> We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious. (...) A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not extend to suppressing or restricting such speakers from expressing their views.
Reasonable stance IMO. As far as I can tell, MIT did not adopt the Chicago Statement [2], so it's nice to see a proposal like this, which seems substantially similar.
Reasonable but sadly I expect it to be a dealbreaker. The triumph of safetyism over speech has been so swift and complete in many left-dominated circles that this sort of appeal is subject to being dismissed as being unbearably privileged at best and regressive dogwhistling at worst.
The difference is that the first can be easily rebuffed with logic and evidence. The second can too, but it's obvious that logic and evidence aren't at the top of the agenda there. So there's no discussion necessary in the latter, and you can just shut it down.
Why allow the first one then? It's about giving them enough rope to hang themselves with, _in public_. The public bit is important, because having them claim persecution and censorship, then saying those things in private anyway without rebuttable, may swing certain people.
I can see that difference between these statements can be minimal for collectivists, who consider benefit of society as the most important value. But for individualists, the former does not implies the latter. It is more like:
All X are good for nothing leaches on society, but their individual rights and freedom are inalienable and that is more important that their negative effect on society.
People from the individualist perspective almost always argue for its overall social utility, that the benefits of invididual rights and freedoms have negative and positive social effects that net positive. I've never heard one (and I've heard many) argue that the net social effects are negative but that the policy is still preferrable.
I suppose nobody would argue that, but in practice it happens all the time, because the people who benefit from the policy aren't directly paying for the costs of those negative net social effects.
I can see where you're coming from theoretically, but at least in America, the vast majority of the people who complain about "leaches on society" are right-wing individualists. They see the undesirable elements as being supported by a welfare state and believe that without the welfare state, their "leaches" would die. It's a gross and dehumanizing view that absolutely abdicates any responsibility for society's role in supporting other people. So individualists can also believe that the two statements are identical.
This is a gross and dehumanizing view because you built a gross and dehumanizing strawman. Do you connect on a personal level with American conservatives in real life? The many I know are compassionate people at an individual level, and you might argue better and have a better chance of convincing people of your viewpoint if you charitably[0] interpreted their position as something like: welfare benefits should be temporary (for those who are able to work and are looking, but are temporarily unemployed) and minimal (for those who either aren't capable of working or choose not to); welfare should not "pay" better than work; and the government should prove that the redistribution of wealth they enforce to pay for welfare is in fact doing what it set out to do, instead of creating a class of permanent welfare beneficiaries who could actually be gainfully employed instead.
Very few people are actually wanting "undesirable elements" to "die".
The expression ‘driven into the sea’ would not be read as a direct call to violence by today’s courts (and by many native English speakers), so those two expressions are legally equivalent.
I think your distinction is the conventional legal view. Though to actually be a criminal offense, the second statement may need to be made in a context where it encourages driving actual people into the sea (not just talking about how good a thing that would be).
Hundreds of years of case law in the Anglosphere contradict your view. Neither statement would be considered incendiary enough to merit censorship in the USA or Britain.
You're speaking of what is, and I'm speaking of what I believe should be. These two things are not in contradiction. Laws can and do change. There was no individual right to bear arms in the United States until the 2008[1], changing establish law for the past 200+ years at the time.
The DC v. Heller decision meant that there always had been an individual right to bear arms in the US, and that laws against it were unconstitutional. It's an important distinction.
That’s a revisionist perspective, even if it’s one that’s held by the court to justify their decision and set a new precedent. Previous SCOTUS rulings found that there was a collective, not individual right to bear arms. That means despite the court insisting that it didn’t just create a right from thin air, history disagrees.
By the logic you proposed, in any decision SCOTUS makes they can state that this is the way it’s always been and history is rewritten. Of course that can’t be the case. New precedent can be set but the historic record shows what the facts of the time were.
And by your logic, once a SCOTUS decision is made it can never be revisited.
Every 2A decision is interpreting the same, unchanged text. So any decision that goes against a previous one by definition means they believe the previous decision was incorrect. The fact that it was interpreted as a collective right before Heller doesn't mean that it was a collective right. It's just how the court (incorrectly) chose to interpret it in the past.
>And by your logic, once a SCOTUS decision is made it can never be revisited.
I never implied any such thing. In fact, I'm arguing that the exact opposite, using DC v. Heller as an example of how SCOTUS can reinterpret a foundational right despite hundreds of years of precedent to the opposite. That speech with implicit violence should be ruled as unprotected speech in spite of hundreds of years of precedent to the opposite.
Supreme Court decisions can be wrong; it doesn't make later decisions "revisionist". Nobody would say Brown v. Board of Education created a right from thin air that disagrees with the history of Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott v. Sanford and the historical fact behind those cases, or that Trump v. Hawaii revised the history of Korematsu v. United States and the historical fact behind it. The Supreme Court is just saying that the government has been doing things wrong this whole time.
I'm not sure why you feel that the Second Amendment is so clearly a matter of a collective right? If you read a sentence that said "A well stocked library being necessary to the education of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Books, shall not be infringed", you would say this is about the right of state-owned librarians to have books, and not the everyman?
You've mistaken my argument. If you follow the thread from the beginning, I'm merely using DC v. Heller as an example of how the court can set precedent to reinterpret a fundamental right under the constitution despite a 200+ year history of the opposite. This was in response to being told
> Hundreds of years of case law in the Anglosphere contradict your view
While that is true currently, it doesn't mean SCOTUS can't come along and decide things differently. It also doesn't change history if they were to do so.
I respect (and sharply disagree) with what you want to be, but the second amendment was always about individual rights. Those rights have been slowly removed by the states. Heller reaffirmed them, as the first line of the article points out.
EDIT: Just noticed jaywalk and others answered much more artfully than I did. Sorry for not checking first.
That page seems to use Mailjet marketing tracking links.
The full message could be: free expression, with intimate surveillance.
I'm not saying that's a bad message, and it's happening in practice, in some forms. Maybe people should explore whether that means everyone should take responsibility for their speech. And if so, whether that means responsibility before the audience, the public, or some authority.
One, perhaps the only, problem with freedom of speech in academia is that can be very actively exploited by bad faith actors, i.e., people who are not interested at all in truth and merely abuse the university system as a platform for furthering political goals and "whitewashing" their position.
These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. They often come from a non-academic background, have a party or "think-tank" background with some obvious political agenda, and their funding also comes from corresponding organizations. Some of them are even just politicians.
The problem with these kind of speakers is not that they speak at a university. The audience is smart enough not to fall for bullshit and to separate politics from science. The problem is that these people use events to give their name and their agenda some credibility and make it easier for the public to confuse their opinions with science. It's a branding problem, political talks can give a university a seriously bad reputation.
Since it would be inconvenient and undemocratic to ban all political speeches and events from universities, I think a trade-off has to be made and some cut-off points are necessary, even if that means that a few interesting talks get lost due to being identified as false positives. It's perfectly fine and reasonable to ban all political speakers from the political fringes (both far right and far left) unless an event clearly serves a scientific purpose and the speaker also has the fitting credentials in terms of actual publications.
I understand this goal is hard to reach in the US, though, since many universities there are private and lobbyism has extended its reach to them. But it's an ideal to strive for. The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them.
> The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them.
