First Amendment

Where to give your millions

 Academic intolerance, First Amendment  No Responses »
Oct 132007
 

Naomi Schaefer Riley has an article at the WSJ about how rich people have trouble giving money to universities. Well, the universities will gladly take the money, but they are not willing to use it to fund educational programs that the leftwing establishment types don’t like. Example:

The Robertson family at Princeton has not been so lucky. In 1961, Charles and Marie Robertson (an heiress to the A&P supermarket fortune), donated $35 million to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University to prepare students for careers in government service. The Robertsons’ descendants now claim that the university has diverted the funds to projects completely unrelated to this mission. In 2002, they sued Princeton to reclaim the endowment, now estimated to be nearly $500 million. Five years later, they still haven’t gotten a refund.

Apparently there is now an organization called the Center for Excellence in Higher Education which will help donors get their funds used for reform:

Along with John M. Templeton Jr. and the John William Pope Foundation, Mr. Marcus has provided the seed money ($5 million) for the Center for Excellence in Higher Education (CEHE). The Indianapolis-based center, launched last month, aims to help donors “use philanthropy as a lever to reform higher education,” says Frederic Fransen, its executive director. Reform includes a greater emphasis on core curricula, a free-market understanding of economics, a more balanced approach to politics, affordable tuition, tenured faculty who spend more time in the classroom, greater transparency in university governance, and an end to grade inflation.

I suppose that might be the thing for some donors. But here is a better idea for all you millionaires and billionaires who rely on me for advice: Give your money to FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. It is working to protect free speech in academia. The academy was once a bulwark of free speech, but has now become one of its biggest threats. The way things are going, there soon won’t be any universities where one would be proud to have one’s name on a new research building. But a few major donations to FIRE or other such advocacy organizations could have a powerful effect in preserving our once-great university system.

Henninger caught the wrong Fish?

 Academic intolerance, First Amendment  No Responses »
Oct 112007
 

I hate being right so much of the time, like when I refer to Academic Intolerance, or when I say there are no more liberals (except for Nat Hentoff) because they’ve all become leftwing fascists. Or when I point out how I’ll end my days in one of Hillary’s internment camps. I hate it when she shows herself more and more to be the kind of person to prove me right. I’d rather be mistaken and be laughed at for being overly paranoid.

So it was rather spooky to read Daniel Henninger’s column in the WSJ in which he tells us that agents of federal authority are now talking about censuring a talk radio host. That was news to me. And he brings up a good question which ought to be brought before Senator Clinton and examined backwards and forwards, inside and out:

I would like to put a question to the senator: Would you defend Rush Limbaugh’s speech rights against the pressure that was brought upon him on the floor of the Senate by your colleagues Harry Reid and Ken Salazar? Colorado’s Sen. Salazar went so far last week as to say he’d support a Senate vote to “censure” Mr. Limbaugh. Rhymes with censor.

And then I thought he was pointing out how academics are now coming out of the closet with some repressive, anti-free speech moves, which is where things really got scary.

Who threw the first stone in these media-driven bloodlettings? Good question. But to my knowledge the right has no equivalent to “repressive tolerance,” the aggressive theory of scorched-earth political argument laid out in the hothouse years of the 1960s by the late left-wing political philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Just last November, in an admiring essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the left polemicist Stanley Fish aptly summed up Marcuse’s assertion that “liberal” notions of tolerance for political speech should be overturned.

The rationale for this notion is that standard tolerance is rigged against the left. In practice, tolerance extends only to the ideas and beliefs of the powerful, while it shuts out ideas on behalf of the weak or “marginalized”–the poor, minorities, women and the rest. Mr. Fish says liberals fail to see “the dark side of their favorite virtue.”

Prof. Fish has an alternative to traditions of tolerance, and to anyone awash in American politics today it will sound familiar: “That is to say, and Marcuse says it, anything the right does is bad and should not be tolerated; anything the left does is good and should be welcomed.” This would explain the emotional intensity and animosity in politics now: The other side no longer deserves minimal respect.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I think Mr. Henninger is mistaken in saying (or at least implying) that Stanley Fish is speaking approvingly of Marcuse’s statement. I just finished reading that Chronicles of Higher Education article (in the November 10, 2006 issue). Fish may be a leftwing polemicist, but I didn’t find that article to be polemical. It raises a lot of good points about the nature of liberal tolerance which we had better understand if we think we are going to defend it.

