The right to speak freely is not the same as the right to rob others of their voices.I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Whatever happened to such commonplace beliefs?
Understanding this argument requires an ability to detect and follow nuance, but nuance has largely been dismissed from the debates about speech raging on college campuses. Absolutist postures and the binary reign supreme. You are pro- or anti-, radical or fascist, angel or demon. Even small differences of opinion are seized on and characterized as moral and intellectual failures, unacceptable thought crimes that cancel out anything else you might say.
No one should have to pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life — along with civic life — dies without the free exchange of ideas.
In the face of intimidation, educators must speak up, not shut down. Ours is a position of unique responsibility: We teach people not what to think, but how to think.
Realizing and accepting this has made me — an eminently replaceable, untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD — realize that no matter the precariousness of my situation, I have a responsibility to model the appreciation of difference and care of thought I try to foster in my students.
If I, like so many colleagues nationwide, am afraid to say what I think, am I not complicit in the problem?
...Nuance and careful reasoning are not the tools of the oppressor, meant to deceive and gaslight and undermine and distract. On the contrary: These tools can help prove what those who use them think — or even what they feel — to be true. They make arguments more, not less, convincing, using objective evidence to make a point rather than relying on the persuasive power of a subjective feeling.
Sunday, October 29, 2017
This Professor Gets It
I wish there were more like this one:
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When you consider they are removing George Washington from a church he helped build, attacking Lincoln's statue based on an erroneous report he owned slave and that too many college students believe internet rumors over reported fact, is it any wonder we're in this situation. And I don't think it's by accident. At some level there is a coordinated effort to erase our history by imposing modern standards on people dead 200 years. Absolutism is indeed the methodology here where even a taint of "sin" according to the tribal norms gets one ostracized and condemned. Ironically that idea of one drop of black blood makes one black held by racists has now been turned on its head where it is fashionable in some places to denigrate any accomplishment made by someone who appears to be of European ancestry. First Lee, then Washington, then Jefferson, then Lincoln and before you know it the history has been supplanted by an entirely made up narrative made up to massage the egos and agenda of the Left. And do you know where they do this with alarming regularity? In nations where tyranny is allowed to overwhelm personal freedoms for the "greater good" which is more often than not a means of enrich those in power.
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