As to what’s going on at Georgetown law and Ilya Shapiro, we’ve seen this before, at Yale, at Williams, at Evergreen State….the pattern ought to be pretty clear by now. Aside from money, social media platforms, waning influence and administrative rot, it’d be nice to have some backbone on speech.
Don’t hold your breath, now.
From TheFire.Org-‘The Condescending Paternalism Of Williams President Adam Falk:’
As FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors has said: “You cannot say to people, you’re too weak to live with freedom. Only that group is strong enough to live with freedom.”
But that’s exactly what Adam Falk, the patronizing president of Williams College, has said to the college’s student body. Yesterday, Falk unilaterally canceled a speech by John Derbyshire, who was invited as part of the student-run “Uncomfortable Learning” speaker series.
From Adam Falk’s letter to Williams students about the matter:
‘Today I am taking the extraordinary step of canceling a speech by John Derbyshire, who was to have presented his views here on Monday night. The college didn’t invite Derbyshire, but I have made it clear to the students who did that the college will not provide a platform for him.
Free speech is a value I hold in extremely high regard. The college has a very long history of encouraging the expression of a range of viewpoints and giving voice to widely differing opinions. We have said we wouldn’t cancel speakers or prevent the expression of views except in the most extreme circumstances. In other words: There’s a line somewhere, but in our history of hosting events and speeches of all kinds, we hadn’t yet found it.
We’ve found the line. Derbyshire, in my opinion, is on the other side of it. Many of his expressions clearly constitute hate speech, and we will not promote such speech on this campus or in our community.
We respect—and expect—our students’ exploration of ideas, including ones that are very challenging, and we encourage individual choice and decision-making by students. But at times it’s our role as educators and administrators to step in and make decisions that are in the best interest of students and our community. This is one of those times.’
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You know, if the explanatory power of your evolutionary biology model is predictive, it missed a pretty important prediction. There’s always a ‘new’ society to emerge, but hey, speech is speech and courage is courage. I stand with both.
Affixing one’s moral compass, sentiments and institutional commitments upon the axis of change, rather than conservation, is one way to end up in an equity canoe headed over a revolutionary waterfall.
As to extrication of the pursuit of scientific knowledge and truth, free thought and speech, and the defense of healthy empiricism, it will take a few generations. The social constructivist model has made a lot of headway (Self feelings are important to discourses of meaning and historical oppression within a landscape of the Self and no meaning…).
As previously and often posted:
“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.’
‘Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. ‘
‘Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. ‘
And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.”
-John Stuart Mill ‘On Liberty: Chapter II-Of The Liberty Of Thought And Discussion’
The Intellectual Cowardice Of The Crowd-Charles Murray At Middlebury College
The Two Clashing Meanings Of Free Speech-Whence Liberalism?
On this site, see: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…
Repost-Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-‘Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’
How might this relate to the Heglian/post-Marxist project via ‘The End Of History’: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’
A Modern Liberal, somewhat Aristotelian and classical?: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’…Repost: Martha Nussbaum Channels Roger Williams In The New Republic: The First Founder
Samuel Huntington was quite humble, and often wise, about what political philosophy could do: From Prospect: Eric Kaufmann On ‘The Meaning Of Huntington’
From The NY Times Book Review-Thomas Nagel On John Gray’s New ‘Silence Of Animals’…From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘The Evolution of Mind and Mathematics: Dehaene Versus Plantinga and Nagel’…