When we talk about these obviously bad actors, are we talking people like Socrates and Galileo? Or are we keeping to strictly political undesirables like Assange, Snowden and the whiny pacifists who nobody likes?
The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards.
"In 399 BC, Socrates went on trial for corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens, and for impiety." [0]
I dunno, that sounds like the sort of thing that might be considered bad faith. I suppose the exact charge might not have survived translation. How do we think about heretics who corrupt people in good faith?
Socrates claimed that he was not, in fact, corrupting the youth. Given that a group of Athenians then found him guilty of that to the point where he felt obliged to kill himself it seems fairly likely that his peers suspected him of arguing in bad faith.
A bad-faith heretic! Double the crimes that I initially thought. Maybe we do need to keep his dangerous ilk out of universities, he would no doubt have been harshly judged on HN at the time if they'd had HN back in the good old days.
More seriously, the academics have perfectly fine standards - to be an academic you need to have studied something deeply and make logical arguments. To speak on campus you need to be sponsored by an academic. That really is all that is needed and they're reasonably objective bars to meet. None of this "oh no he's got bad faith!" stuff that is trotted out for politics. Argue about the outcomes of policies, not the unobservable mental state of the people putting the policies.
> None of this "oh no he's got bad faith!" stuff that is trotted out for politics. Argue about the outcomes of policies, not the unobservable mental state of the people putting the policies.
I don't think you understand the difference in these two concepts. You can "corrupt the youth" without resorting to bad faith arguments. This quote of yours makes no sense.
You can read the Apology yourself (in the original Greek, even), and see that is has nothing to do with “bad faith” in the way we understand contemporarily: “corrupting the youth of Athens” refers specifically to encouraging their atheism and lack of deference.
To his eternal credit, Socrates does not argue very well in his defense. But this does not amount to bad faith on his part.
Bad faith is characterized by inauthenticity, meaning: acting or arguing in discordance with one's true beliefs or intentions.
Edit: bad faith is additionally characterized by its intentional stance, meaning that it shouldn't be confused with a state of ego dystonicity (wherein the actor acts compulsively against their self-perceived "true" nature).
To the best of my knowledge, there is no serious interpretation of Socrates in which his recorded expressions are considered to be in bad faith. The absolute closest stretch would be arguing that the Socratic method is in some sense "faithless," which is distinct from the negative nature of bad faith.
shrug. I'd rather people discuss whether claims are made in good faith and create standards of debate rather than try to prove that they're correct. Because ironically the latter just breeds bad faith rhetoric.
The worst pattern off rhetoric that is absolutely dominating public discourse is "You've been accused of doing X"; "Well yeah but my opponent did something vaguely similar, ergo it's ok"
>The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards.
Which of course is arguably the point. There's just another type of "bad faith actor" who is lurking in the shadows with these arguments: Someone who wants to leverage censorship against disfavored viewpoints regardless of their truth value.
Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying" and "let only approved speakers speak even if the approval process may be corrupt", I'll take the former pretty much every time.
> Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying" and "let only approved speakers speak even if the approval process may be corrupt", I'll take the former pretty much every time.
While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whatever they want and expecting the lies to be exposed/countered by the truthspeakers is destined to fail. We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
> it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them
How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your arguments (I assume) means you don't really believe lying will sway people to your perspective.
> We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
We haven't. It may be true but that data is not available to us. These could be bots, they could be new converts (with the old ones de-converting), they could be paid propagandists, or trolls. It could just be the algorithm promoting people who create engagement. These people could be incredibly rare but incredibly prominent on the platform.
When are you going to be affected by this theory? Are you swayed by lies and misinformation? Do you cling to beliefs in the face of fact and evidence? Are you undeserving of the right to speak because of it? Why should you have been allowed to leave this comment? You have not been vetted to make these statements.
>> it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them
> How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your arguments (I assume) means you don't really believe lying will sway people to your perspective.
I think you're making the mistake of assuming that everyone is willing to play the same ends-justify-the-means game, where they're OK with shamelessly lying if it can momentarily get someone to align with their faction. What the GP describes is only a dilemma if you have a commitment to the truth.
Also what you describe (counter cheap lies with more cheap lies), would actually play into the hand of a disinformation actor. In many cases they're not looking to persuade anyone of of anything, just increase confusion, cynicism, and disengagement; which reduce their adversary's capacity for making decisions and taking action.
You have reduced my capacity for action and I am disengaging from this conversation. Because of this thread I no longer recognize Plate Tectonics and now believe in Expanding Earth Theory.
> You have reduced my capacity for action and I am disengaging from this conversation. Because of this thread I no longer recognize Plate Tectonics and now believe in Expanding Earth Theory.
You want to get people to vote for your candidate. So you create social media posts saying the opponent voted against funds that would go to veterans. You don't need to look anything up, you just need to create the post. It's almost certainly true, because EVERY candidate has done this. However, it's extremely misleading...
Your opponent wants to make sure people understand the truth. The truth is that there were several bills that would fund veterans with a small amount of money, but they were all "add-ons" to other bills that did major things that the candidate did not approve of (for example, something like saying no state may provide a drivers license to anyone that is an ex-con). Now, in order make sure people understand the truth, you have to find the cases where the candidate in question voted against money for veterans, explain what the situation behind it was, and why there was "something bigger to consider" in each case.
> When are you going to be affected by this theory? Are you swayed by lies and misinformation? Do you cling to beliefs in the face of fact and evidence? Are you undeserving of the right to speak because of it?
I am generally not affected by this type of lie/misinformation, because I specifically look for it. That's not to say I'm never affected by it, just that I keep an eye out for that type of thing.
But I know for a fact that people I know and care about _are_ affected by it, and on a regular basis. Plus it's used to sway people I don't know, and those people vote. And I find it concerning that they will base their vote on incorrect information.
Being worried that they will base their vote on incorrect information is really, really close to being worried that they will vote incorrectly, period. Very few things in politics are so cut and dry that there's one "correct" fact.
But there is a big difference between "voted against X because it was a minor add-on to a bill that was overwhelmingly bad" and "voted against X when it was the focus of a bill; because the candidate is against X". The post in question implies the later, when the former is the actual truth (in my example).
I'm not trying to say someone is voting "wrong", because voting is a matter of opinion. But one should be able to base their opinion on actual truth, not lies. At the end of the day, if their opinion is based on lies they have been told, then it's really no different than secretly switching out the labels on the candidates in the voting machine.
>> While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whatever they want and expecting the lies to be exposed/countered by the truthspeakers is destined to fail. We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
> It takes less effort to uncover a public lie than to uncover a hidden truth.
> Alternatively worded, something about sunlight being the best disinfectant.
That's a slogan, not a truth. For instance: what is "best"? The fastest? The most thorough? Something guaranteed to work, if given enough time?
Even if "best" means it's the "fastest" disinfectant, that doesn't mean it's fast enough to keep up with the infections the op describes.
There's also the question: if you prove something is a lie, will enough people pay attention? A 140 character lie could take pages to debunk. Given enough lies, that page count is going to build up to the point where no one has time for it. And the actual audience of the debunking is unlikely to be a superset of the audience of the lie.
Even if this were true, insinuating that this necessitates that we need a Ministry of Truth to create diktats for us is pure Nirvana Fallacy. Platforms have been experimenting with all sorts of mechanisms to combat misinformation that do not involve the naked suppression of "harmful" perspectives, thankfully.
