Barack Obama Channels John Stuart Mill When Discussing Free Speech on Campus

“The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas."

University of California president Clark Kerr

Here's an excerpt from Edwin Chemerinsky's excellent 2017 book, Free Speech on Campus (p. 71):

Concerns about a culture of intolerance on college campuses led President Obama to tell Rutgers graduates in 2016 that democracy and education require a willingness to listen to people with whom you disagree:

I know a couple years ago, folks on this campus got upset that Condoleezza Rice was supposed to speak at a commencement. Now, I don’t think it’s a secret that I disagree with many of the foreign policies of Dr. Rice and the previous administration. But the notion that this community or country would be better served by not hearing from a former Secretary of State, or shutting out what she had to say—I believe that’s misguided. . . .

If you disagree with somebody, bring them in and ask them tough questions. Hold their feet to the fire. Make them defend their positions. If somebody has got a bad or offensive idea, prove it wrong. Engage it. Debate it. Stand up for what you believe in. Don’t be scared to take somebody on. Don’t feel like you got to shut your ears off because you’re too fragile and somebody might offend your sensibilities. Go at them if they’re not making any sense. Use your logic and reason and words. And by doing so, you’ll strengthen your own position, and you’ll hone your arguments. And maybe you’ll learn something and realize you don’t know everything. And you may have a new understanding not only about what your opponents believe but maybe what you believe. Either way, you win. And more importandy, our democracy wins.

Chemerinsky writes (p. 64):

We believe there is no middle ground. History demonstrates that there is no way to define an unacceptable, punishment-worthy idea without putting genuinely important new thinking and societal critique at risk. Universities contribute to society when faculty are allowed to explore the frontiers of knowledge and suggest ways of thinking that may be considered crazy, distasteful, or offensive to the community. When people ask the censor to suppress bad ideas in higher education, many important and positive ideas never have the chance to flourish, and many dangerous or evil ideas are allowed to thrive because they are not subjected to evaluation, critique, and rebuttal. In our view, no belief should be treated as sacrosanct. Nullius in verba remains vital: we must be willing to subject all ideas to the test.

In 2020, Chemerinsky was invited to talk at Claremont McKenna College. Four key points to his talk were reported at the school website:

Free speech: “To me, the core principle (of free speech) is that all ideas and views can be expressed no matter how offensive, even deeply offensive. … The government cannot prohibit speech or create liability for speech on the grounds that it’s offensive.”

Hate speech: “Hate speech is very hurtful. But most of all, the reason why hate speech is protected in the United States is that it stresses an idea. The Late Justice John Marshall Harlan said ‘to censor your words is to censor your ideas. We can’t cleanse the English language to please the most squeamish among us.’”

Campus culture: “Colleges and universities can have time, place, and manner restrictions with regard to speech, as long as they leave it open at alternative places for communication. Government can have time, place, and manner restrictions. For colleges and universities, the government can have it to restrict the disruption of campus activities and to protect safety. Colleges and universities have a moral duty towards the safety of the students and faculty.”

Speech we detest: “We don’t need freedom of speech to protect the speech we like. We need freedom of speech to protect the speech we detest. I am dubious to let the government decide what message to express. Freedom of speech is based on a faith—a faith that we would all be better off in the academic institution, where all our ideas and views will be expressed.”

Continue ReadingBarack Obama Channels John Stuart Mill When Discussing Free Speech on Campus

The Fictions Demanded by the Political Far Left

John McWhorter lists some today's most prominent fictions pushed by the political far left in his NYT article: "Here’s a Fact: We’re Routinely Asked to Use Leftist Fictions."

These days, an aroma of delusion lingers, with ideas presented to us from a supposedly brave new world that is, in reality, patently nonsensical. Yet we are expected to pretend otherwise. To point out the nakedness of the emperor is the height of impropriety, and I suspect that the sheer degree to which we are asked to engage in this dissimulation will go down as a hallmark of the era: Do you believe that a commitment to diversity should be crucial to the evaluation of a candidate for a physics professorship? Do you believe that it’s mission-critical for doctors to describe people in particular danger of contracting certain diseases not as “vulnerable (or disadvantaged)” but as “oppressed (or made vulnerable or disenfranchised)”? Do you believe that being “diverse” does not make an applicant to a selective college or university more likely to be admitted?

