1. i agree that legislative action taken against free speech (by the government) is a dangerous precedent, and in most instances should not be taken. there's a lot to talk about here (educational institutions' fear of litigation, the complexity of navigating freedom of speech in a space that is both educational and residential), but i think that the right to protest, distribute information, and speak without fear of arrest are fundamentally important things that we are right to protect - putting notions of what it and isn't acceptable language in the hand of governmental institutions is usually not a good way to protect individual rights.
2. yet that's not really what the video is talking about, is it?
3. gut feeling on the issue of speakers being invited, uninvited, or disinvited is that private institutions have the right to do what they want with their funding and their spaces (public institutions are a different story); they're under no obligation to honor speakers that do not align with their pedagogical values, and if anything it feels like leftist institutions get a disproportionate amount of flak for this. (nobody is breathing fire up Brigham Young University's ass for not inviting Laverne Cox as a speaker, for example.) this is not to suggest that i think this is an ideal situation: if anything, dialogue across ideological differences is valuable and especially welcome within institutions of higher education. but that's not a question of legality, it's a question of whether or not students - many of whom have experienced traumatic violence to themselves and their communities as a direct result of certain ideologies - feel that they have something to gain from hearing a differing perspective. i think that's a harder question to ask and answer, at the very least much harder than labeling the entire issue a free-speech violation and painting undergraduate students as a uniform mass of brainless idiots.
on that note, we undergrads are getting a ton of hate in this video.
4. the reading of "trigger warnings" here strikes me as lacking nuance. these aren't necessarily attempts to excise difficult topics or conversations from academic spaces; they're meant as acknowledgements that intellectual concepts are rooted in real things affecting real people, and they allow people space to engage while still honoring their social/emotional/functional needs. they serve the same function as ESRB ratings on games or MMPA on films do - it's important to be aware of what any work entails in preparing yourself to deal with it, especially for survivors of violence.
to offer just one example: i grew up in a violent household, so depictions of domestic violence are often intense for me to experience. i wouldn't ever suggest banning people from talking about domestic violence! but imagine how it would feel to hear everybody around you bantering about domestic violence, making jokes about it, treating it like a theory for them to play with instead of an actual thing that affects actual people. trigger warnings are not just about content, they're about who gets to be in the classroom, who gets to talk about the content in what particular ways.
this principle isn't always applied judiciously, to be fair, but i think NOT acknowledging it at all would be worse, even from a purely pedagogical perspective. (part of being a good teacher is knowing where your students come from!)
5. in my experience, it's a particular demographic of white, middle-class man that's always making these videos, always waxing poetic about society's downfall, which...is odd. my issue with this particular video is that it conflates a lot of different developments in higher education with the more narrow issue of free speech, all to serve the beyond-exhausted trope of babied Millennials who need Mommy and Daddy to wipe the tears dribbling down their chins. it doesn't account for what free speech means across race, gender, class, sexuality, or disability - it presumes that free speech means the right to speak in ignorance without response from peers or educators (protection from *legal* punishment is different).
6. part of being educated is learning how to be *incorrect*, learning how to listen as much as you speak, learning how to extend compassion both as a speaker and as a listener. if you lose sight of that, you lose sight of why free speech is valuable to begin with.
No comments:
Post a Comment