The American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
offers a long article by Michael C. Bahrent, “A Tale of Two Arguments About
Free Speech on Campus”, link.
The article talks about the alarm risen by a group called
FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
The article develops the idea that the current generation of
professors and students don’t value free speech they way people did around the
time of Y2K.
They see personalized speech is more useful to the already
well-off, who generally don’t like to “take action” and have no shame in
demonstrating. Furthermore, the distraction of individualistic speech makes it
very difficult for campuses to become inclusive of groups of previously less
desired people.
There is also a way the political climate on a typical campus
compounds this.
The Left is demanding relief from a hypercritical attitude
that classifies individuals as simply winners and losers and tries to justify a
superficially meritocratic hierarchy. Yet, within the intersectional groups the
Left tries to form, they would find they have to set up their own hierarchies.
But they insist it makes some sense, that if you can shut
down all speech that simply seems critical of someone for not being as
competitive sexually as someone else, you could stop bullying and sequences that
have horrific results. In their view, my
own William and Mary expulsion was the result of this talk, rather than from
morally legitimate claims I could myself become a mooch on the larger group.
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