In some circles these days, you are supposed to say you do.

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The Rate at which Children Learn New Words

The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar notes that by age 3 an average child can use about 1,000 words (double Kanzi’s bonobo world record); by age 6, around 13,000; and by age 18, some 60,000: ‘that means it has been learning an average of 10 new words a day since its first birthday, the equivalent of a new word every 90 minutes of its waking life.

FREE SPEECH: Ten Principles for a Connected World, Timothy Garton Ash (2017)

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John McWhorter joins Firing Line’s Margaret Hoover on PBS to discuss “Critical Race Theory.”

John McWhorter joins Firing Line's Margaret Hoover on PBS to discuss "Critical Race Theory."

A few excerpts:

Margaret Hoover:

what are they rallying against? What are they teaching that is objectionable?

John McWhorter:

here's the here's the issue. And I wish all of them would be more specific there two things. One is practically lining all the kids up against the wall and teaching the white people, our oppressors, black people are oppressed, and that the white kids need to know it, and the black kids need to know it. And what however you present it, that is some strong stuff to be giving to eight year olds to teach that whiteness is potentially evil and that blackness means that you have to constantly be on guard against it.

Then the second thing is a basic idea that battling power differentials, and specifically racism, often is supposed to be not just one of many things, not just one of many things in the meal, but the center, the fulcrum of all intellectual, artistic and moral endeavor. That's what is being taught at many schools. It's not just whether or not you teach people that there was slavery, that there was redlining and that racism can be subtle. It's making all of these schools antiracist boot camps. That's the problem these days.

After last summer, there was this educational opportunity many of these people saw where you could start saying that you needed to do this within this racial reckoning. And if you don't do it, you're a racist. Now, if anybody had tried to pull that, say, 15 years ago, it wouldn't have work. But now we have Twitter, so if you go against them, you get called a racist in the public square. For nine out of 10 people, that's enough to make them follow along, because most of us are buying groceries and raising our kids, but the result of this has been truly dangerous.

Margaret Hoover:

So you just introduced a new term into this conversation, anti racism. And your next book is entitled, Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America. Explain what is the relationship between anti racism and critical race theory?

John McWhorter:

Well, anti racism as a fashionable word these days, but what it means in practice, you know, who knows what its definition in the dictionary is, but what it means in practice is that if there is some kind of imbalance between white and black people, the reason is something called racism, either bigotry, or some raw deal that black people have been done as the result of it and probably a mixture of the two. And that therefore, what we're going to do is we're going to battle that racism. That's what anti racism means in our current context. And the problem with it is that, often, what we're seeing as, quote unquote, racist isn't. So the common idea that you get nowadays, black kids tend not to do as well on standardized tests. Well, instead of saying, "How do we get black kids to do better on them?" which is something that has happened in the past, the new idea is that you say, "Let's just get rid of the test, because the test must be racist." You don't have to specify how, but if the black kids don't do as well on it, the test is a racist practice. That's a real leap. That is a hyper-radical way of looking at things that I think most people presented with the mechanics of the argument would think of as rather cruel, frankly, to black kids. That's not the way to run a society., most of us would think. Some people might be able to make a case for it, but most of us wouldn't agree with that. But instead, we're being taught that if you're not an antiracist, you're bad. And we're gonna embarrass you on Twitter. And as a result, many people end up pretending to agree with ideas like this.

Margaret Hoover:

There are local school board meetings across the country, getting national attention with parents using the word indoctrination about anti racism curriculum. You say that you've been contacted by parents and teachers and principals from all over the country on a daily basis? What are people who reach out to you telling you

John McWhorter

Well, people who reach out to me are telling me is that they are extremely disappointed and are angry that this is suddenly happening in their school. And the regular theme is that they understand what racism is, but they don't want their kids being taught what to think as opposed to how to think. And then also, they're scared. They are so deeply afraid of being tarred as racists in public. And these people just they want their children to be taught not that there's no racism. They don't want their children to be taught Beaver Cleaver as America, but they don't want want their children to be going to antiracist academies. The idea that that represents progress that nobody should stand athwart is one of the most sclerotic ideas I had ever seen becoming mainstream in my entire existence.

Continue ReadingJohn McWhorter joins Firing Line’s Margaret Hoover on PBS to discuss “Critical Race Theory.”