Oh, I'm with you on this point. I was merely pointing out that "let everyone speak their minds however they want and the truth will come out" is not realistic.
You're misunderstanding bad faith actors in academia. These are people not interested in advancing science and not interested in the truth. The examples you give of Socrates and Galileo are clearly examples of the opposite.
As for Assange, Snowden, or "whiny pacifists" -- yes please keep them out of universities, and also don't forget to exclude any Trumpists, Steve Bannons, nationalists, individual anarchists, and members of communist parties, unless they're reporting about their actual scientific research if they conduct some. I see no reason whatsoever why such people should give political speeches at universities.
Universities should provide a broad education, and there are interesting and important experiences that could be shared by the likes of Snowden, even if it isn't strictly speaking their own scientific research.
That said, the person must be able and willing to discuss a bigger picture than just their personal politics, which is why I specifically picked Snowden but excluded Assange, Trump, and Bannon in the above. That's basically your good faith distinction.
> The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards.
Indeed, they seem to be promoting the continuation of the insipid “elitist only” culture. The fact that the most politically divisive of the university cancelled the speaker (which resulted in MIT making this statement) seems to escape the OP
I'm quoting what I said in anther comment here, but it applies, so...
> it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whatever they want and expecting the lies to be exposed/countered by the truthspeakers is destined to fail. We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
Hitler went to prison and came out stronger and more popular. Oppressing him didn't work, but there was a chance that the German people could have been convinced that National Socialism wouldn't improve the economy and restore Germany to its pre-WWI glory.
Well he took everyone’s weapons away and imprisoned everyone who spoke against him. So a robust constitution like ours would’ve had a much better chance of standing up to him.
Do you have any evidence to support your assertion here? It seems to me that promoting well practiced liars has rarely resulted in reasoned discussions.
Nor does compelling people to promote bad faith actors seem to me anything other than another method of suppression. Compelled speech is not free speech.
Let individuals and individual institutions apply some judgement, as if they were living, breathing human beings able to make choices.
If a university demonstrates consistently poor judgement, that problem will not be solved by having event organisers who believe they are unable to make their own choices.
You made assertions. I did not. We have a well established free speech tradition. It’s on you to prove why a place of education should shut down civil discourse that you don’t like.
>One, perhaps the only, problem with freedom of speech in academia is that can be very actively exploited by bad faith actors, i.e., people who are not interested at all in truth and merely abuse the university system as a platform for furthering political goals and "whitewashing" their position.
Strong disagree. The problem with "freedom of speech in academia" is that it's a polite fiction.
What happens when an MIT professor puts out a press release saying that the US deserved 9-11 and that more attacks are justified? Or that the Charlottesville protestors didn't go far enough, and more lefties need to be run down in the street like dogs? Will MIT be hiring Holocaust denier history professors? Does anyone truly believe that, if a professor publicly expresses views well outside of mainstream acceptability, there will be no professional consequences?
"Free expression" at a place like MIT still means you need to keep well within the standards of acceptability, just that we want to make sure that the standards include certain things that are now considered beyond the pale.
People think they can easily identify bad faith, since they hear arguments that sound incomprehensible and assume no one could hold them in good faith. It is common to believe that large swaths of the population carry their convictions in bad faith.
As a life long atheist I have suffered from this misconception. The idea of a god seems so absurd to me that I honestly don't understand how people can have faith in one. Never the less it is true, they do, and in good faith. I've had enough deep conversations with believers to establish that. And it's true no matter how many instances of their hypocrisy you collect.
Exactly. One man's bad faith actor is another's torchbearer. I personally know some reasonable people who would call AOC a bad faith actor, and also some other reasonable people who would call Tom Cotton a bad faith actor; it's glib to say that they are easily identifiable and widely agreed upon as such.
This is a good summation of what makes a bad actor but requires information only the bad actor has access to (motive).
I agree with you though.
A good faith actor should be as open minded as they expect their audience to be. A good faith actor asks probing questions and cedes when shown to be incorrect? Has the ability to admit when incorrect?
Bad actors tend to lack the openness that they expect others to have.
> The problem is that these people use events to give their name and their agenda some credibility and make it easier for the public to confuse their opinions with science.
Then this is a failure of public education and science journalism. Science journalism has indeed been failing the public for decades now, and have arguably been a big factor in the public's distrust of scientific institutions, so that's not surprising.
You don't solve this problem by banning speakers or restricting speech, you solve it by improving journalism and public education.
One of my favorite incidents involving free speech happened several years ago, and had an MIT connection.
Some alt-right people organized a big so-called "Free Speech Rally" in Boston, perhaps as a Trump-emboldened show of force, or publicity effort.
But a massive number of counter-demonstrators turned out (including many students and staff from MIT), dwarfing the alt-right people by orders of magnitude, and basically told them "no", in so many accents.
"The answer to offensive speech is more speech" doesn't always work that well, nor that literally. And some kinds of speech in a university environment will sometimes call for listening and dialogue, unlike that one demonstration.
But that one day, the alt-right people didn't seem to have genuine dialogue in mind, and it was the free speech that they called for (perhaps cynically and disingenuously) that corrected their particular argument.
Are you implying the alt right employs bad faith trolling? Cry bullying?
Way too often, free speech debates are hijacked to normalize a fascistic movement in American politics. The left is feckless because they don't think like Peter Thiel or Steve Bannon.
Certainly there are days when the mass of normal opinion outweighs the straussian tactics of the right because the position of the right has gone ridiculously too far and it is obvious that it isn't normal. But it is difficult to count on that happening reliably.
Agreed, visible mass of public opinion isn't a panacea.
And there seems to be a widespread anti-intellectualism movement, from multiple directions, that's turning all of us into bickering reactionaries.
Someone has to start bringing us back to aspiring to sophistication of intellect and character, to both engage in genuine dialogue, and to recognize when someone else isn't.
MIT, as one vanguard, doesn't have the last word on this (it has its own biases), but IMHO not surprising to see them taking a confident stand for a kind of intellectualism that's in a relatively good direction. We need the influence of others, to address concerns/perspectives that are not as much on the radar of MIT.
> Way too often, free speech debates are hijacked to normalize a fascistic movement in American politics.
The fun thing about this statement is that it's just as true, but much more clear, if you consider "fascistic" to be "anything to the right of Angela Davis".
> Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Department Head Robert van der Hilst canceled the department’s annual John Carlson Lecture due to controversy surrounding the invited speaker, Professor Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, and his views on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts within academia....
> In a Newsweek op-ed titled “The Diversity Problem on Campus,” published August 2021, co-authors Abbot and Stanford Professor Iván Marinovic wrote that DEI in academia seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups, violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment, compromises the university’s mission, and undermines the public's trust in universities and their graduates.
"University of Pisa has canceled the Prof. Galileo's lecture on celestial bodies due to the controversy surrounding his views on heliocentrism, after continued protests by the students who reject the unholy idea that the planet they live on isn't the center of the Universe. Department of Heresy and Inquisition has temporarily suspended Galileo and referred him to Church."
This is a false equivalence. Galileo was concerned with physical fact, whereas this professor's controversial opinions are sociological and fairly subjective--they boil down to a value judgement.
That's not to condemn (or defend) the professor. This just isn't a fair characterization of the debate.
