Evergreen is desperately trying to escape the hole it dug for itself last year. But it refuses to comprehend what occurred, and so it digs down, not out.
@EvergreenStCol admin brought in constitutional lawyer, Alan Levine, to publicly rationalize deplatforming.
I went.
@EvergreenStCol admin brought in constitutional lawyer, Alan Levine, to publicly rationalize deplatforming.
I went.
Levine spent an hour misportraying well documented events on other campuses and nastily caricaturing good people including @NAChristakis, @ErikaChristakis, @glukianoff and (implicitly) @JonHaidt. Levine ignored the Evergreen riots entirely.
He attacked @charlesmurray's work as outside the realm of what can reasonably be discussed. In describing events at Middlebury he omitted the violent injury done to Prof Allison Stanger who was, of course, planning to discuss Murray's work with him before violence broke out.
Levine's premise: racism is rampant on campuses. Students in some demographics experience oppression regularly, and individuals are in a good position to diagnose it. They are banishing white supremacy but are now blocked by a right wing conspiracy falsely invoking free speech.
I asked him this:
Putting free speech aside, disagreement and the free exchange of ideas are at the core of the work of a university. But there is an asymmetry--it is easier to disrupt someone's ability to make a point than it is to make one...
Putting free speech aside, disagreement and the free exchange of ideas are at the core of the work of a university. But there is an asymmetry--it is easier to disrupt someone's ability to make a point than it is to make one...
...a single individual screaming incoherently can block any viewpoint. Who gets to decide what ideas may be expressed on a campus? Do creationists get to shut down discussion of evolution? Do climate change deniers get to block discussion of environmental chemistry?
Some ideas, he argued, don't deserve protection. Those are the ones we get to bar.
Who decides what perspectives may be silenced?
Not I, because I am a white man. Shutting viewpoints down is the province of people who've faced a history of oppression.
Who decides what perspectives may be silenced?
Not I, because I am a white man. Shutting viewpoints down is the province of people who've faced a history of oppression.
Yes, a constitutional scholar, brought to campus by @EvergreenStCol's administration, really did make that argument out loud. And his answer got vigorous applause from the audience.
Evergreen's rioters and their admin collaborators are ineducable. They have rejected enlightenment itself--I have been saying that since May.
It is now January--8 months since student rioters openly declared food, water and chairs off limits to whites at a public meeting...
It is now January--8 months since student rioters openly declared food, water and chairs off limits to whites at a public meeting...
...escalating in the following days to hunting people on campus, and patrolling with baseball bats--President Bridges having ordered campus police to stand down.
Eight months of painful, public lessons and yet no learning has apparently occurred. Someone must intercede.
Eight months of painful, public lessons and yet no learning has apparently occurred. Someone must intercede.
Evergreen--a public college--is still experimenting with formalizing a blatantly illegal system of race-based privilege, still appeasing bullies and bigots, still rationalizing, still courting violence and financial ruin.
The Board of Trustees (who should have fired Bridges in May) is still mysteriously absent.
@GovInslee who lives and works just a few miles from @EvergreenStCol, and to whom the Trustees are formally responsible, is still nowhere to be found.
Where are the adults? Where?
@GovInslee who lives and works just a few miles from @EvergreenStCol, and to whom the Trustees are formally responsible, is still nowhere to be found.
Where are the adults? Where?
