“This is not simply a loss for liberty on campus and the right to indulge in what’s condemned as verbal harassment or bullying, broadly defined. It’s a loss of political freedom: the theories of censoring offensive or hurtful speech that are used to prosecute alleged student harassers are used to foment opposition to the right to burn a flag or a copy of the Quran or build a Muslim community center near Ground Zero.”
There would be good reasons to support a minority of civil libertarian women, against the gender equity feminists, “the personal is political” crowd, and others, some of whom have strong-armed their way into our institutions as drivers of social change.
Also, this wouldn’t be a surprise:
‘That simplistic, practically hysterical anti-libertarian approach to offensive speech appears to be shared by the Obama administration.’
And always worth pointing out for those interested in broad definitions of free speech:
‘But underlying trivial and tragic deprivations of liberty, the authoritarian impulse is the same.’
See: Martha Nussbaum On Judith Butler
On This Site: He may have been fired for many reasons, some of them not so good: Repost-Revisting Larry Summers: What Did He Say Again?
Conservative Briton Roger Scruton suggests keeping political and aesthetic judgments apart in the humanities: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…Repost-From Scientific Blogging: The Humanities Are In Crisis-Science Is Not…
Martha Nussbaum saw this coming a while ago, but is her platform broad enough to define liberal education?: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’.