I disagree. We can judge the falsifiability of statements without knowing whether or not they're false.
E.g. "red is a better color than blue" is obviously a subjective opinion, where as "ʻOumuamua is made of frozen nitrogen" is obviously a falsifiable statement.
Right, there are specific instances of opinions which cannot be verifiable facts, but the verifiability of a fact is not, in general, itself verifiable!
Hah this is a really good point. IIRC the Catholic Church was actually OK with using heliocentric mathematical models, just not with interpreting them as factual.
I wonder what really happened. I'm guessing Galileo was one of those vocal people that just can't help poking the bear.
Edit: reading up a bit more it seems Galileo had a bit of a Linus T. streak, with gratuitous insults and ad hominems against authority. Makes me want to read the source documents now :-)
"The MIT statement on free expression states that in order to encourage provocative thinking, controversial views, and nonconformity, the university will protect all speech within the boundaries of the First Amendment."
"Therefore, as a junior member of the Flat Earth Society, I demand MIT provide me an auditorium and a microphone to legitimize and amplify my nonconformist opinion about the shape of the Earth."
MIT is obviously only going to consider inviting speakers that would appeal to some subset of its community. The statement doesn't give anyone a right to demand an audience at MIT, it gives the MIT community license to invite controversial speakers.
Which gives the lie to all the sanctimonious talk about protecting all speech that's legal under the First Amendment.
MIT isn't protecting all legal speech, they're amplifying speech the MIT community wants to hear, and suppressing speech the community doesn't want to hear.
If the MIT community wants to legitimize and amplify speech about perpetuating the current hierarchy of elites, and suppress protest speech aiming to open up and overturn that hierarchy, it's up to the community.
It has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
Contrary to all the feel-good language about platforming nonconformity, the goal is not to provide an equal platform to all viewpoints, because that would be ridiculous.
Free speech isn't about giving all ideas an equal footing. It's about letting any individual speak their mind without fear of repercussions. And that is exactly what MIT appears to be pledging to do here.
Ideas are still subject to the marketplace, and the MIT community is a very discriminating market.
AIUI this was controversial, but not for the reasons you might think: people were concerned that the guy wasn't well and that encouraging him wasn't kind.
People are free to promote whatever crackpot ideas they wish. The question is whether MIT should provide a platform for everyone.
Since there are infinite crackpot ideas but only one Kresge Auditorium, the MIT community must make value judgments about what speakers and ideas are worthy, and which ones are not.
No institution should be compelled to provide a platform for all speakers and ideas. Some speakers and ideas are worthy of MIT, and many are not.
MIT faculty and leadership should embrace their fiduciary duty to make these hard judgments. They should grapple with what it means for speakers and ideas to be worthy, and what speech should not receive MIT legitimacy and amplification.
Instead this statement evades all of that by pretending to support all speech as long as it's legal.
> Since there are infinite crackpot ideas but only one Kresge Auditorium, the MIT community must make value judgments about what speakers and ideas are worthy, and which ones are not
But this is the key thing: Abbot was giving a talk on environmental studies, and confirmed affirmative action was not part of the talk he was giving. The push to exclude him was on the basis of something other the science of his talk.
Here's a better analogy: would it be appropriate to cancel musician'd concert because he's a flat earther? The argument that we have only one auditorium and we should allocate it to a better musician does not make sense unless there's a compelling reason to say that his musical performance abilities are affected by a belief in a flat earth.
I don't understand, if he wrote an op-ed uncovering racial discrimination in academia, why would people who are (presumably) against racial discrimination want to cancel his lecture?
If by "the DEI people" you mean "students who were only able to be there because someone made a conscious effort to do diversity outreach" then yes. They would be opposed to someone suggesting that they should stop the outreach so that people like them could no longer be there.
His piece (you can read it here: https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-16...) is more of the same intellectually dismissive rhetoric that we've seen a thousand times before. As usual it's got all the same nonsensical discriminatory suggestions that don't actually help people, like "support charter schools" and "we should use a process based on merit and qualifications alone" and "we should build a system that uses merit and qualifications alone but is also unbiased". And just for fun he suggests at the end that any university even considering how to approach race issues is somehow comparable to nazism. This is just bad writing, I don't blame the students for being upset. Have you noticed how very few students who are actually underprivileged would ever share these views?
> If by "the DEI people" you mean "students who were only able to be there because someone made a conscious effort to do diversity outreach" then yes. They would be opposed to someone suggesting that they should stop the outreach so that people like them could no longer be there.
This is only half the equation. There's another group of people who excluded on account of their race and gender as part of this "diversity outreach". DEI isn't about inclusion vs. exclusion. Both Abbot and DEI supporters are in favor of including and excluding students. What they disagree on is how this decision is made.
Also, how is "we should build a system that uses merit and qualifications alone but is also unbiased" a discriminatory suggestion? That is the total opposite of the message.
No, it is not the opposite. That suggestion is just restating the question. They already tried to build a system that uses merit and qualifications alone, and the complaint is how doing that has led to extremely biased results.
There is nothing wrong with disagreeing on how the decision is made, but the piece itself is poorly written, intentionally inflammatory, and insulting. There are maybe two valid suggestions buried within a bunch of nonsense, which shouldn't be the case for such a short article. It always disturbs me how anyone is willing to publish these terrible, low quality op-eds. And then when people get angry at them for their writings being low-quality, insulting and inflammatory, they have the nerve to complain that people don't want to hear the rest of their opinions... Instead of, you know, addressing the issue that caused the anger and changing the bad opinions accordingly.
I think you're still not not getting the point Abbot is making.
> They already tried to build a system that uses merit and qualifications alone, and the complaint is how doing that has led to extremely biased results.
How did it produce "extremely biased results"? You're being vague here, but I suspect by "biased results" you mean they produced a racial (and perhaps gender) makeup you don't like. Abbot rejects the idea that a non-discriminatory admissions process is biased because it produces student body with the "wrong" racial makeup. His view is that picking a "right" racial makeup and utilizing discrimination to achieve it, is a form of bias.
Also how is it "intentionally inflammatory and insulting"? Are you aware that 62% of African Americans do not support the use of race in admissions?[1] Perhaps what's insulting is and admission process that looks like this: https://www.economist.com/img/b/1280/1482/90/sites/default/f...
>You're being vague here, but I suspect by "biased results" you mean they produced a racial (and perhaps gender) makeup you don't like.
No, you are completely and utterly wrong on that. This is more of the same intellectually lazy assumptions, please stop this.
And I get his point perfectly, it is still insulting and dismissive. When someone starts talking about school vouchers and "merit" in the context of this then it's mostly an admission that they don't know what they're talking about. It has absolutely nothing to do with the problems faced by a school like MIT that already has an extremely low acceptance rate anyway. They know how to test students on academic rigor, that isn't the issue. The fact is, they already cannot accepts all students who pass based on academic merit alone. Your chart even demonstrates that is the case with Harvard, the issue is explicitly not that racial makeup is being considered over academic achievement.
> No, you are completely and utterly wrong on that. This is more of the same intellectually lazy assumptions, please stop this.
Then can you explain what was biased about an admissions process that does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, and other identity characteristics, if it wasn't the demographics of the student body? It's still vague how a race-agnostic admissions process would be biased.
