15 pointsby mudil2 days ago4 comments
  • appreciatorBus2 days ago
    It’s about time. Next he needs to defund any department taking cues from or influenced by “critical theory” and its descendants.
    • UncleMeat2 days ago
      "To save free speech we must fire a bunch of people for their academic speech."

      Hm.

      • appreciatorBus2 days ago
        “To save free speech we must stop funding people who theorize in bad faith, endlessly looking for ways to undermine reality so as to put themselves in power.”
        • anigbrowl2 days ago
          No projection going on here, the modern conservative movement is a paragon of unselfish sincerity, as exemplified by the national administration. It may look like they're up to their absolute eyeballs in corruption and double dealing, but just ask them and they'll tell you they're the most honest folk to ever walk the earth, or indeed any other planet.
        • UncleMeata day ago
          I thought that universities were about exploring challenging ideas according to the free speech advocates. Are the ideas promoted by critical theorists not merely challenging ideas?
        • WarOnPrivacy2 days ago
          >To save free speech we must stop funding people who theorize in bad faith

          To believe this in a meaningful, rational way would require one to constantly call out administrations and propagandists, after months and years of debunking evidences the methods to serially operate in bad faith.

          In the absence of any calling out: We can reasonably surmise they are either captured by political cultists and not processing rationally - or that they are simply operating in bad faith.

          Granting, however, that some percent of folks simply get off on bad actors and the harm they do to those who never earned that. For them, cruelty brings it's own buzz and that is enough.

          • appreciatorBus2 days ago
            Sounds like you’re defining a binary, a big no-no in pomo! Better to say that political disagreement exists on a spectrum.
    • didgeoridoo2 days ago
      The problem is that critical theory at the foundational level (Adorno, Foucault, even Butler) is an extremely useful and coherent way of thinking about power and situated perspective.

      Unfortunately the revolutionary praxis that emerged from it is what we typically see in the academy under the label of “critical theory”, which smuggles in a lot of “liberation” ethics under the guise of critique — so it’s no longer “this is how to think about power”, but rather “power is evil and should be destroyed, or even better given to me”. Foucault literally called these people “saviors” and he didn’t mean it nicely.

      (It doesn’t help that this praxis is simplistic, ties into friend/enemy emotions, and gives people “something to fight for” in an era where meaning is hard to come by.)

      No matter how contaminated the bathwater, though, I think the baby is probably worth saving.

    • WarOnPrivacy2 days ago
      Every large org/entity/group/party/etc is currently degrading under a toxic principle, which is

           No one anywhere wants to clean their own house
      
      Improvement is what happens when this principle is recognized and is rolled back.

      Kowtowing is what happens when changes happen in response to overt bullying by a powerful, hostile autocrat.

      Embracing (and nurturing) the above toxic principle is evidenced by folks who parrot talking points supplied by powerful, hostile autocrats.

    • anigbrowl2 days ago
      Sounds like censorship from people mad that they lost some arguments.
  • beisner2 days ago
    Seems like a pretty obvious effect no? There’s a major power imbalance between professor and student. Not sure how much it would extend outside of the classroom.
  • NoraCodes2 days ago
    > Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said the University “went wrong” by allowing professors to inject their personal views into the classroom, arguing that faculty activism had chilled free speech and debate on campus.

    The university does not "allow" professors to express their opinions; that is a fundamental tenet of academic freedom, and is critically important to free speech in and of itself. The idea that a university could _prevent_ professors from giving their opinions in class is laughable anyway; if we didn't value the opinions of professors, we wouldn't need them at all, and could get away with lecturers without PhDs or research obligations. (Of course, many university administrators would quite like that.)

    It seems to me that Garber is less interested in preventing faculty from expressing opinions in general and more that he is interested in suppressing a particular set of opinions he and his donors disagree with.

    • Gabriel542 days ago
      There is a big difference between professors being "free" to publish and express their views on a subject, and teaching that same subject in such a way that their views are presented as the only acceptable views on that subject.
      • mxkopy2 days ago
        I think you have more fundamental problems if you’re not capable of not taking people at their word at that point
  • torlok2 days ago
    Finally, all the anti-woke arguments from Twitter circa 2014, and the last 10 years of Joe Rogan's existence have been vindicated.
    • performative2 days ago
      we're getting too close to gamergate 2, mom i'm scared