I wish it was somewhere online that’s generally accessible, because it ought to be widely discussed.

Oh, and just to give a sample, Fish makes a point that C.S. Lewis had made on another topic. (Or was it the same topic?) Lewis had said you can’t derive conclusions in the imperative from premises in the indicative. Fish, points out that you can’t derive conclusions about what to do to promote and defend tolerance by analyzing its nature. (The article is basically an essay about Wendy Brown’s book, “Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire.”)

On balance, I think it is the latter; she wants a better universalism than liberalism’s, but her articulations of it are without content, as they will necessarily be if she thinks to derive it from her critique of liberalism and liberal tolerance. That critique, to repeat the point made earlier, tells you what liberal tolerance is made of; it doesn’t tell you whether it is bad or good, and it certainly doesn’t tell you what should be put in its place.

I think in looking for threats to the values represented by the 1st Amendment, Mr. Henninger caught the wrong Fish. At least I hope so.

Edit: Fixed the spelling of Mr. Henninger’s name.

This stuff is catching

 First Amendment, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 082007
 

David Everitt shows that no one political faction has a monopoly on the urge to stifle the opposition. He addresses the question: Is there an echo of the old McCarthy era blacklists? The sad thing is that we have so many examples like this, and so few of the “I disagree with what you say, but defend your right to say it” type.

With the kind of demagoguery found in both periods comes an eagerness to stifle the opposition, sometimes successful, sometimes not, but always managing to inject intolerance into the public square. During the 1950s, the most damage done to political adversaries, and civil liberties in general, was perpetrated by right-wing zealots when they took advantage of the furor over the Korean War and installed a media purge. Leftists couldn’t match the right’s efforts – but not for lack of trying. During World War II, they had supported the Roosevelt administration’s sedition trials and the suppression of publications considered pro-Axis. Later, as the Cold War began, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship demanded that an anti-Soviet film, The Iron Curtain, be banned, and the Voice of Freedom Committee attacked anti-Communist radio commentators by organizing protest campaigns against their sponsors, employing techniques that presaged the methods used later by Red hunters to instigate the blacklist. A similar tendency would even be embraced by avowed free-speech champion John Henry Faulk. Just three years after striking a blow for tolerance and fair play in his historic 1962 libel trial, he adopted the tactical thinking of his old enemies by urging the John Lindsay mayoral campaign to publicize the past political affiliations of rival candidate William F. Buckley in order to “shut him up.”

In our own times, the readiness to silence the opposition continues to crop up. While the right tried to derail the careers of Danny Glover and the Dixie Chicks, the left attempted to do the same for radio psychologist Laura Schlesinger and, just recently, proposed a bill to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine in an effort to undermine the influence of conservative talk radio. On the broader political scene, this habit has been accompanied by extremist rhetoric and paranoid conspiracy-mongering, also reminiscent of the blacklist period. Some on the left have characterized Dick Cheney as a Nazi, just as Secretary of State Dean Acheson was once branded the “Red Dean.” Many have recently fulminated over a Zionist, neo-conservative cabal that secretly controls the Bush administration, just as right-wingers once denounced an insidious group of Ivy League pinkos manipulating foreign policy in the early Cold War (while leftists simultaneously insisted that Truman was the puppet of Wall Street warmongers).

Bought and paid for

 Academic intolerance, First Amendment, Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Sep 132007
 

I had thought it would come to this eventually. I didn’t realize it was already here as a matter of official policy, and has been here for ten years already.

Here is John Leo in a column at townhall.com

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice “from local to global level.” This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn’t long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight “oppression,” and sees American society as pervaded by the “global interconnections of oppression.” Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a culturally left agenda, often including diversity programs, state-sponsored redistribution of income, and a readiness to combat heterosexism, ableism, and classism.