> The fact is, they already cannot accepts all students who pass based on academic merit alone. Your chart even demonstrates that is the case with Harvard, the issue is explicitly not that racial makeup is being considered over academic achievement.
I'm not sure how one arrives at this conclusion. An African American student in the 4th decile (as in, is scoring above 40% of students and below 60% of students) has the same chances at admission at an Asian student in the top decile. Even at that top of the academic performance an Asian applicant has a ~15% chance at admission while an African American student at the same academic performance has nearly a 60% chance at admission. There is nowhere near equal chances at admission between racial groups at the same academic performance.
The fact that they have many more qualified applicants doesn't make their admission practices any less discriminatory. If I have 500 qualified white applicants and 5,000 qualified Asian applicants and I admit 100 whites and 100 Asians have I not discriminated against Asians? Just because I'm picking both from the same qualified pool doesn't change the fact that I'm making a 10x disparity favoring whites.
>Then can you explain what was biased about an admissions process that does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, and other identity characteristics, if it wasn't the demographics of the student body? It's still vague how a race-agnostic admissions process would be biased.
>An African American student in the 4th decile (as in, is scoring above 40% of students and below 60% of students) has the same chances at admission at an Asian student in the top decile.
Ok, but that still doesn't change the facts. The issue is not that there aren't enough qualified students or that unqualified students are being placed above qualified ones or that merit is being ignored. That just isn't what's happening at all. That graph is missing a lot of important context, like the actual court case it was talking about that is currently headed for the Supreme Court:
The whole thing about "we need more merit" is a misdirection. It's a bad, irrelevant take. This professor should be ashamed to have put his name on such dreck.
>If I have 500 qualified white applicants and 5,000 qualified Asian applicants and I admit 100 whites and 100 Asians have I not discriminated against Asians?
It very well might be so, but now you're coming back around to the same thing about implicit bias again, the very thing that the original article was dismissing as not an issue. The plaintiff even argued in court that Harvard was doing this...
If anything, this lends even more support to Abbot's proposed changes to admissions criteria. Removal of race from applicants' applications would eliminate the implicit bias, as admission officers would not know the race of applicants. This is like putting the screen between orchestra performers and reviewers in auditions.
> The issue is not that there aren't enough qualified students or that unqualified students are being placed above qualified ones or that merit is being ignored.
Then why are Asians at the top of the class still only half as likely to get admitted than Black applicants in the middle? The fact that you proclaim that all applicants are qualified does not alter the racial disparity in admissions rates.
Here's another blunt example: I have some job that requires a fitness test. I have 1,000 applicants run a a mile. If they can do it in less than 8 minutes they're qualified. 400 applicants make the 8 minute cutoff. 100 of them Black, 100 white, 100 Asian, 100 Latin. I hire 100 white applicants and no one else. When people complain that I only hired people of one race I point out that all of them passed the 8 minute qualification test and no unqualified white applicant was hired over a qualified applicant of another race. Is that a reasonable way to argye that this hiring process was not racially discriminatory.
>And just for fun he suggests at the end that any university even considering how to approach race issues is somehow comparable to nazism.
I wouldn't invoke Godwin here, I think the point may have been to show racial discrimination in general always ends badly. People who support it will always defend their reasons, but in the end doesn't it always lead to divisiveness and suspicion and hatred?
In 1984, there is a scene at the end where O'Brien (a party member) interrogates and tortures Winston (the main character). He asks him political questions and demands truthful answers, and if he spots that Winston lies to avoid pain, but knows the truth, O'Brien still electrocutes him. At the end O'Brien shows him 4 fingers and asks how many fingers Winston sees. He says 4! And gets electrocuted. Then he says 5, and gets electrocuted again. After many attempts, Winstom cries "wtf it matters how many fingers are there! it's whatever number you want!" O'Brien, pleased finally, releases Winston. O'Brien wanted to teach that truth shall not be appealed to in presence of authority, for the only truth is the will of the authority, and when the will changes on a whim, the truth does too.
Because they redefined the meaning of word "racism" such that their views are no longer considered racist. Unsurprisingly, that also redefined the meaning of "against racial discrimination". Tl,dr: We no longer understand each other.
I was at MIT over 50 years ago. I used to give them money, not a huge amount, but enough to create what has become a permanent endowment under my name. However years ago, I had lunch with the then president of MIT and realized that MIT had changed. It was no longer the MIT I experienced. The student body was different, and clearly, they had tweaked the knobs and selected for a different profile of student.
It made me sad because I remember my fellow students, some rich, some poor, some from Philips Exeter, some like me from inner city Detroit schools, some from Asia some from Southern California. The thing was though, they weren't at all well rounded, the very trait that the president seemed so proud of in the current student body.
My classmates were eccentric, creative, nerdy, and most of all so intelligent. My math classes were full of genuses and savants. I still remember a fellow student in my second semester real analysis class (prerequisite chain was five semester long to get into the class: 1yr Calc -> 1 Semester DiffEq -> 1st semester real analysis -> 1 semester complex analysis); he was a Freshman and the best student in the class. Was he well rounded? I don't think so, but he was good at pinball and math.
Then the tragic Aaron Swartz affair.
They didn't sign the Chicago Letter [1].
I started meeting other MIT alumni that are disappointed with the direction MIT went as well.
Every year they still call me asking for more money.
What do you gain by donating money to the university? Is there a tax break for such donations? What good came out of your donations? Is there traceability and accountability of each dollar donated?
I ask as I simply cannot fathom donating money to a university where the overarching aim is often to make money.
I understand what you are saying. Back then, I felt that donating money to a research University would indirectly provide benefits to the entire world by accelerating the advancement of science and technology.
Like other charitable contributions in the US, it is tax deductible. What that means is donating $100,000 has an after tax cost of around $50,000 depending upon one's tax bracket.
Yes there is accountability, and I usually receive a nice note from a couple of the undergraduates that have their undergraduate research projects funded by my modest endowment.
So, how far are they willing to go? Will they host neo-nazis? Will they host far right conservatives? I wonder if they'd be up for hosting pro-BDS speakers or out-and-out socialists or communists. Freedom of speech is never, ever given out equally, no matter what they say. At some point, something crosses the line into "crying fire in a movie theatre" for just about everyone. This is effectively a statement that some professors didn't like the threshold that the students set with the Carlson lecture, but surely the professors/administration have some threshold that will come out in due time.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] thread> We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious. (...) A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not extend to suppressing or restricting such speakers from expressing their views.
Reasonable stance IMO. As far as I can tell, MIT did not adopt the Chicago Statement [2], so it's nice to see a proposal like this, which seems substantially similar.
[1] https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/report...
[2] https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/r...
Why allow the first one then? It's about giving them enough rope to hang themselves with, _in public_. The public bit is important, because having them claim persecution and censorship, then saying those things in private anyway without rebuttable, may swing certain people.
All X are good for nothing leaches on society, but their individual rights and freedom are inalienable and that is more important that their negative effect on society.
Very few people are actually wanting "undesirable elements" to "die".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
By the logic you proposed, in any decision SCOTUS makes they can state that this is the way it’s always been and history is rewritten. Of course that can’t be the case. New precedent can be set but the historic record shows what the facts of the time were.
Every 2A decision is interpreting the same, unchanged text. So any decision that goes against a previous one by definition means they believe the previous decision was incorrect. The fact that it was interpreted as a collective right before Heller doesn't mean that it was a collective right. It's just how the court (incorrectly) chose to interpret it in the past.
