Thank you for bringing your clarity of thought and learned insights to a difficult (and sometimes discouraging) discussion. The nuance that you've introduced doesn't make me feel better about the college presidents and their failure to condemn calls for genocide - or, for that matter, the Penn, Harvard, and MIT trustees who together have communicated that it's fine to be unsure whether calling for genocide is evil but it's not acceptable to be unpopular with a large donor.
Nonetheless, I hadn't considered that public universities would be required to allow speech that private universities could bar. That is an interesting twist on the dialogue.
(This comment might end up being lengthy and it touches on multiple different points, so excuse the long-windedness)
This is somewhat tangential, but at least to me it seems that one of the main issues with Higher Education is that of Telos. People have ultimately forgotten that the "end" of education is the cultivation of eudamonia (human flourishing), of which virtue is one of the main constitutive parts. By contrast, much of modern education is purely economic or material (eg: one goes to a "good college" to get a "good job," etc.). I am myself as guilty of participating in this as anyone else, but it just seems to me that the role of the university in the modern day is somewhat contrary to its historical role, as now it (to a degree) exists as a more-or-less arbitrary sorting system.
It is my personal belief that if Higher Ed is going to survive, it will be through the model of classical education as put forward by institutions such as University of Dallas, the Thomas Aquinas Colleges, Christendom, etc, because these are the institutions that understand what education is for. I say this as an undergrad at WashU, so I might seem hypocritical, but the growth of classical education over the past ten years has been remarkable.
On the point of speech, the whole Harvard Affair is revealing that no one truly believes in "free speech," and instead people merely just disagree where the lines should be drawn. I don't mean this as a comment about the politics of the situation, but simply as an observation. For instance, until the mid-20th Century, the US (and the English-speaking world more broadly) simultaneously had some of the strictest obscenity laws on the planet, while also having the greatest protections on political speech. By contrast, if one were to go to Harvard, Berkley, et al. today, I do not think that there is a single action or word would be considered too obscene, though voicing opinions held by vast bipartisan majorities would probably get one cancelled.
In that sense, the Papish vs. University of Missouri seems like a ratchet and pawl. The case, which was decided in favor of a student had distributed an objectively obscene newspaper, seems to have been decided as such (and still is extant) for the purpose of preventing a public university from trying to do anything that might either slow or roll back the post-Soixante-Huit libertinism of universities, as that libertinism is viewed as politically necessary for "progress"(see Carl Trueman's chapters on Freud, Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich). By contrast, the voices in favor of the pre-(sexual) revolutionary order are ostracized and ridiculed as "backwards," and are ultimately forced out through various "soft-totalitarian" means (for instance, could someone opposed to contraception get tenure in our current world).
In the instance of Harvard, one can see the ratchet and pawl break down, as the administration and students either pushed too hard (or too early) for the revolutionary and insane Sartre/Fanon view that left-wing violence is justified if done in the name of "anti-Imperialism." Unlike on other matters, the public still holds to the pre-revolutionary position and thus saw that what the Harvard students were promoting is bonkers. Now the public is trying to apply force to mark the ratchet go back (to when to it was rightly considered indecent to call for genocide), and the pawl of Harvard is doing its best to prevent the ratchet from going back. Ultimately, too much force would break the pawl, and if Harvard continues defending the Hamas-apologia of its student body, the influence that Harvard has on the culture might end up broken or greatly diminished.
A similar example that comes to mind is the European Court of Human Rights (links below for further reference). The ECHR has ruled that it is protected speech for a feminist to climb naked onto the altar of a church and simulate an abortion while urinating during the middle of a church service (in front of congregants). By contrast, the ECHR routinely rules the opposite way on cases of hate-speech, with regard to (for example) Islamophobia. One should oppose intolerance of any stripe, but whether or not such intolerance should be protected speech, there is a striking disconnect between the ECHR declaring offensive and bigoted statements about Islam to be liable to criminal while allowing similarly offensive and bigoted statements about Christianity.
(As an aside, when the Carver Project resumes in the Spring, I will have more time to attend meetings and I think that Classical Education is an interesting subject that bridges political and religious lines)
I continue to enjoy your thoughtful and measured insight!
