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"On Tuesday night I was lucky enough to attend a very engaging debate at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. Organized by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and moderated by Kmele Foster...
..., it featured Jonathan Haidt and Andrew Sullivan answering in the affirmative, and Suzanne Nossel and Jeffrey A. Sachs answering in the negative, the event’s organizing question: “Is there a campus free speech crisis?”."
"The overwhelming feeling I think these debates, in sequence, should inspire is that of déjà vu. Contra Haidt, this means there isn’t the sort of novelty in campus activism in sentiment he sees."
"By 2016, most speech codes had been eliminated, but new concepts like microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces had taken their place."
"Kaminer on Intelligence Squared worried about the idea of “verbal conduct,” which “confuse[d] the metaphoric power of allegedly hateful speech with actual violence.” When I spoke to him after the debate on Tuesday, Haidt suggested that this was a central difference...
... between the current situation and the situation in the 1990s. Yet the idea that speech can be violence is mostly a tactical one intended to buttress attempts at censorship. The censorship is the main thing, and that doesn’t seem to have changed."
"Why do only the apologists debate, the excuse-makers, the minimizers? Why do Sachs and Nossel, whose line is that campus censorship is a problem but not a huge problem, cover for the members of the intelligentsia who say that “free speech” has become an alt-right buzzword?”
"And don’t let people lie. Fish went on to write a book called There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (And That’s a Good Thing, Too!). A perfect harbinger of the clickbait era in every way, this sloppy text should surely affect our interpretation of Fish’s presence on Firing Line..
... Similarly, Jason Stanley appeared on Intelligence Squared having already written in the New York Times that speech could itself be a kind of censorship."
"Sachs seemed hesitant to go the full Fish/Stanley route. It was only in his closing statement that he seemed to disclose some sympathies to their styles of thought. First, he expressed some sympathy for critical theory, noting that it had been useful in some of his research...
... This was particularly interesting to me, since Aaron Hanlon, a recent author of a piece describing Sachs’s data and agreeing with his conclusions, has argued very aggressively to me that critical theory no longer has much pride of place in academia."
"Second, Sachs stated, more or less apropos of nothing, that there are no neutral principles, that everything is political and serves some groups more than others. Quite the bomb to drop in your last thirty or so seconds of speaking time."
"Another pressure point I think should be explored came from Sullivan’s assertion that it is the eclipse of individual identity by group identity, of individualism by collectivism, that has spurred on the identity politics of the campus social justice trend...
... But Mark Lilla, whose The Once and Future Liberal I reviewed last September, has argued exactly the opposite. For Lilla, identity politics is a kind of expressive equivalent of Reaganite economic individualism, in which one feels empowered and entitled...
... to agitate for the world to change until it completely reflects one’s felt identity. Two opponents of identity politics, but with completely different views of its historical roots and its current manifestations. What gives?"
"I sometimes think the best way to defeat tribalism and groupthink is not to build bridges between tribes but to destroy the illusion of uniformity within them."
"Here are a few within-tribe debates I think would be fascinating based on the conversation:
A debate on whether and to what extent the roots of identity politics lie in individualism or collectivism.
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A debate on whether and to what extent the roots of identity politics lie in individualism or collectivism.
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A debate on whether and to what extent the free speech furor that’s been engulfing campuses and the media since 2015 differs from the canon wars and the development of political correctness in the 1990s.
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A debate on whether and to what extent the free speech furor that’s been engulfing campuses and the media since 2015 differs from the canon wars and the development of political correctness in the 1990s.
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A debate on whether and to what extent critical theory and postmodernism remain potent forces in the academy, as regards teaching, research, and administrative policy.
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A debate on whether and to what extent critical theory and postmodernism remain potent forces in the academy, as regards teaching, research, and administrative policy.
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A debate on whether and to what extent abstract moral and political principles can be neutral, and if they can’t, whether it is better to strive for as much neutrality as possible or to abandon the effort entirely.
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A debate on whether and to what extent abstract moral and political principles can be neutral, and if they can’t, whether it is better to strive for as much neutrality as possible or to abandon the effort entirely.
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A debate on whether and to what extent linguistic and symbolic changes can be effected “from above,” and on whether these distract from more material concerns about the distribution of power and resources.
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A debate on whether and to what extent linguistic and symbolic changes can be effected “from above,” and on whether these distract from more material concerns about the distribution of power and resources.
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A debate on whether and to what extent speech can be distinguished from other kinds of action."
A debate on whether and to what extent speech can be distinguished from other kinds of action."
