What Provosts Get Wrong: A Failed Case for Campus Speech Restrictions

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | April 24, 2020 | Robert Shibley

[karpov]

On picking up What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus, one might expect a book urging those who dismiss today’s college students’ complaints about institutional racism, persistent sexism, and other societal ills to take them more seriously. To engage with their arguments and to try to empathize with them, rather than ignoring or lambasting them, even when they engage in what seems to many people like unjustified histrionics.

What Snowflakes Get Right is not that book. In fact, on completing NYU comparative literature professor (and former vice provost) Ulrich Baer’s book laying out his views on campus free speech, one can’t help but be struck by its near-total lack of empathy for anyone who disagrees with his political viewpoint, or whose interpretation of the principles of free speech and equality differ from his own, extremely arguable, views.

The result is a book that does nothing to change the minds of those not already disposed to agree with the author, and almost seems intended to alienate them. Baer repeatedly cites Donald Trump’s election, in lurid terms, as a justification for universities to forbid speech that creates “inequality.” Every example paints his ideological opponents in a bad light, and those who agree with him in a positive one.

Perhaps the book is merely meant to stiffen the spines of left-leaning critics of free speech who may be having a hard time justifying their demands for censorship when it’s gobsmackingly obvious that neither the left nor the right have pure motives. But it’s also possible that it is the natural result of Baer’s belief that it’s both right and admirable to refuse to debate certain topics unless the other side has already agreed to some or all of your contentions.

[ConservativeInPA]

Baer argues that while universities should be places where topics are discussed and debated, those who wish to debate certain views, which he repeatedly labels as discredited, obsolete, or both, should be excluded, especially if they are expected to come from off-campus speakers who wish to speak on campus. He writes that on campus, “[s]peech that crosses this line is speech that disputes the inherent equality of all students based on group belonging.”

In other words, he is really saying that he has no ability whatsoever and no arguments whatsoever to counter conservatives. He knows that he will get his ass handed to him in a debate, so he avoids the debate. What a pussy. He is the epitome of a snowflake, and the reason why there are snowflakes. No backbone, no individualism, no rigor, no learning - just indoctrination to be part of a mindless, unquestioning herd of useful idiots.

[ModelBreaker]

“What a pussy.”

You just made Baer “defend his humanity.” That is so unfair of you.

[ConservativeInPA]

It’s called a macro-aggression, I think.

[BBQToadRibs]

Back in the early 80s when I was in college, I think it was a political science class, but we had to debate an issue and were allowed to pick which side we wanted to support. Sides were picked, then the Prof immediately switched the two sides. You had to support the side you had wanted to attack and attack the side you had wanted to defend. Point being, finding strengths in the side you didn’t like, finding weaknesses in the side you did like. It was actually a great exercise. From what I see of college kids now, I’m not so sure they would fair very well. I don’t think they would like to be challenged like that.

[ModelBreaker]

“It’s called a macro-aggression, I think.”

LOL.