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Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
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11 Mar, 5 tweets, 3 min read
If you can look past the fact I speak in long, meandering, and grammatically questionable sentences, this interview with @seanilling more or less explains why I am so worried about our free speech discourse right now.

vox.com/policy-and-pol…
As I described at @ArcDigi, there is a legislative war being waged on academic freedom/free speech right now. Even if you dislike "woke" speech or critical race theory, you should be able to appreciate the danger we are in.

arcdigital.media/the-new-war-on…
Supporters of these bills will try to persuade you that the danger is overblown. Do not listen to them.

arcdigital.media/supporters-of-…
Besides, as @jessesingal mentions here, we already have all the tools we need to fight compelled speech, discrimination, and hostile educational environments. Barnette, Title VI, etc. There's no honest reason to make new laws. Only dishonest ones.

I'll be joining @lindsayaellis, @Musa_alGharbi and @jzfriedman to talk about all this -- the bills, the movement behind them, the conundrum of campus free speech -- tomorrow. You should register.

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More from @JeffreyASachs

Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
10 Mar
Assuming this is true (I don’t know if it is/is not, that’s irrelevant), this is a good example of unconstitutional compelled speech. There’s no need to invent new laws to deal with it. Existing law and court precedent like Barnette is more than capable.
Ah, I see from some of the replies that this is the Clark case in Nevada. I wrote a bit about it in one of my recent Arc pieces. It’s a lot more complicated than Ramaswamy’s tweet suggests — which makes sense, since it’s just a tweet.
Schools can have a good, constitutional reason to compel speech. The point of Barnette (powerfully described by Sean’s Shiffren) is that this speech should not interfere with the intellectual autonomy of students as thinking agents.

scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewconten…
Read 7 tweets
Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
9 Mar
Yeah, the “There was no ban!” thing just doesn’t wash. It’s reasonable to shrug your shoulders at the Seuss estate’s decision, but what eBay and public libraries are doing is (for different reasons) something else entirely.
Yes, it’s essential to be precise on this point. AFAIK, Chicago has only suspended some Seuss books for review. The only place they’ve been outright removed is Portsmouth, VA, though I expect there will be others.

And for what it’s worth, I’m actually less concerned about eBay’s actions than I am with the libraries thing. Slap a content warning on them if you must. Alert parents to the images. But you don’t mess with the public’s access to public things in public spaces.
Read 10 tweets
Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
27 Feb
I can't tell if Rufo is misinformed or simply using words differently that I do, but honestly who cares? I'm just going to post two bills below. I'll supply a few prompts, but you read them and make up your own mind.
First, Arkansas HB 1218, a bill entitle... You know what? The title is way too long for a single tweet. Here's a screenshot instead.

arkleg.state.ar.us/Bills/FTPDocum…
Read the bill carefully. Note what is covered and what is not. It does carve out exceptions (Sec 1.f), but pay close attention to their limits.

Now ask yourself, were this bill to pass, could a professor endorse race-based affirmative action in the classroom?
Read 8 tweets
Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
26 Feb
New from me at @ArcDigi: There's a war being waged right now on left-wing speech. In state houses across the country, GOP legislators are voting on bills that would muzzle professors, censor students, and destroy academic freedom.

arcdigital.media/the-new-war-on…
Some of these bills were described in this excellent piece by @michelleinbklyn. But there are so many more.

nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opi…
In Georgia, a state rep has ordered universities to report back to him with a list of every course in which faculty discuss concepts like "privilege" or "oppression". Profs say it's already having a chilling effect.

ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/edu…
Read 14 tweets
Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
26 Feb
Good piece here on the political effects of a college education. Believe it or not, getting a higher ed degree makes people more economically *conservative*, not liberal. So much for the Myth of Campus Socialism.

bostonglobe.com/2021/02/24/opi…
It's not the professors, by the way. It's the peer groups. That generalizes to pretty much ever political change a student might experience in college. It's the peer groups.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…
Same thing in Europe.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
Read 5 tweets
Jeffrey Sachs Profile picture
25 Feb
Collin College has fired Professor Lora Burnett. This entire story is outrageous. Burnett criticized her university's re-opening plan (a plan that cost one employee her life), and for that crime, she has been fired. Shame on @collincollege.
But that's not all. The more immediate impetus was a tweet she sent out slamming Mike Pence. Private speech, outside the classroom, etc. But Collin's president didn't care and hauled her in for a dressing down.
Turns out a state legislator had contacted the president about shutting Burnett up. But which? After a good deal of work from @adamsteinbaugh, plus $14k in wasted legal fees by Collin College, the truth came out.

thefire.org/after-four-mon…
Read 8 tweets

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