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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25943 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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So do you think there should be a censorship arms war or do you want more academic freedom?

  • -13

or do you want more academic freedom

You left out a third option: I want a magical pink unicorn who shits gold and whose farts cure cancer. I genuinely see that as more plausible than getting our current university system to support academic freedom.

It's all quite unfortunate, and I suspect there is some genius way to get from where we are to a healthy higher education system without use of a flamethrower. But, no one, and certainly not Trump, knows that genius way, so this is maybe the best of a bunch of bad options.

If the main observable action when in power is to further the downward trend against academic freedom, why should anyone trust the claims being made? Actions speak louder than words after all.

If we want academic freedom we should make moves towards academic freedom, not be indistinguishable from the censors.

  • -10

If the main observable action when in power is to further the downward trend against academic freedom, why should anyone trust the claims being made? Actions speak louder than words after all.

If. Notably, that is not the main observable action, since academic freedom isn't being suppressed by defunding academic organizations that violate civil liberties law or by defunding academics that support explicitly anti-academic ideologies. Even if academic freedom were being suppressed, most people don't observe academic freedom as some sort of scalar value that increases when the sum of all academics practicing their academic freedom goes up or something. These are vectors where the specifics matter, and, as such, to say that this is the "main observable action" - even presuming that it were an observable action in the first place, which it isn't - is wrong.

If we want academic freedom we should make moves towards academic freedom, not be indistinguishable from the censors

I don't think most people have a difficult distinguishing between the behavior of Trump and his ilk in this context and the behavior of the censors that have been running roughshod throughout academia's veins. Notably, this does make moves towards academic freedom, by punishing organizations and people who have demonstrated and/or made commitments to suppressing academic freedom. If we want academic freedom, we should punish such people so as to provide an incentive not to do it further.

And empirically, one method that has absolutely not worked at all for increasing academic freedom - in fact, it has only resulted in things getting worse and worse over time until today, when academics not being free has become so common knowledge that academia has substantially discredited itself as a source for truth - is to not punish these people when you have power.

If the main observable action when in power is to further the downward trend against academic freedom, why should anyone trust the claims being made? Actions speak louder than words after all.

Yes, exactly. This is why current complaints about the lack of academic freedom cannot be taken seriously.

If we want academic freedom we should make moves towards academic freedom, not be indistinguishable from the censors.

If Ukraine wants peace, they should make moves towards peace, not shoot missiles into Russian territory.

Yes, exactly. This is why current complaints about the lack of academic freedom cannot be taken seriously.

Do you think the only complaints about academic freedom come from the same people who were censoring before?

I hope you are aware there are tons of free speech and first amendment advocacy groups, left and right leaning libertarians, and other stuff like that who opposed left censorship before and are opposing right censorship now.

  • -10

Yeah, I think most people complaining about this now were either directly participating in the censorship, approving of it, or at most not all that bothered by it.

Sure, there were some pro-free speech groups, I think FIRE is the most prominent. Libertarians are non-entities though, and it would be an odd one if they complained about government grants being cut.

I think it's also worth pointing out that even FIRE and the other libertarian groups are essentially part of the Republican coalition. Both their personnel and their legal arguments draw almost entirely from the right side of the political spectrum. They have been totally and completely frozen out of left-wing institutions, most dems outside the abundance movement refuse to have anything to do with them, and even the abundance dems are embarassed and try to downplay the relationship as much as they can to their fellows.

With the exception of now-irrelevant dinosaurs like Ira Glasser, pre-2025 calls for free speech, tolerance, and academic freedom came exclusively from the right, and even now that Trump is in power the only people maling principled arguments in that direction are still disproportionately right-wing activists.

Libertarians are non-entities though, and it would be an odd one if they complained about government grants being cut.

You can be against government grant funding as a concept and be against unconstitutional anti free speech idealogical selection in grant funds if it does exist.

I'm not sure you can. The whole point of goverent grants is fund what the market will not, and thus be distortionary, from a libertarian point of view.

And any libertarian-lite attemot at salvaging this by saying "well, as long as we have government grants, they should be assigned neutrally" runs into the problem of them not having been neutral for decades, and said libertarian not uttering a peep about it, as well as "neutrality" being hard to define in the he context.

You can not support something existing but also believe that if it does exist it should at least be done in a fair and freedom supporting manner.

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The ACLU shit the bed ages ago and their top lawyer is in favor of burning books.

FIRE exists and has expanded their purview, yes. I am glad there is one organization that actually has principles.

do you want more academic freedom?

What are you positing as the mechanism to get from here to there?

It doesn't seem to have been an option of the last several decades. Supreme Court cases do nothing, black-letter civil rights law does nothing, hitting them in the wallet might have an effect.