John,
Thank you for bringing your clarity of thought and learned insights to a difficult (and sometimes discouraging) discussion. The nuance that you've introduced doesn't make me feel better about the college presidents and their failure to condemn calls for genocide - or, for that matter, the Penn, Harvard, and MIT trustees who together have communicated that it's fine to be unsure whether calling for genocide is evil but it's not acceptable to be unpopular with a large donor.
Nonetheless, I hadn't considered that public universities would be required to allow speech that private universities could bar. That is an interesting twist on the dialogue.
(This comment might end up being lengthy and it touches on multiple different points, so excuse the long-windedness)
This is somewhat tangential, but at least to me it seems that one of the main issues with Higher Education is that of Telos. People have ultimately forgotten that the "end" of education is the cultivation of eudamonia (human flourishing), of which virtue is one of the main constitutive parts. By contrast, much of modern education is purely economic or material (eg: one goes to a "good college" to get a "good job," etc.). I am myself as guilty of participating in this as anyone else, but it just seems to me that the role of the university in the modern day is somewhat contrary to its historical role, as now it (to a degree) exists as a more-or-less arbitrary sorting system.
It is my personal belief that if Higher Ed is going to survive, it will be through the model of classical education as put forward by institutions such as University of Dallas, the Thomas Aquinas Colleges, Christendom, etc, because these are the institutions that understand what education is for. I say this as an undergrad at WashU, so I might seem hypocritical, but the growth of classical education over the past ten years has been remarkable.
On the point of speech, the whole Harvard Affair is revealing that no one truly believes in "free speech," and instead people merely just disagree where the lines should be drawn. I don't mean this as a comment about the politics of the situation, but simply as an observation. For instance, until the mid-20th Century, the US (and the English-speaking world more broadly) simultaneously had some of the strictest obscenity laws on the planet, while also having the greatest protections on political speech. By contrast, if one were to go to Harvard, Berkley, et al. today, I do not think that there is a single action or word would be considered too obscene, though voicing opinions held by vast bipartisan majorities would probably get one cancelled.
In that sense, the Papish vs. University of Missouri seems like a ratchet and pawl. The case, which was decided in favor of a student had distributed an objectively obscene newspaper, seems to have been decided as such (and still is extant) for the purpose of preventing a public university from trying to do anything that might either slow or roll back the post-Soixante-Huit libertinism of universities, as that libertinism is viewed as politically necessary for "progress"(see Carl Trueman's chapters on Freud, Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich). By contrast, the voices in favor of the pre-(sexual) revolutionary order are ostracized and ridiculed as "backwards," and are ultimately forced out through various "soft-totalitarian" means (for instance, could someone opposed to contraception get tenure in our current world).
In the instance of Harvard, one can see the ratchet and pawl break down, as the administration and students either pushed too hard (or too early) for the revolutionary and insane Sartre/Fanon view that left-wing violence is justified if done in the name of "anti-Imperialism." Unlike on other matters, the public still holds to the pre-revolutionary position and thus saw that what the Harvard students were promoting is bonkers. Now the public is trying to apply force to mark the ratchet go back (to when to it was rightly considered indecent to call for genocide), and the pawl of Harvard is doing its best to prevent the ratchet from going back. Ultimately, too much force would break the pawl, and if Harvard continues defending the Hamas-apologia of its student body, the influence that Harvard has on the culture might end up broken or greatly diminished.
A similar example that comes to mind is the European Court of Human Rights (links below for further reference). The ECHR has ruled that it is protected speech for a feminist to climb naked onto the altar of a church and simulate an abortion while urinating during the middle of a church service (in front of congregants). By contrast, the ECHR routinely rules the opposite way on cases of hate-speech, with regard to (for example) Islamophobia. One should oppose intolerance of any stripe, but whether or not such intolerance should be protected speech, there is a striking disconnect between the ECHR declaring offensive and bigoted statements about Islam to be liable to criminal while allowing similarly offensive and bigoted statements about Christianity.
(As an aside, when the Carver Project resumes in the Spring, I will have more time to attend meetings and I think that Classical Education is an interesting subject that bridges political and religious lines)
Links:
https://nypost.com/2022/10/25/court-overturns-sentence-of-feminist-who-simulated-aborting-jesus-on-catholic-altar-while-topless-urinating/
Public universities face more constitutional constraints in limiting discourse...yes, but it is happening everywhere.
https://medium.com/@samsoncournane5/slapped-for-telling-the-truth-9eb614089ba9