I never implied any such thing. In fact, I'm arguing that the exact opposite, using DC v. Heller as an example of how SCOTUS can reinterpret a foundational right despite hundreds of years of precedent to the opposite. That speech with implicit violence should be ruled as unprotected speech in spite of hundreds of years of precedent to the opposite.
I'm not sure why you feel that the Second Amendment is so clearly a matter of a collective right? If you read a sentence that said "A well stocked library being necessary to the education of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Books, shall not be infringed", you would say this is about the right of state-owned librarians to have books, and not the everyman?
> Hundreds of years of case law in the Anglosphere contradict your view
While that is true currently, it doesn't mean SCOTUS can't come along and decide things differently. It also doesn't change history if they were to do so.
EDIT: Just noticed jaywalk and others answered much more artfully than I did. Sorry for not checking first.
The full message could be: free expression, with intimate surveillance.
I'm not saying that's a bad message, and it's happening in practice, in some forms. Maybe people should explore whether that means everyone should take responsibility for their speech. And if so, whether that means responsibility before the audience, the public, or some authority.
These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. They often come from a non-academic background, have a party or "think-tank" background with some obvious political agenda, and their funding also comes from corresponding organizations. Some of them are even just politicians.
The problem with these kind of speakers is not that they speak at a university. The audience is smart enough not to fall for bullshit and to separate politics from science. The problem is that these people use events to give their name and their agenda some credibility and make it easier for the public to confuse their opinions with science. It's a branding problem, political talks can give a university a seriously bad reputation.
Since it would be inconvenient and undemocratic to ban all political speeches and events from universities, I think a trade-off has to be made and some cut-off points are necessary, even if that means that a few interesting talks get lost due to being identified as false positives. It's perfectly fine and reasonable to ban all political speakers from the political fringes (both far right and far left) unless an event clearly serves a scientific purpose and the speaker also has the fitting credentials in terms of actual publications.
I understand this goal is hard to reach in the US, though, since many universities there are private and lobbyism has extended its reach to them. But it's an ideal to strive for. The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them.
When we talk about these obviously bad actors, are we talking people like Socrates and Galileo? Or are we keeping to strictly political undesirables like Assange, Snowden and the whiny pacifists who nobody likes?
The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards.
I dunno, that sounds like the sort of thing that might be considered bad faith. I suppose the exact charge might not have survived translation. How do we think about heretics who corrupt people in good faith?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Trial_of_Socrates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith
A bad-faith heretic! Double the crimes that I initially thought. Maybe we do need to keep his dangerous ilk out of universities, he would no doubt have been harshly judged on HN at the time if they'd had HN back in the good old days.
More seriously, the academics have perfectly fine standards - to be an academic you need to have studied something deeply and make logical arguments. To speak on campus you need to be sponsored by an academic. That really is all that is needed and they're reasonably objective bars to meet. None of this "oh no he's got bad faith!" stuff that is trotted out for politics. Argue about the outcomes of policies, not the unobservable mental state of the people putting the policies.
I don't think you understand the difference in these two concepts. You can "corrupt the youth" without resorting to bad faith arguments. This quote of yours makes no sense.
To his eternal credit, Socrates does not argue very well in his defense. But this does not amount to bad faith on his part.
Edit: bad faith is additionally characterized by its intentional stance, meaning that it shouldn't be confused with a state of ego dystonicity (wherein the actor acts compulsively against their self-perceived "true" nature).
To the best of my knowledge, there is no serious interpretation of Socrates in which his recorded expressions are considered to be in bad faith. The absolute closest stretch would be arguing that the Socratic method is in some sense "faithless," which is distinct from the negative nature of bad faith.
The worst pattern off rhetoric that is absolutely dominating public discourse is "You've been accused of doing X"; "Well yeah but my opponent did something vaguely similar, ergo it's ok"
Which of course is arguably the point. There's just another type of "bad faith actor" who is lurking in the shadows with these arguments: Someone who wants to leverage censorship against disfavored viewpoints regardless of their truth value.
Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying" and "let only approved speakers speak even if the approval process may be corrupt", I'll take the former pretty much every time.
While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whatever they want and expecting the lies to be exposed/countered by the truthspeakers is destined to fail. We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your arguments (I assume) means you don't really believe lying will sway people to your perspective.
> We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
We haven't. It may be true but that data is not available to us. These could be bots, they could be new converts (with the old ones de-converting), they could be paid propagandists, or trolls. It could just be the algorithm promoting people who create engagement. These people could be incredibly rare but incredibly prominent on the platform.
When are you going to be affected by this theory? Are you swayed by lies and misinformation? Do you cling to beliefs in the face of fact and evidence? Are you undeserving of the right to speak because of it? Why should you have been allowed to leave this comment? You have not been vetted to make these statements.
> How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your arguments (I assume) means you don't really believe lying will sway people to your perspective.
I think you're making the mistake of assuming that everyone is willing to play the same ends-justify-the-means game, where they're OK with shamelessly lying if it can momentarily get someone to align with their faction. What the GP describes is only a dilemma if you have a commitment to the truth.
Also what you describe (counter cheap lies with more cheap lies), would actually play into the hand of a disinformation actor. In many cases they're not looking to persuade anyone of of anything, just increase confusion, cynicism, and disengagement; which reduce their adversary's capacity for making decisions and taking action.
That didn't come off as clever, BTW.
You want to get people to vote for your candidate. So you create social media posts saying the opponent voted against funds that would go to veterans. You don't need to look anything up, you just need to create the post. It's almost certainly true, because EVERY candidate has done this. However, it's extremely misleading...
Your opponent wants to make sure people understand the truth. The truth is that there were several bills that would fund veterans with a small amount of money, but they were all "add-ons" to other bills that did major things that the candidate did not approve of (for example, something like saying no state may provide a drivers license to anyone that is an ex-con). Now, in order make sure people understand the truth, you have to find the cases where the candidate in question voted against money for veterans, explain what the situation behind it was, and why there was "something bigger to consider" in each case.
Vs you, who only had to create a simple post.
The level of effort is in no way balanced.
But I know for a fact that people I know and care about _are_ affected by it, and on a regular basis. Plus it's used to sway people I don't know, and those people vote. And I find it concerning that they will base their vote on incorrect information.
I'm not trying to say someone is voting "wrong", because voting is a matter of opinion. But one should be able to base their opinion on actual truth, not lies. At the end of the day, if their opinion is based on lies they have been told, then it's really no different than secretly switching out the labels on the candidates in the voting machine.
Alternatively worded, something about sunlight being the best disinfectant.
> It takes less effort to uncover a public lie than to uncover a hidden truth.
> Alternatively worded, something about sunlight being the best disinfectant.
That's a slogan, not a truth. For instance: what is "best"? The fastest? The most thorough? Something guaranteed to work, if given enough time?
Even if "best" means it's the "fastest" disinfectant, that doesn't mean it's fast enough to keep up with the infections the op describes.
There's also the question: if you prove something is a lie, will enough people pay attention? A 140 character lie could take pages to debunk. Given enough lies, that page count is going to build up to the point where no one has time for it. And the actual audience of the debunking is unlikely to be a superset of the audience of the lie.