I’m somewhat sensitive to this issue, because I’ve occasionally had people of the left ask me why a person of my political views is working for a public university, on the public payroll.  (I have a support staff position.)    My standard response is that it’s a damning indictment of the system if giving me a paycheck is supposed to buy my political views as well.

But that’s the direction in which things are headed.  A personal observation is that young students and even faculty members are having increasing difficulty separating ecological science from environmental activism.     I wonder how many can still articulate the reasons for separating the two.   They seem to understand the difference between science and non-science when the topic of creationism comes up — but they don’t seem to be able to apply the principles generally.

Well, I don’t know if this National Association of Scholars (apparently the source of much of Leo’s information) is going to make much headway in protecting science and scholarship.

How about this:  NASW should add an amendment to its code of ethics, explaining that whenever its members engage in public discussion of political affairs, that they should add the disclaimer that their political views are bought and paid for.    Newspapers when printing letters to the editor from such persons, should point out that the political views of the writer have been bought and paid for, and are not the result of independent thought any more than those of a corporate PR flack are.

Who pays the price

 Bash the Messenger, First Amendment  No Responses »
Aug 072007
 

It followed an unauthorised press conference by members of the Reporters Without Borders campaign group, who called for the release of about 100 journalists, online dissidents and free speech activists who are imprisoned in China. After the event, uniformed and plain-clothed police physically prevented foreign journalists from leaving the area, in some cases for more than an hour, according to reporters present. “If this is going to be the behaviour for the rest of the time until the Olympics, then I think China will be paying a rather high price in terms of its international image,” said Jocelyn Ford, a journalist who was covering the event.

No, not necessarily. It isn’t necessarily China that will pay a high price. If we become complicit in this behavior, putting a tacit stamp of acceptance on it, then we’re the ones who will pay a high price.

Financial times article:  China ‘breaks promise’ on media

One way to get started on paying that price is to do things like putting the words “break promise” in quotes in the headlines. That’s a way of disdaining any responsibility for our own behavior.

For the sake of one man

 First Amendment, Russia  No Responses »
Jul 192007
 

Good call by Bret Stephens of the WSJ in his article, For the Sake of One Man.

It’s about the fuss Britain is making (for which it deserves our thanks and praise) over the murder of Alexander Litvinenko:

What matters, rather, is nicely captured in a remark by Russian foreign ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin regarding Britain’s decision to expel the four diplomats. “I don’t understand the position of the British government,” Mr. Kamynin said. “It is prepared to sacrifice our relations in trade and education for the sake of one man.”

That’s a telling remark, both in its substance and in the apparent insouciance with which it was made: The whole architecture of liberal democracy is designed primarily “for the sake of one man.” Not only does Mr. Kamynin seem unaware of it, he seems to think we are unaware of it. Perhaps the indulgence which the West has extended to Mr. Putin’s regime over the past seven years gives him a reason to think so.

And I would say that not only are we somewhat responsible for creating an atmosphere in which Vlad Putin feels he can get away with his repression of the media, but it works the other way around, too. The more he can get away with, the more it creates a comfort zone for those in the U.S. who want to use the Fairness Doctrine or hate crime laws to quell dissidents’ voices.

Coulter-Edwards hate speech

 First Amendment  No Responses »
Jun 272007
 

Here’s John Edwards on Ann Coulter:

“I think she [Mrs. Edwards] was making it clear that we can’t continue to tolerate this kind of name-calling and hate-mongering,” Edwards said. “We have to elevate the discussion because this is all calculated to keep us from talking about … the things that affect people’s lives, like men and women dying in Iraq.”

Source: We Have to Elevate the Discussion

And then watch Edwards’ supporters respond by spewing venom and hatred against Coulter at this blog at the New York Times.

Edwards Coulter P.S.

One of my favorites was this one posted by “Joe”.

I hate Ms. Coulter and I do not understand why she is aloued [sic] to have a voice on TV.

Joe

This was mild in comparison to what some of them said.

Maybe these people think Edwards’ advice applies only to the other side.

 Newer Entries