As a disclaimer I am against any censorship of academia and think that even Charles Murray should be allowed to speak at a university (assuming he is invited by an academic department or student group) and that the university should never have veto power.
However, I think the example in the Atlantic is actually more mild than past cases: the John Carlson Lecture is a general audience talk that the university holds to boost its public image.
It’s not an academic talk discussing new research or a political perspective, but rather summarizes ideas for the public. If MIT wants to decide who should give such talks I don’t care.
In contrast, if a department or student group wants to invite a specific speaker for a specialized talk about politics, science, math, then the university censoring such discourse is what is truly dangerous.
In this light, the cancellation of Milo Yiannopoulos who was invited by the College Republican club is much worse. Even though personally I do not think Yiannopoulos is anything but a provocateur, if someone (group/department) wants to invite him the university should not block him from speaking.
Where to begin.. Milos Yiannopolous is a great example. Lauren Southern, Ben Shapiro at DePaul University. Roger Williams University banned a conservative student group, Condi Rice was disinvited from speaking at Rutgers commencement, Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali was disinvited from a commencement speech, Ari Fleisher was disinvited from Middlebury in 2002, Ann Coulter was disinvited by Cornell, John Brennan was disinvited by U Penn in 2016, Charles Murray disinvited by Virginia Tech in 2016, Peter Theil disinvited by Berkeley in 2014z
It goes on and on. See thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database for a complete database of disinvitation attempts. The vast majority in the past several years have been from the Left.
> I also don't see how you can draw a distinction between disinviting speakers and censoring the ideas they came to talk about.
Milo is perhaps the best example here: Milo comes to campuses to cause a spectacle, not to spread new ideas. Sure, he's talking about some ideas. But that's not his primary motivation.
Milo is not an academic. Would he be happy with letting some academic go in his stead and present his same ideas in the form of an academic lecture?
> There are absolutely things you can't talk about freely at universities, for example: immigration, gender differences in personality, variations in IQ across races, etc.
Do you have any evidence for this?
(Note that you can't talk about things like variations in IQ across races as if they existed more strongly than they actually do or mean something they don't, and expect to be taken seriously. But that's not universities censoring dissident politics, that's universities expecting basic scientific literacy instead of people pushing a political agenda in the guise of science. The concept of IQ is an idea that came from the academy and has been refined by the academy; using an old understanding of IQ and what it means is essentially an abandonment of science.)
> The fissure is over whether a disagreeable idea or speaker should be engaged and defeated on rational grounds, or excluded from the premises by whatever means necessary. Last generation's liberal professors value the exercise for its own sake. Today's leftist students think it's an abomination that they're allowed into the institution at all.
> That's not what I see happening, but sure, you can accuse other people of that if you like.
I've seen videos of it happening. Basically a speaker is invited to give a talk, but people who disagree with her crowd the auditorium and scream to prevent the talk from being given. The intention is not to "engage [or] defeat on rational grounds," but to shut down and exclude.
A lot of the people who have this done to them are in fact disagreeable, but that doesn't make the reaction less illiberal.
> students have always been belligerent and uninterested in hearing the views of their opponents
Agreed. But I don't know to what degree the school should accept the students' demands.
> This is a screed from a man who is upset that he is not being handed a platform to speak. [...] No one invited me to speak at Oxford either.
That's not what the author describes, though: they were invited to speak at Oxford, and students who didn't want that event to take place complained until it was cancelled.
> That doesn't make this a free speech issue.
It's not, I agree. But it's something, and not a good something.
> By giving such speakers a forum, they're endorsing that such views are worthy of being heard or debated
No, they're not. In almost all cases speakers at a University are invited by a group of individuals, be it a student group or some other association. They are the ones who are saying the speaker has ideas worthy of discussion. If a University has any respect for diversity of opinion, it will refrain from suppressing any significant subgroup within its walls.
Is one to come to mind. Students and other teachers are deprived of a lecture because a small vocal minority of students are upset that in an unrelated interview, the professor expressed a fairly mainstream view of preferring "equality" over "equity".
On the one hand, we have Abbot, who is an academic, being uninvited from a public lecture organized by the department that covers his field based on apparently little more than Twitter outrage.
On the other hand, we have Yiannopoulos, who is an activist, whose event was canceled by the College Republicans due to public safety concerns after 150 protesters blocked access to the venue. The next day, Yiannopoulos returned to UC Davis with supporters and marched across the campus in counter-protest at the cancellation of the event.
Censoring academic freedom of speech has a much more chilling effect on academic freedom than does restricting outside participation in campus speech.
Yiannopoulos has a national platform for his ideas, and indeed this kind of incident only bolsters it. In any case, he was ultimately able to visit the campus and express his message the next day.
Academics, however, depend on being able to publish, speak publicly, receive prizes and so on for their careers; there is truth in publish or perish. If their ability to participate in the academic discourse is going to end up limited for holding unpopular opinions (even unrelated to their work!), then the chilling effect is much larger.
The person in the article was invited by the university. This isn't a random person demanding to be heard. This is the university succumbing to pressure from a small group to ban a guest from sharing their ideas with the student body that choose to attend.
Dorian Abbot is a perfect example of why you're wrong.
He opposes affirmative action and as a result got cancelled at MIT for a _completely_ unrelated talk about climate and life on other planets.
If you yourself disagree with him and do not want to participate in the talk, fine. don't watch it, don't listen to it, don't attend it, and use YOUR speech to recommend others do the same.
What happened here is that he got cancelled so that those who _WANTED_ to associate no longer could. This is not about association, and it's not about speech, it's about preventing others from hearing and it's about harming him for daring to have that opinion.
When the cancel culture stops happening, THEN I'll start believing when people say the things you're trying to say here. Not before.
> mounted a Twitter campaign to cancel a distinguished science lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology because they disagreed with some of the political positions the speaker had taken
So we're past the point of looking for racism. Even political opposition, or a viewpoint you don't agree with merits cancellation?
> There is a bit of a paradox here, because you could argue that cancelling a professor for having an unfashionable opinion is itself an exercise of student free speech.
No, it's curbing the professors speech. If students allowed the professor to speak, but held their own counter speech or protest march then that would be an exercise of free speech. Preventing another person from speaking is disruption, not counter protest.
The article argues, and I agree, that a university is free to not invite someone if they view them as controversial. Where the problem really is is that they invited him and then retracted the invitation in response to a mob. The retraction is what makes this problematic.
EDIT: the other point that the article makes is that this professor's "controversial" views are held by upwards of 70% of the American public. The net result of applying this rule consistently would be that a strong majority of the American public cannot express their opinions on this subject because of a tiny vocal minority.
> Second, the people taking this idea to extremes are a vocal minority.
But that's the problem, it's the extreme vocal minority who are calling for (and succeeding in) cancellations of perfectly reasonable individuals who want to speak at universities. See Jordan Peterson, etc.
Some of the language in this article is a little breathless: it makes the claim that this instance is "quantitatively different," but the instance is the same kind we've seen before: a professional or academic having dislikeable views outside of their field.
It's also not clear whether this man (whose name I honestly can't remember after reading the article) has been "cancelled" in any meaningful sense: he now has an article in a leading liberal magazine defending him, written by another highly titled and positioned academic. Oh, and then he ended up speaking on behalf of MIT anyways, except not in a public venue where inviting him could be seen as an endorsement of him qua person.
Or Chelsea Manning who was disinvited from speaking at Harvard after pressure from the government
reply