I've been thinking about the piece since I read it and the things that really stick with me are:
1) Putting the Emma Camp column in a category with, "Port Huron Statement in 1962 and William F. Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom's 1960 Sharon Statement. " as a way of demonstrating the historical linage.
2) Noting that frequently the argument is made as a corrective, "the academy has drifted away from its mission" but satisfying the argument would require building entirely new practices.
3) He ends up defending the academy in various ways, but not merely out of loyalty to the institution; I think he's correct to say that critics have a point (and have always had a point), but that doesn't mean that there's any simple or agreed on way to correct the concerns.
Surprisingly, I thought, David French also had a reasonably commentary on the debate, thought far less ambitious than Burke's.
First, having experienced both state action against free speech--such as a local zoning board ordering the end of youth worship services on our church property--and peer shaming, including shout-downs in class during law school, I know that state censorship is much worse.
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As FIRE notes, similar bills have been introduced in nine other states as well. They're generally advanced by Republican legislators who are seeking to suppress instruction of concepts purportedly related to critical race theory in public education. While legislators have wide latitude to regulate the speech and curriculum of public K-12 teachers, the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that the First Amendment extends broad protections in public universities.
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None of that means that students should keep their thoughts to themselves. Many students have personal experiences that are directly relevant in matters like race and gender. Moreover, testing your ideas in meaningful debate is a powerful learning tool. But curiosity and humility go a long way toward tempering our worst instincts.
The formula for free speech on campus is simple to state, but difficult to execute. Always defend students and professors against unlawful state censorship. Use your voice to debate and discuss, not to dominate or intimidate. Be slow to take offense and quick to extend grace.
I think the two pieces go together, Burke is trying to build to a broader framework to contextualize the tensions that David French acknowledges.
Wow, I wouldn't have thought a zoning board would delve that intrusively into what a church does. At least, not if they're Christian.
Is there any way in which my life will be better if I figure out who Emma Camp is?
Is there any way in which my life will be better if I figure out who Emma Camp is?
No, but you don't need to know to make sense of the piece in the OP.
4: You would get to experience the joy of participation in this discussion.
Ok, I will tell you. Emma Camp is an University of Virginia undergraduate. The NYT published an editorial by her lamenting the lack of free debate in her college experience.
You weren't supposed to tell me. Now I'll have trouble forgetting.
I like the point about "incuriousness." Perhaps this is my evangelical upbringing, but I do think there's a large strain of pro-"debate" opinion which is based on hostility to learning. You're just there to proclaim the truths you already know and rout the enemy, not to actually learn anything. Obviously that's not how education should function.
Creationists love "debate" because debating tricks are their only hope when all their ideas are wrong.
That was one of the things that struck me with covid. You'd see people using trying to force you (or 'the media') to engage with the same argument again and again. Keeping to your point is, I'm told, one of the things they teach kids in debate. But when one person has a real job and the other is a paid troll, you're just trying to force a win through exhaustion.
Anyway Camp is going to have NYTimes column before she's 40, so we're going to have to get used to this nonsense.
(That is a full-time position, obviously she's already had one column.)
And I'm an expert on that, because I correctly predicted that about Ross when he was 21.
I predicted that he'd fuck things up with Rachel.
It's got to be really hard to be just enough of an asshole that you are accepted as a conservative leader but not so much of an asshole that nobody who isn't a conservative will talk to you. But I don't see any reason to make it easier.
11-12 captures what I see as the substantive point here. Donald Trump is objectively correct in his views, because he became president of the United States. Camp is also correct, because she was published in the New York Times.
Truth is useful only to the extent that it serves us.
Haven't read Burke yet, so I'm sure he covers this, but Camp's argument is that there is no conservative idea that should elicit widespread disapproval. It's ridiculous.
17: Other people have made that point directly, here is what Burke says.
Which leads to point #3 that this genre of attack on conformism never really addresses, all the way back to its earliest instantiations, which is after we're no longer conformist within the university, how shall we live together in our new disagreement-defined institutions? Because all writers in this genre, from SDS to Emma Camp, set themselves against what they take to be intolerable and intolerant constraints, and thus cannot project themselves into the collective action problems of the university that might emerge on the other side of those constraints. . . . Because what has tended to happen in each successive turn of the wheel is that those who railed against what they imagined to be constraints end up articulating constraints once space is made for their views--both because they were arguing from an ultimately parochial position that defined their views (and their views only) as the non-conforming absence from existing culture and because they know full well that some constraints arise from universities having other purposes than just being soap boxes.
Is this where one of those Russian-prison things is needed? Like if someone asks for vigorous debate, make the debate about why they need to be an asshole.
The Russian-prison thread was kind of long, so I may have missed the nuance. But something like that.
I don't mean to be glib, but isn't "I had to self-censor" just a pretty basic part of being a grown-up? I mean, yes, it is hard to create spaces in classrooms that admit of sound debate, but Christ the bar keeps moving. Is she getting bad grades? Being tormented? Expelled? No? Teacher just isn't letting her set the terms of the class discussion and doing the "let's bracket this for now?" move so the rest of the class can learn something? Debate kids, man.
