More Musings on Free Speech...

The Legal Questions: US courts have, over the years, limited what they refer to as unlawful speech, the famous yelling fire in a crowded theatre argument, though Holmes's argument has been trimmed back a bit in the succeeding years, is often cited as an example of legal limits on free speech. The Courts have also limited so called obscene speech (they know it when they see it), as when they effectively banned XXX movies from the marketplace during the Nixon years and after.

I am not sure what college safe spaces mean in the context of court decisions regarding free speech. The courts have held, for example, that the Westboro Baptist Church can claim, at the funerals of American soldiers, that God is killing American soldiers because the US has rebelled against their God, if they do it from, if memory serves, 50 feet away. Is that what one means by safe spaces? How does all this work in the brave new digital age? Do we need an MPAA like rating system for college classes and social media? Students this Youtube video I am about to show you is rated R so feel free to leave if you need to? With respect to YouTube we already kind of have one for Youtube: confirm your age.

Academic Freedom: Generally speaking, the, often arguably more dream than reality idea at the heart of universities, is that they are arenas for the debate of ideas be these ideas Marxist, functionalist, sociobiological, semiological, feminist, etc. Since ideas are, in part at least, products of environments they are, as such, rent through with ideas about equality, inequality, and so on. Scholars, again perhaps more in theory than in practise, try to put ideas into context, economic context, political context, cultural context, geographical context, and demographic context. That seems to me to be one thing that should at the heart of serious systematic and analytical study and at the heart of academic teaching.

Those on the right wing who complain about the lack of freedom of speech on campus really aren't, by the way, defenders of free speech. In the 1960s right wingers shouted down speakers whose ideological views they disagreed with effectively cancelling their speeches and making them pioneers in what is today called cancel culture. That they whinge and whine about those allegedly doing to them what they have done to others is absurdly amusing. What hypocritical right wingers are concerned with is their freedom of speech. They could care less about the freedom of speech of those on the "other side" and they generally do nothing to defend a "leftist" whose freedom of speech is abridged in universities and beyond.

Protected Speech: I do get that some forms of speech are probably not worth legal protections. Should the courts, for example, protect schoolyard ad hominem "speech", forms of speech that have become ever more prominent thanks, in part, to social media? Are claims, some of which seem to be made without grounding them in evidence, unlawful or obscene? Are they examples of bully boy ad hominems? As far as I know, bully by ad hominems have not been ruled unlawful or obscene by the courts.

The Neoliberalisation of Academia: One of the things I find fascinating about speech codes and safe spaces is their possible relationship to neoliberal capitalist notions that the customer is always right. Since the "Reagan Revolution" universities and colleges have been taken over by neoliberal managers whose training, often, is in management. They are managers not academics, in other words. Department of Education data indicates that administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009. This increase in the numbers of administrative personnel was, according to an analysis by Bloomberg, 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. An analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the California State University system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183, a 221 percent increase. To paraphrase a political proverb: A bureaucrat for every tenured faculty member.

As academia has been neoliberalised the managerial elite in academia have become obsessed about several things including keeping the customer satisfied and growing the customer base. As a result, assuring that the various targeted demographics are happy with what they are consuming has become one of the missions of academic managers along with assuring that they make lots of money. Is that what is going on with speech codes and safe places?