Meanwhile, at Harvard...
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/opinion/antisemitism-university-presidents.html?smid=url-share
What the University Presidents Got Right and Wrong About Antisemitic Speech
I had a singular thought: Censorship helped put these presidents in their predicament, and censorship will not help them escape.
I’m a former litigator who spent much of my legal career battling censorship on college campuses, and the thing that struck me about the presidents’ answers wasn’t their legal insufficiency but rather their stunning hypocrisy. And it’s that hypocrisy, not the presidents’ understanding of the law, that has created a campus crisis.
First, let’s deal with the law. Harvard, Penn and M.I.T. are private universities. Unlike public schools, they’re not bound by the First Amendment, and they therefore possess enormous freedom to fashion their own custom speech policies. But while they are not bound by law to protect free speech, they are required, as educational institutions that receive federal funds, to protect students against discriminatory harassment, including — in some instances — student-on-student peer harassment.
Supreme Court has held that in the absence of an actual, immediate threat — such as an incitement to violence — the government cannot punish a person who advocates violence.
So if the university presidents were largely (though clumsily) correct about the legal balance, why the outrage? To quote the presidents back to themselves, context matters. For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.
The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students. When, as a student at Harvard Law School, I was booed and hissed and told to “go die” for articulating pro-life or other conservative views, exactly zero administrators cared about my feelings. Nor did it cross my mind to ask them for help. I was an adult. I could handle my classmates’ anger.
But reform can’t be confined to policies. It also has to apply to cultures. As Pinker notes, that means disempowering a diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus that is itself all too often an engine of censorship and extreme political bias. Most important, universities need to take affirmative steps to embrace greater viewpoint diversity. Ideological monocultures breed groupthink, intolerance and oppression.
Universities must absorb the fundamental truth that the best answer to bad speech is better speech, not censorship. Recently I watched and listened to a video of a Jewish student’s
with pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia University. Her voice shakes, and there’s no doubt that it was hard for her to speak. I’d urge you to listen to the entire thing. She seeks a “genuine and real conversation” but also tells her audience exactly what it means to her when she hears terms like “Zionist dogs.”
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Hiding behind their virtue masks...
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People getting really worked up over words. Sticks and stones are real... but not at these silly college campuses right now.
ANYWAY....... curious if @Ivorythumper 's tree neighbor (lawyer at Penn?) is involved?
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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I went to a college graduation a few months ago where the black students got a special sash that said "Black Excellence". Nobody else got sashes. I wondered whether they would get pats on the head as they received their diplomas, but sadly, none were offered. Racist.
I'm nonplussed that any of this is surprising. These are dead center mainstream popular culture antics at colleges.
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@jon-nyc said in Meanwhile, at Harvard...:
@George-K said in Meanwhile, at Harvard...:
No Lithuanians either.
Though, one could make the case that Buddhists, Mormons and Lithuanians are not a "race."
Neither are LGBTQwxyz
Simple math. The Human Race has 2 genders. Many of these individuals don’t fit within those 2 genders. Therefore they must be some other type of race…
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Technically, since they can’t naturally breed with each other, I’m not sure they are even the same species as each other, let alone a race within that species…
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@LuFins-Dad said in Meanwhile, at Harvard...:
Technically, since they can’t naturally breed with each other, I’m not sure they are even the same species as each other, let alone a race within that species…
Actually the Ls can breed with the Gs just fine.
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Harvard forces a Jewish student group to hide its menorah each night after its lighting over fears of vandalism that “won’t look good” for the Ivy League school, the rabbi of Harvard Chabad said.
“On our campus in the shadow of Widener Library, we in the Jewish community are instructed, ‘We’ll let you have the menorah, you made your point, OK. Pack it up, don’t leave it out overnight because there will be criminal activity we fear and it won’t look good’,” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi said at a Hanukkah lighting Wednesday night.
Zarchi, the founder and president of Harvard Chabad, said the university has asked the group to take in the menorah each night since the first Hanukkah lighting on campus.
But amid a rise in antisemitism across the world and on college campuses due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, the rabbi said the message is even more poignant.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Meanwhile, at Harvard...:
Harvard forces a Jewish student group to hide its menorah each night after its lighting over fears of vandalism that “won’t look good” for the Ivy League school, the rabbi of Harvard Chabad said.
“On our campus in the shadow of Widener Library, we in the Jewish community are instructed, ‘We’ll let you have the menorah, you made your point, OK. Pack it up, don’t leave it out overnight because there will be criminal activity we fear and it won’t look good’,” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi said at a Hanukkah lighting Wednesday night.
Zarchi, the founder and president of Harvard Chabad, said the university has asked the group to take in the menorah each night since the first Hanukkah lighting on campus.
But amid a rise in antisemitism across the world and on college campuses due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, the rabbi said the message is even more poignant.
It's nice they're kickin' it old-school with a little pre-emptive victim-blaming.
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Anyhow, I’m picking on this particular offering because it contained this passage, which jumped out and smacked me in the forehead:
Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill called the investigation “shocking and dangerous” on Thursday and questioned why members of Congress are spending their time probing Harvard rather than passing a border bill or aid to Ukraine. “When you challenge the independence of private institutions, you are challenging a core element of our democracy. We should be on alert,” Ifill told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “The Source.”
"If Harvard wants to do its own investigation, it is free to do so. But for members of Congress to decide that they want to meddle into the private affairs of a private institution in order to score political points and to target a Black president is incredibly dangerous,” added Ifill, the former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
This is absurd on every level. Why are members of Congress “probing Harvard”? Because Harvard receives hundreds of millions of dollars from Congress, that’s why. Per Harvard’s own financial reports, the college was given $625 million by the federal government in 2021 — a number that “accounted for approximately 67 percent of total sponsored revenue.” Between 2018 and 2022, records show, Harvard was handed more than three billion federal dollars. If Harvard wishes to be completely “independent” of Congress — as, say, Hillsdale is — then it must also become completely independent of Congress’s wallet. It cannot pick and choose. With subsidy comes oversight. That isn’t a threat to “our democracy”; that is our democracy.
Are we really to believe that Ifill, who used to work for the NAACP, wishes to abolish the current rules that come along with the federal funding of universities? As PEN America records, “private institutions that receive federal funding must also adhere to federal anti-discrimination laws, such as those applicable under Title IX.” Is that “meddling”? Or does that term only apply when Congress asks questions that Ifill doesn’t like? Where’s her limiting principle? It is interesting that Ifill mentions “aid to Ukraine” in her list of things that Congress should be doing instead. Does she think that Congress should write a blank check in that realm, too? Do questions asked of those beneficiaries represent a challenge to the “core element of our democracy,” or, perhaps to Ukraine’s sovereignty? Or do these standards apply to Harvard alone?
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Here, here!
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DON’T let them eat cake.
- RFK Jr
