing now. Alternately incurious and hyperbolic, the media helped set the stage for our current predicament.
https://novapsyche.substack.com/p/punking-the-protests-for-a-putsch
One of the primary counter protestor agitators who spread the IM BEING BLOCKED A JEW GETTING TO CLASS wildfire tried for 3 days to film antagonizing rage bait and carried pepper spray.
Nevertheless I see things such as critical race theory and DEI as codswallop and I would wish to see such ideas to slowly fade away - unaided by Trump.
And even more proudly next semester, since many of the readings I have used for years have now been removed from the library of the U.S. Navel Academy.
“What an affable man.”
*Tim Scott when he’s voting for a white supremacist to be Secretary of Defense.”
“…”
Nope. Those same bad-faith actors are quiet now, because they got what they were looking for: silencing their critics.
(*Held unconstitutionally so by the district court, now on appeal to the 1st Cir.)
The right can now run on canceling cancel culture as pro free speech.
https://bsky.app/profile/paulgowder.bsky.social/post/3lmimv3vf3c2w
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/liberals-new-mccarthyism-dissent/