There were probably better ways to do it than this, I would agree. But if the alternative is doing nothing and letting progressives keep degrading the institutions, so be it

What are you positing as the mechanism to get from here to there?

The mechanism is that instead of limiting free speech and punishing academics for wrongthink, we win at free speech by fighting for the principle. This is what principled libertarian first amendment groups like FIRE are doing.

Allowing shitflinging competitions and "you started it" accusations to consume our freedoms will not restore our freedoms, it just creates a downward spiral. As we can see right now, we're even creating new theories of legal harassment.

There’s nothing new about the idea that we need to ban the expression of certain opinions in order to fight discrimination — that’s the reasoning behind a vast number of speech codes that FIRE has fought since 1999. The new, destructive twist on this is what we at FIRE call the cumulative theory of harassment. That’s the notion that while myriad individual instances of expression by unrelated individuals may be fully protected under the First Amendment, they can together create a cumulative harm, even to those not present and not targeted by the speech, that justifies overriding the Constitution.

We're downward spiraling already when principles are abandoned for revenge grievances. Defending freedom is not and never will be easy.

The mechanism is that instead of limiting free speech and punishing academics for wrongthink, we win at free speech by fighting for the principle. This is what principled libertarian first amendment groups like FIRE are doing.

They failed. Utterly.

Don't confuse not having perfect and permanent success with a failure, or you'll let your free speech rights keep slipping further and further away.

As I said, they failed, utterly. Their protests fell on deaf ears and the academy became more and more exclusive of any opposing views. It turns out that a key part of enforcing ones free speech rights is force.

Oh ok, are you gonna use force to start enforcing free speech rights being targeted by the government now?

Which free speech rights do you believe are being targeted by the government now?

This overall topic is about who the democratically elected government chooses to spend money on. Even if you consider free speech dependent on federal subsidy, which would be wildly at odds with the premise of natural rights, there are always people not getting money. There have always been conditions for getting the money. These incudes the previous administration's insistence on DEI-support speech in applications and proposals, the reversal of which is the basis of the OP's quoted objection.

Organizations like FIRE are a great resource to find ongoing attacks against free speech and free expression by government https://www.thefire.org/

For example the most recent one in the "cumulative theory of harassment" https://www.thefire.org/news/findings-against-harvard-are-blueprint-national-campus-speech-code and the censorship of legal anti-semitic speech.

Another problem with the cumulative theory of harassment is that it holds current speakers responsible for creating a “hostile environment” based on the previous statements and activities of people to whom they may be entirely unrelated. This means anyone can find themselves in the position of perpetrator of hostile environment harassment without himself or herself actually engaging in harassing behavior.

Consider, for example, the following account said to “highlight the hostile environment created for Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard,” according to HHS:

On May 12, 2024, a crudely drawn image of Interim President Garber was also displayed [during an encampment protest] depicting him as a devil with horns and a tail, recalling “medieval antisemitic tropes of Jews as Satan’s minions.

Like posting a political cartoon to Instagram, simply displaying such a picture simply cannot be deemed harassment by any rational measure, let alone be taken as serious enough to deny the person seeing it “equal access to an educational program or activity.” The Supreme Court’s decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education established the standard for peer harassment under Title IX, holding schools liable only when they are deliberately indifferent to harassment that is severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and even warns of “the amount of litigation that would be invited by entertaining claims of official indifference to a single instance of one-on-one peer harassment.”

Under the cumulative theory of harassment, that’s out the window. A school like Harvard must consider each individual student’s choice to display this picture as part of a pattern of behavior that consists of everything everyone else is doing on campus during some undefined period of time, whether or not the student knew anything about it.

As they conclude

Real discrimination deserves a real response. True threats, vandalism, and violence are not protected speech and schools should act when they occur. But they must do so with the precision the Constitution requires — punishing conduct, not ideas, and respecting the robust political debate that higher education exists to nurture.

Harvard’s case should be a warning. Unless we properly respect the line between speech and misconduct, Title VI risks becoming not a shield against injustice, but a sword for enforcing the orthodoxy favored by whatever political forces wield it, now or in the future.

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we win at free speech by fighting for the principle.

Then it is never won. And that is fine! I admire Tolkien's long defeat, but we should not confuse it with something winnable.

It's been winning for a long time in the US! We have slip ups but don't confuse not attaining a permanent perfection with a complete failure. Each time a would be censor is prevented from censoring, a win is had. Sometimes it will fail, but when no one tries to fight for what is right then nothing good will come.

War is preferable to the one-sided "academic freedom" that previously prevailed.

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