Saturday, May 19, 2018

George Will: Free Speech On Campus And Speech First vs. Michigan

Will is on fire.

Oh...uh...but remember...there's no free speech problem on campuses...

posted by Winston Smith at 7:41 AM

3 Comments:

Blogger Aa said...

I have a hard time taking this seriously since college students, small collections of them (at times large) have always been like this. They were there in the 60s in large numbers, the 70s, I saw them in the 80s when I was there and stopped paying attention. But now we have social media...maybe if we took a collective breath we'd realize it's same old same old and calm down. But what the hell do I know (sigh).

1:13 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I disagree...but you know me...I'm easily set off by this stuff.

IMO free speech is sacrosanct
And:
The academic left has been successful in the past in its efforts to suppress speech (see: the paleo-PC speech codes, e.g. at Michigan)
And:
It's moved *way* out of academia
And:
Academia is a bottleneck that allows the left to exert control over the rest of the culture (hence the previous point)
And:
Each new incarnation of the illiberal left involves some new diabolical tweaks that pose news threats.

Since I'm a philosopher, I'm interested in the positions even if they have no actual effects.

But these have actual effects.

Everyone made fun of the "Antioch rules" last time around.

This time around, the Antioch rules were implemented by the Department of Education as an insane, entirely unjustifiable distortion of Title IX.

I wish you were right and all this was just sound and fury.

But I don't believe it.

1:23 PM  
Blogger Pete Mack said...

I don't see academia exercising control over the culture at large. Influence certain parts, yes. But control is much too strong a term.

6:44 PM  

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