As for Assange, Snowden, or "whiny pacifists" -- yes please keep them out of universities, and also don't forget to exclude any Trumpists, Steve Bannons, nationalists, individual anarchists, and members of communist parties, unless they're reporting about their actual scientific research if they conduct some. I see no reason whatsoever why such people should give political speeches at universities.
That said, the person must be able and willing to discuss a bigger picture than just their personal politics, which is why I specifically picked Snowden but excluded Assange, Trump, and Bannon in the above. That's basically your good faith distinction.
Indeed, they seem to be promoting the continuation of the insipid “elitist only” culture. The fact that the most politically divisive of the university cancelled the speaker (which resulted in MIT making this statement) seems to escape the OP
Excellent. So let them say what they want and demolish them with reason instead of suppression.
> it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whatever they want and expecting the lies to be exposed/countered by the truthspeakers is destined to fail. We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
Nor does compelling people to promote bad faith actors seem to me anything other than another method of suppression. Compelled speech is not free speech.
Let individuals and individual institutions apply some judgement, as if they were living, breathing human beings able to make choices.
If a university demonstrates consistently poor judgement, that problem will not be solved by having event organisers who believe they are unable to make their own choices.
That wasn't an assertion, and there was nothing requiring evidence.
Strong disagree. The problem with "freedom of speech in academia" is that it's a polite fiction.
What happens when an MIT professor puts out a press release saying that the US deserved 9-11 and that more attacks are justified? Or that the Charlottesville protestors didn't go far enough, and more lefties need to be run down in the street like dogs? Will MIT be hiring Holocaust denier history professors? Does anyone truly believe that, if a professor publicly expresses views well outside of mainstream acceptability, there will be no professional consequences?
"Free expression" at a place like MIT still means you need to keep well within the standards of acceptability, just that we want to make sure that the standards include certain things that are now considered beyond the pale.
As a life long atheist I have suffered from this misconception. The idea of a god seems so absurd to me that I honestly don't understand how people can have faith in one. Never the less it is true, they do, and in good faith. I've had enough deep conversations with believers to establish that. And it's true no matter how many instances of their hypocrisy you collect.
The same is true of political opponents.
This is a good summation of what makes a bad actor but requires information only the bad actor has access to (motive).
I agree with you though.
A good faith actor should be as open minded as they expect their audience to be. A good faith actor asks probing questions and cedes when shown to be incorrect? Has the ability to admit when incorrect?
Bad actors tend to lack the openness that they expect others to have.
Then this is a failure of public education and science journalism. Science journalism has indeed been failing the public for decades now, and have arguably been a big factor in the public's distrust of scientific institutions, so that's not surprising.
You don't solve this problem by banning speakers or restricting speech, you solve it by improving journalism and public education.
Some alt-right people organized a big so-called "Free Speech Rally" in Boston, perhaps as a Trump-emboldened show of force, or publicity effort.
But a massive number of counter-demonstrators turned out (including many students and staff from MIT), dwarfing the alt-right people by orders of magnitude, and basically told them "no", in so many accents.
"The answer to offensive speech is more speech" doesn't always work that well, nor that literally. And some kinds of speech in a university environment will sometimes call for listening and dialogue, unlike that one demonstration.
But that one day, the alt-right people didn't seem to have genuine dialogue in mind, and it was the free speech that they called for (perhaps cynically and disingenuously) that corrected their particular argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Free_Speech_Rally
Way too often, free speech debates are hijacked to normalize a fascistic movement in American politics. The left is feckless because they don't think like Peter Thiel or Steve Bannon.
Certainly there are days when the mass of normal opinion outweighs the straussian tactics of the right because the position of the right has gone ridiculously too far and it is obvious that it isn't normal. But it is difficult to count on that happening reliably.
And there seems to be a widespread anti-intellectualism movement, from multiple directions, that's turning all of us into bickering reactionaries.
Someone has to start bringing us back to aspiring to sophistication of intellect and character, to both engage in genuine dialogue, and to recognize when someone else isn't.
MIT, as one vanguard, doesn't have the last word on this (it has its own biases), but IMHO not surprising to see them taking a confident stand for a kind of intellectualism that's in a relatively good direction. We need the influence of others, to address concerns/perspectives that are not as much on the radar of MIT.
The fun thing about this statement is that it's just as true, but much more clear, if you consider "fascistic" to be "anything to the right of Angela Davis".
If anyone else was wondering what was being referenced above, I'm guessing it's this:
https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation:
> Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Department Head Robert van der Hilst canceled the department’s annual John Carlson Lecture due to controversy surrounding the invited speaker, Professor Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, and his views on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts within academia....
> In a Newsweek op-ed titled “The Diversity Problem on Campus,” published August 2021, co-authors Abbot and Stanford Professor Iván Marinovic wrote that DEI in academia seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups, violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment, compromises the university’s mission, and undermines the public's trust in universities and their graduates.
That's not to condemn (or defend) the professor. This just isn't a fair characterization of the debate.
E.g. "red is a better color than blue" is obviously a subjective opinion, where as "ʻOumuamua is made of frozen nitrogen" is obviously a falsifiable statement.
Edit: reading up a bit more it seems Galileo had a bit of a Linus T. streak, with gratuitous insults and ad hominems against authority. Makes me want to read the source documents now :-)
"Therefore, as a junior member of the Flat Earth Society, I demand MIT provide me an auditorium and a microphone to legitimize and amplify my nonconformist opinion about the shape of the Earth."
MIT is obviously only going to consider inviting speakers that would appeal to some subset of its community. The statement doesn't give anyone a right to demand an audience at MIT, it gives the MIT community license to invite controversial speakers.
MIT isn't protecting all legal speech, they're amplifying speech the MIT community wants to hear, and suppressing speech the community doesn't want to hear.
If the MIT community wants to legitimize and amplify speech about perpetuating the current hierarchy of elites, and suppress protest speech aiming to open up and overturn that hierarchy, it's up to the community.
It has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
Contrary to all the feel-good language about platforming nonconformity, the goal is not to provide an equal platform to all viewpoints, because that would be ridiculous.
Ideas are still subject to the marketplace, and the MIT community is a very discriminating market.
AIUI this was controversial, but not for the reasons you might think: people were concerned that the guy wasn't well and that encouraging him wasn't kind.
Since there are infinite crackpot ideas but only one Kresge Auditorium, the MIT community must make value judgments about what speakers and ideas are worthy, and which ones are not.
No institution should be compelled to provide a platform for all speakers and ideas. Some speakers and ideas are worthy of MIT, and many are not.
MIT faculty and leadership should embrace their fiduciary duty to make these hard judgments. They should grapple with what it means for speakers and ideas to be worthy, and what speech should not receive MIT legitimacy and amplification.
Instead this statement evades all of that by pretending to support all speech as long as it's legal.
But this is the key thing: Abbot was giving a talk on environmental studies, and confirmed affirmative action was not part of the talk he was giving. The push to exclude him was on the basis of something other the science of his talk.
Here's a better analogy: would it be appropriate to cancel musician'd concert because he's a flat earther? The argument that we have only one auditorium and we should allocate it to a better musician does not make sense unless there's a compelling reason to say that his musical performance abilities are affected by a belief in a flat earth.
