Erin Shaw: Bans on "Divisive Concepts" Threaten to Stifle Speech

Absolutely right.

Period.

No 'ifs,' 'ands,' or 'buts'...

Er...

...but...:

The point of those policies was actually to block indoctrination, as is clear if you read the seminal ones from e.g. Florida.

So how could someone aim at No leftist indoctrination and end up with No promotion of divisive concepts?

Two ways:

First, We might be tempted to say No promotion of concepts at all, only discussion...but the case is at least provisionally closed on many issues. E.g. the approximate shape of the Earth, that evolution occurs in at least some form, that the Battle of Lexington was in 1775, and so on.

Second--and speaking from personal...oh, sorry...of course I meant "lived"...experience: whenever you argue against leftist indoctrination, leftists respond that there is no clear line between teaching and indoctrination. This is really just a rhetorical ploy to allow them to keep indoctrinating students...but actually they're right...because there are relatively few clear lines between any two such things. Nature is filled with lines...but blurry ones. Generally not clear ones. 

   And it's on this latter ground that the battle ought to be fought.

   Don't avoid engagement here. If you do, you'll always be running from it. And you'll run to even shakier ground--like a prohibition on discussing "divisive concepts"...

...except, again (and of course) the original policies banned promotion of them, not discussion of them..

...and the promotion/discussion distinction is basically a way to discuss the teaching/indoctrination distinction...

   Look, here's what's really up, so far as I can tell:

   It's perfectly permissible to just teach/tell students that p if/when p is true...or at least it seems to be, and the case is at least provisionally closed. It is NOT ok to just teach/tell students that p when p is controversial...and especially when it is extremely so.

   But what the left has been doing is actually taking ideas that are not only NOT proven nor even well-established...and just teaching/telling students--and adults--that they are established facts. And, worse: they've been teaching/telling students (and adults!) that the case is closed and that obvious falsehoods are true. E.g. (again, their flagship dogma) Women have penises...

   It's generally a judgment calls whether to represent something as proven beyond any appreciable doubt...because, again, what we really have is a spectrum of degrees of proof. And we can't couch everything we say in preponderance of evidence language.

[subroutine: if we try to do that, we fall into a regress. Instead of Earth is round (actually it's an oblate spheroid), I say The evidence clearly indicates that Earth is round. Well, why is the nature of the evidence get exempted from these considerations? It, too, is something that must be established...so if I wanted to do the same thing for every question, I'd have to say: the evidence clearly indicates that the evidence clearly indicates that Earth is round... and so on. Or: so far as I can tell, the evidence clearly indicates that Earth is round. Anyway: at some point we just have to say something straight up and drop the evidence language...]

   To cut to the chase: in schools and "training" sessions run by the left, it's been promoting its wacko, poorly-evidenced theories as proven facts. The rest of us are demanding that that stop. We'll always face the generic problem, discussed above, about when to treat things as at least provisionally settled...but that's a completely different problem. What has to stop is what the left is doing. The other problem is never going to go away. But when challenged, they pretend that what they're doing is an instance of the generic problem...which it isn't.

   Almost every time I've spoken out against indoctrination at my university, someone has responded in a way that attempts to blur the distinction between the generic problem and the specific leftist indoctrination problem--and that's how we end up with the "divisive concepts" approach. It's a way of answering the left's sophistical defense of indoctrination. But, again, that's a confusion.

   The above is all written in one draft, as usual, but it's a bit more haphazard than usual. But I don't have time to revise it.

   Bottom line: there are some clear cases of indoctrination, and it's those that must stop. My own university got busted for a clear case of indoctrination of student orientation leaders (or maybe resident advisors) when it foolishly taped one of the session. It clearly showed two grad students basically telling the undergrads that leftist doctrines about "privilege" and whatnot are true. No qualifications, no indication that they were speculative, controversial, leftist views...they simply said things like "Here is a list of groups with 'privilege'" and so on. That was a clear instance of indoctrination. 

   Anyway, I think the bans were better than nothing, though obviously just band-aids. They helped blunt the edge of pervasive leftist indoctrination...but they're no substitute for going right at the problem. 

   Final note: when our faculty senate was drafting its condemnation of such policies, I spoke against the resolution. I noted that, after years of leftist indoctrination, it had never even considered condemning that...and noted that the real goal was blocking indoctrination...and I moved that we add a clause condemning indoctrination. Another faculty-member said that it was too hard to distinguish between teaching and indoctrination. I responded that, difficult as that might be, indoctrination was still bad, and that we should condemn it, so that the criticism of divisive concept bans wasn't interpreted as a defense of indoctrination. My motion was soundly defeated. That's the situation in microcosm right there...

[Case in point:  the president of the AAA says that the case is closed on the number of sexes, and that for anthropologists to teach students that there are two of them is like turning astronomy classes into astrology classes...]