Universities serve as finishing schools for the ruling class.
Middlebury, like many prestigious colleges, has steadily gravitated away from its core educational mission and now serves primarily as a sort of finishing school for the ruling class. Professors and administrators alike are simply expected to shower students with affirmation—and then hand over a degree securing smooth entry into America’s elite. College has become four years of expensive fun. This is what parents and students now demand.
.. The student body is ultra-affluent. Middlebury is among a small handful of schools with more students from the top one percent of the income distribution than those from the bottom 60 percent. And on graduation, newly christened alums are typically funneled right back into their elite enclaves, taking jobs at places like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Amazon.
What an NYU Administrator Got Wrong About Campus Speech
Ulrich Baer’s op-ed in The New York Times is the latest challenge to liberal speech norms that fails to withstand close scrutiny.
Ulrich Baer, a vice provost at New York University, published an op-ed in The New York Times defending student-activist efforts to shut down speakers at institutions of higher education like Auburn, UC Berkeley, and Middlebury. He urged readers inclined to defend liberal norms on matters of speech to adopt “a more sophisticated understanding” and argued that “the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing.”
Were there “parameters of speech” at Berkeley 10 or 15 years ago that denied standing to students who have it today? What were the parameters? Who are the students?
.. Many words are lavished on a questionably relevant anecdote about the Holocaust and the obligatory theory of a postmodern French philosopher. Very few words clarify what speech is to be suppressed by what standards, or who is to decide if they are met
.. casting ostensibly unworthy speech as that which marshals abstract argument against personal experience.
.. it also challenged the Jewish survivors to produce evidence of their own legitimacy in a discourse that had systematically denied their humanity.”
.. Holocaust denial stayed a highly stigmatized, fringe belief. The descendants of Holocaust survivors are not marginal victims kept down by bygone free speech. So the culture of relatively absolute free speech worked.
.. Holocaust denial is arguably less widespread in the country with no laws against it than some Western European countries that have long criminalized denying the Holocaust.
.. Consider the marginalized son of Appalachian coal miners who goes off to college feeling sure, based on personal experience, that the climate is not changing. Few would disagree that having deeply held experience-based beliefs contradicted by evidence.. the op-ed gives only the Holocaust example, making it seem monstrous to subject personal experience to the marketplace of ideas.. “Some topics, such as claims that some human beings are by definition inferior to others, or illegal or unworthy of legal standing, are not open to debate because such people cannot debate them on the same terms.”.. Don’t worry, students, Milo Yiannopolous does not, in fact, possess the power to “invalidate” your humanity—as yet, he hasn’t even shown an ability to dignify his own.The humanity of every individual is a fact. No one can invalidate it with speech. Teaching undergraduates otherwise renders them needlessly vulnerable to bigots and trolls... since Baer thinks some questions Plato raised are “unmentionable and undebatable,” one wonders if or why he is comfortable with NYU professors assigning the philosopher as course reading.. it is inaccurate and disempowering to tell undergraduates that any bigot can render them unable to participate in public discourse merely by speaking on campus.. Chattel slavery shouldn’t have been up for debate. Thank goodness that abolitionists joined and won the debate anyway. Gay marriage shouldn’t have been up for debate. Thank goodness Andrew Sullivan wasn’t acculturated to believe that merely engaging in that debate risked invalidating his existence... How does he suppose that unpopular position will advance and triumph over antagonists who presently include an overwhelming majority of Americans—and most elected officials from both parties—if the next generation of educational elites is prevented from debating or even mentioning the matter in the one setting where they are training to reason well?
Ai Weiwei: How Censorship Works
Life in China is saturated with pretense. People feign ignorance and speak in ambiguities. Everyone in China knows that a censorship system exists, but there is very little discussion of why it exists.
.. The content offered by the Chinese state media, after its processing by political censors, is not free information. It is information that has been chosen, filtered and assigned its place, inevitably restricting the free and independent will of readers and viewers.
.. Judgments become distorted and rationality itself begins to slip away. Group behavior can become wild, abnormal and violent.
.. Whenever the state controls or blocks information, it not only reasserts its absolute power; it also elicits from the people whom it rules a voluntary submission to the system and an acknowledgment of its dominion. This, in turn, supports the axiom of the debased: Accept dependency in return for practical benefits.
.. The self-silenced majority, sycophants of a powerful regime, resentful of people like me who speak out, are doubly bitter because they know that their debasement comes by their own hand.
.. Because the censorship system needs cooperation and tacit understanding from the censored, I disagree with the common view that the censored are simply its victims. Voluntary self-censorship brings benefits to a person, and the system would not work if the voluntary aspect were not there.
.. Managers of artistic and cultural projects, though, need to do more than that; they need to show proactively that they “get it” and will accommodate the authoritarians and protect their public image. They know that if anything causes unhappiness higher up, a project, and perhaps an organization, will be scrubbed.
Floyd Abrams Sees Trump’s Anti-Media Tweets as Double-Edged Swords
His Twitter trail could be a gift to lawyers for the news industry during leak investigations into articles that made the president mad enough to pick up his Android and tap, Tap, TAP!
It could provide great grist for legal arguments that the investigations are less about prosecuting damaging leaks than they are about punishing journalists.
.. his new book, “The Soul of the First Amendment,” which he called “really a story of American exceptionalism.” It argues that the United States’ protections for free speech are the best in the world, at least as of now.
.. he helped argue the conservative side of the Citizens United case, which allowed corporations and unions to spend more freely in elections.
.. things have been much worse. There were days when censorship was rampant and real reporting could land you in prison, right here in the United States. For instance, as Mr. Abrams’s book notes, it was not all that atypical when, in 1901, a Chicago court sentenced the managing editor and a reporter at The Chicago American to jail for an article that was critical of one of its decisions.
.. by the second half of the last century, the courts had begun to view “the First Amendment in an expansive and generally highly protective way.” It started with liberal jurists and eventually spread to the conservative jurists as well
.. Gawker, which a Florida jury hit with a $140 million verdict in an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit last year. Without the financial wherewithal to fight on through the appeals process, its owners went into bankruptcy and sold to Univision.