21: On some level it's the "there's somebody wrong on the internet thing," but IRL. Like, there's a class discussion, there's some groupthink going on, and the dissenting student has to choose between saying something and getting shit on or holding their tongue despite the wrongness.
And sometimes that absolutely is what being a grown-up is, but I totally get the frustration of being in a classroom, ostensibly dedicated, not to "debate", but to knowledge and thinking things through, but nobody's supposed to speak up against a bad consensus.
Now, the conservatives who mostly do this complaining are not, as a rule, on the right side of these matters, but I'm sure there are times that they are, but know that it's still not worth correcting.
To be clear, I never experienced anything like this in college--I wasn't in classrooms where those kinds of discussion were going on (most of my seminars were architecture or Western Canon lit). I'm extrapolating from online discussion and from talking with Iris (who's very politically engaged and absolutely comes home with some less-than-factual takes that are extremely righteous).
Ultimately I don't much care, and obviously the real threats to free speech are from the right, but I do think there's a tendency on the left to deny that these things happen at all rather than to admit that sometimes they do and it's bad.
I'm not feeling charitable. And it's possible that she experienced bad classroom management continually (it wouldn't take much to confirm to her that they weren't conservative.) It's hard, and professors don't get training in it, and it takes a lot of skill to manage hot button issues where students are coming in with different priors and different levels of knowledge. (I teach on sex & gender in a very red state where the dominant religion has Views on gender roles. ) Groupthink is also a thing. College students, especially those at residential colleges, conform socially. And when it's appropriate for there to be a debate, then it should be on the professor to help make the minority case (whatever it is) clearly and articulately.
But.. not all classes are debates! Not all debates are fruitful. And "let's push this to after class" has to happen sometimes. And the bit with the poster on the dorm? The rule was dumb, but it was content-neutral, and that... makes it not a free speech issue? It's not conservative to think that there are never any restrictions on speech. It's just immature.
And sometimes a religious conservative kid meets a gay person/person of color/woman with a doctorate/mom with a professional career/coffee drinker* for the first time in college and learns that what they'd been told and what was appropriate to assert at home/church/etc isn't thought of as up for debate anywhere else. That's a different kind of education.
*possibly overly local.
Educator-femininity reminds me that one of my grade school teachers supposedly used to walk into school every morning with a lit cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. But the parents complained and preserve the reputation of the school, she was required to smoke her cigarette indoors in the teachers' lounge, right next to the room where the kids would breath while they looked at books.
The Burke piece is great, but I'm heartbroken that no one in the discussion around this random op-ed has yet dismissed the entire subject with "Academic self-censorship is so nasty because the stakes are so low." How can this be so hard? Have people gotten less lazy with rhetoric?
Coffee is great, though! Hey heebie, have you tried coffee? IT'S GREAT. MMMM, COFFEE.
But really, it's peculiar that the view of academia from various sides, including the "cancel culture" panic side, is now that the stakes are so high. That does seem like a paradigm shift.
23: this thread does a good job of making that argument, but part of what I appreciate about the Burke piece is that it isn't tied too strongly to the specific case, and is more general: https://mobile.twitter.com/ijbailey/status/1501924336705355778
26: Defector did a rundown on the staff coffee drinking habits, and I was shook to discover that Albert Burneko drinks a coffee mug full of espresso every morning.
To my surprise, I have become coffee-dependent on work days. I don't drink it on the weekends or on vacation, because my family doesn't mind so much if I am slow.
Or if they do mind, I'm too far out of it to notice.
How do you not drink coffee two days a week without headaches?
I don't mean like as a point of etiquette. But if I don't have at least two cups of coffee, I'll have a headache by noon.
I've ended up having an odd semi-conclusion to the whole coffee-stimulants-headaches dilemma, which I was considering turning into its own post.
33: I can make it with just one.
I've ended up having an odd semi-conclusion to the whole coffee-stimulants-headaches dilemma, which I was considering turning into its own post.
Please do! I'm very curious.
I hadn't realized that Tim Burke had gone Substack. You could organize a history of blogging around the different platforms he's used over the years. Though I guess he never did Movable Type or Blogger.
Anyway, I, too, pine for days when students vigorously debate the degree to which they agree with my opinions, which are unassailable, and where the only real question is how long it will take for the applause to trail off after every impromptu speech I give.
32: My wife is hooked on Diet Coke, and caffeine withdrawal headaches are a real problem for her. That's never been an issue for me at all. I'm just less with-it without my morning dose.
||The completely novel sex act has hit the big time (read the replies): https://twitter.com/maggieethornton/status/1503478731154857988?s=21 |>
They're going to ruin Christmas music.
41: That triggers my "Dear Abby letters written by Yalies" alarm. Or, to be more contemporary, *chan is still a thing. Or, keep in mind that lots of entries on Urban Dictionary are jokes.