His piece (you can read it here: https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-16...) is more of the same intellectually dismissive rhetoric that we've seen a thousand times before. As usual it's got all the same nonsensical discriminatory suggestions that don't actually help people, like "support charter schools" and "we should use a process based on merit and qualifications alone" and "we should build a system that uses merit and qualifications alone but is also unbiased". And just for fun he suggests at the end that any university even considering how to approach race issues is somehow comparable to nazism. This is just bad writing, I don't blame the students for being upset. Have you noticed how very few students who are actually underprivileged would ever share these views?
This is only half the equation. There's another group of people who excluded on account of their race and gender as part of this "diversity outreach". DEI isn't about inclusion vs. exclusion. Both Abbot and DEI supporters are in favor of including and excluding students. What they disagree on is how this decision is made.
Also, how is "we should build a system that uses merit and qualifications alone but is also unbiased" a discriminatory suggestion? That is the total opposite of the message.
There is nothing wrong with disagreeing on how the decision is made, but the piece itself is poorly written, intentionally inflammatory, and insulting. There are maybe two valid suggestions buried within a bunch of nonsense, which shouldn't be the case for such a short article. It always disturbs me how anyone is willing to publish these terrible, low quality op-eds. And then when people get angry at them for their writings being low-quality, insulting and inflammatory, they have the nerve to complain that people don't want to hear the rest of their opinions... Instead of, you know, addressing the issue that caused the anger and changing the bad opinions accordingly.
> They already tried to build a system that uses merit and qualifications alone, and the complaint is how doing that has led to extremely biased results.
How did it produce "extremely biased results"? You're being vague here, but I suspect by "biased results" you mean they produced a racial (and perhaps gender) makeup you don't like. Abbot rejects the idea that a non-discriminatory admissions process is biased because it produces student body with the "wrong" racial makeup. His view is that picking a "right" racial makeup and utilizing discrimination to achieve it, is a form of bias.
Also how is it "intentionally inflammatory and insulting"? Are you aware that 62% of African Americans do not support the use of race in admissions?[1] Perhaps what's insulting is and admission process that looks like this: https://www.economist.com/img/b/1280/1482/90/sites/default/f...
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...
No, you are completely and utterly wrong on that. This is more of the same intellectually lazy assumptions, please stop this.
And I get his point perfectly, it is still insulting and dismissive. When someone starts talking about school vouchers and "merit" in the context of this then it's mostly an admission that they don't know what they're talking about. It has absolutely nothing to do with the problems faced by a school like MIT that already has an extremely low acceptance rate anyway. They know how to test students on academic rigor, that isn't the issue. The fact is, they already cannot accepts all students who pass based on academic merit alone. Your chart even demonstrates that is the case with Harvard, the issue is explicitly not that racial makeup is being considered over academic achievement.
Then can you explain what was biased about an admissions process that does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, and other identity characteristics, if it wasn't the demographics of the student body? It's still vague how a race-agnostic admissions process would be biased.
> The fact is, they already cannot accepts all students who pass based on academic merit alone. Your chart even demonstrates that is the case with Harvard, the issue is explicitly not that racial makeup is being considered over academic achievement.
I'm not sure how one arrives at this conclusion. An African American student in the 4th decile (as in, is scoring above 40% of students and below 60% of students) has the same chances at admission at an Asian student in the top decile. Even at that top of the academic performance an Asian applicant has a ~15% chance at admission while an African American student at the same academic performance has nearly a 60% chance at admission. There is nowhere near equal chances at admission between racial groups at the same academic performance.
The fact that they have many more qualified applicants doesn't make their admission practices any less discriminatory. If I have 500 qualified white applicants and 5,000 qualified Asian applicants and I admit 100 whites and 100 Asians have I not discriminated against Asians? Just because I'm picking both from the same qualified pool doesn't change the fact that I'm making a 10x disparity favoring whites.
There can still be implicit bias. Please read this publication from MIT on this exact subject: https://tll.mit.edu/teaching-resources/inclusive-classroom/i...
>An African American student in the 4th decile (as in, is scoring above 40% of students and below 60% of students) has the same chances at admission at an Asian student in the top decile.
Ok, but that still doesn't change the facts. The issue is not that there aren't enough qualified students or that unqualified students are being placed above qualified ones or that merit is being ignored. That just isn't what's happening at all. That graph is missing a lot of important context, like the actual court case it was talking about that is currently headed for the Supreme Court:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
The whole thing about "we need more merit" is a misdirection. It's a bad, irrelevant take. This professor should be ashamed to have put his name on such dreck.
>If I have 500 qualified white applicants and 5,000 qualified Asian applicants and I admit 100 whites and 100 Asians have I not discriminated against Asians?
It very well might be so, but now you're coming back around to the same thing about implicit bias again, the very thing that the original article was dismissing as not an issue. The plaintiff even argued in court that Harvard was doing this...
If anything, this lends even more support to Abbot's proposed changes to admissions criteria. Removal of race from applicants' applications would eliminate the implicit bias, as admission officers would not know the race of applicants. This is like putting the screen between orchestra performers and reviewers in auditions.
> The issue is not that there aren't enough qualified students or that unqualified students are being placed above qualified ones or that merit is being ignored.
Then why are Asians at the top of the class still only half as likely to get admitted than Black applicants in the middle? The fact that you proclaim that all applicants are qualified does not alter the racial disparity in admissions rates.
Here's another blunt example: I have some job that requires a fitness test. I have 1,000 applicants run a a mile. If they can do it in less than 8 minutes they're qualified. 400 applicants make the 8 minute cutoff. 100 of them Black, 100 white, 100 Asian, 100 Latin. I hire 100 white applicants and no one else. When people complain that I only hired people of one race I point out that all of them passed the 8 minute qualification test and no unqualified white applicant was hired over a qualified applicant of another race. Is that a reasonable way to argye that this hiring process was not racially discriminatory.
I wouldn't invoke Godwin here, I think the point may have been to show racial discrimination in general always ends badly. People who support it will always defend their reasons, but in the end doesn't it always lead to divisiveness and suspicion and hatred?
Because they are not against racial discrimination.
It made me sad because I remember my fellow students, some rich, some poor, some from Philips Exeter, some like me from inner city Detroit schools, some from Asia some from Southern California. The thing was though, they weren't at all well rounded, the very trait that the president seemed so proud of in the current student body.
My classmates were eccentric, creative, nerdy, and most of all so intelligent. My math classes were full of genuses and savants. I still remember a fellow student in my second semester real analysis class (prerequisite chain was five semester long to get into the class: 1yr Calc -> 1 Semester DiffEq -> 1st semester real analysis -> 1 semester complex analysis); he was a Freshman and the best student in the class. Was he well rounded? I don't think so, but he was good at pinball and math.
Then the tragic Aaron Swartz affair.
They didn't sign the Chicago Letter [1].
I started meeting other MIT alumni that are disappointed with the direction MIT went as well.
Every year they still call me asking for more money.
Take back MIT. [2]
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/29/u-chicago-let...
[2] https://youtu.be/ZK5r9OZ73Xg
I ask as I simply cannot fathom donating money to a university where the overarching aim is often to make money.
Like other charitable contributions in the US, it is tax deductible. What that means is donating $100,000 has an after tax cost of around $50,000 depending upon one's tax bracket.
Yes there is accountability, and I usually receive a nice note from a couple of the undergraduates that have their undergraduate research projects funded by my modest endowment.