Thread by @biblioracle

Tweeted earlier about what I think are some obvious structural limitations of @TheFIREorg's database as an indicator for threats to campus speech, but I also want to walk through a deeper dive on a specific incident to show the complications.

https://twitter.com/biblioracle/status/1432681979791745025

A single dispute at Stanford University over the Hoover Institution accounts for 11 of the 426 incidents logged by FIRE all by itself, and there's a bunch of things to notice.

First is that a report written by four Stanford faculty members criticizing some of the speech and actions of Hoover Institute fellows is at the center of the dispute. Here's the full text. activatestanford.org/actions/report…

The purpose of the report is to outline what the authors believe are instances of partisan political speech divorced from the values of free and rational inquiry. This is primarily a dispute over institutional values.

The report proposes nothing more than the establishment of a committee that will examine the relationship between the Hoover Institute and Stanford University. This is a proposal that FIRE has categorized as a threat to speech.

The proposed committee was meant to come entirely from the faculty senate, a governing body inside the institution. There is certainly a dispute going on here, but it's curious that FIRE has decided that it is somehow a threat to speech.

The overarching charge of the authors of the report is that the Hoover Institute is not a values-based source of scholarly inquiry, but instead a partisan think tank that operates in ways inconsistent with the overall mission of Stanford University.

The authors make an argument that the partisan nature of the Hoover Institute operates in ways that are actively hostile to institutional values. I don't understand why this isn't a legitimate area of discussion and why FIRE categorizes it as a threat.

Irony alert, one of the incidents logged by FIRE concerning Hoover Fellow Mark Moyar being "cited" in the report, was noted in the report because he advocated banning the 1619 Project.

Another Hoover figure on whose behalf FIRE logs an incident is Scott Atlas, remember him? A leading conduit of COVID misinformation and advisor to Pres. Trump, Atlas was given free rein.

Meanwhile, Stanford med school faculty who wrote a letter criticizing Atlas' COVID misinformation was not allowed to post the letter at the Stanford Med School website. FIRE did not log an incident on behalf of those faculty, only Atlas.

The Stanford faculty report also names Richard Epstein as a purveyor of Covid misinformation, a charge which FIRE logs as a threat to speech. Epstein was perhaps the earliest, most wrong public figure on Covid.

Epstein's embarrassments are multifold. His first attempt at estimating likely deaths in the U.S. was 5000, which he said was a math error. He meant 50,000. At the current rate we'll crest 1 million by the end of the year. hoover.org/research/coron…

FIRE looks at speech primarily from a 1st Amendment perspective, but of course academic freedom is a more productive lens for this incident. As the authors of the faculty report argue, academic freedom is a privilege dependent on embrace of certain values.

They argue that if Hoover wants to trade on the Stanford name, they should be required to adhere to those values. This is not a 1st Amendment or speech dispute, and yet it counts for 11 cases in FIRE's database.

Niall Ferguson is another incident logged by FIRE, and like Mark Moyar was being criticized for trying to restrict the speech of a Stanford undergraduate. The Stanford undergrad is not logged as a potential victim by FIRE.

There's no doubt that Stanford and the Hoover Institute have some stuff going on, but the notion that it fits into the FIRE report on threats to speech on campus couldn't be more specious. It's an example of using campus institutions to adjudicate and express values.