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Notes -
The War at Stanford - The Atlantic
A few interesting things about this article:
The author is a sophomore student-journalist, and it's really good writing, by any standard. It turns out his parents are both top journalists. Nature vs nurture (vs high-status parents faking achievements by their kids to make them look good) is ambiguous, yet again!
One observation he makes that I hadn't seen in other reporting on campus protests, is that college admissions select for people who are "really good at looking really good," which includes strategic political posturing. This reminded me of my own experience at a high school that hyper-optimized for college admission, where I quickly became jaded by classmates openly-performative "activism." Are the elite student protestors my former classmates' gen-z counterparts? If so, how do my elite "betters" actually go on to do good things? Or, if the elite students are genuinely better than me, why are the people who are the best at looking the best mounting their (electrically conductive material, as required by this deliberately mixed metaphor) flagpole to the third rail? Or, is the sophomore student-journalist's observation true, but irrelevant, making this is just a really well-written, yet redundant, article about campus protests?
The Stanford administration banned calls for genocide, in response to the House hearing, but acknowledged to the reporter that this is illegal, due to a California statute requiring all universities to adhere to the First Amendment, not just public universities. I'm curious what the PR and legal discussions leading to this "ban" were, and what may result from it.
This seems woefully optimistic to me, not least in the assumption that people would abandon these positions were they made less than maximally appealing. There's no small amount of the people leading this charge who headily predate modern college admissions being driven by "looking really good" -- up to and including professors and administrators.
I think the more plausible argument why this has gone so hard so fast is that the conventions against doing so were proven wrong. Until the mid-00s, there was an argument -- a credible and serious argument -- that the Progressive movement had to win by persuading people, not just as a matter of principle but principle and pragmatics. That one defeats one's enemies by making them your friends. But by 2012 making Bad People Afraid worked, by 2014 and the aftermath of the ACA, it had already become respectability politics; by 2015, the answer was yes, you could get everything you wanted by stigmatizing and shunning and silencing those opposed to you hard enough, and some turgid prose on top, too. All the people worried about pushback or the pendulum shifting or whatever metaphor you want were wrong, and I say that as someone who plead at length with exactly that argument in the belief my neck was on the line.
It's a genuinely harsh paradox, and harsher still for those of us who haven't let the New Respectability hollow us out like skin suits, but it doesn't stop existing just because you ignore it.
Search term you're looking for is the Leonard Law, passed in 1992. Not sure by how much; the California legis lookup only goes to 1992. Stanford did try the our ban is our free speech thing, but courts rejected it. The 2007 Amendment was passed with pretty clear margins, though Yee (better known for his other work) being involved doesn't encourage.
Wait, are you suggesting that Obergefell derived from making Bad People Afraid? Or just that it was the end which proved such means would be tolerated?
I don't know.
I'd like to believe that it merely proved people like Dan Savage would be tolerated and feted, rather than undermine and weaken their movements, and that in a counterfactual world where everyone instead focused on honest debate and open engagement, Obergefel would still have happened, perhaps with a bunch of references to South Park's Big Gay Al. In this world, though, we got that sorta stuff, and Savage bullying a bunch of teenagers as part of his anti-bullying campaign was just the most on-the-nose bit, rather than the worst or even highest profile.
And there is a large portion of the progressive movement believes that sort of behavior was a large portion of why they won, and it's not obvious that they're wrong. Putting massive social, career, and legal costs to opposing gay marriage genuinely blew apart a lot of anti-gay marriage movements; breaking any opposition to favored goals as homophobia worked; leaking donation records and sending newcasters to individual rando's homes increased the cost of doing those things.
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I meant I was curious about the PR and legal reasoning of Stanford announcing a "ban" they acknowledge is illegal to enforce.
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