In response to my prior post on the attempted suppression of the Stanford Daily ad noting the contrast between Israeli and Palestinian reactions to 9/11, Matthew Yglesias writes:It seems to me that folks on the right have an unhealthy obsession with the trivial and rarely-successful antics of some relatively small groups of college student agitors. When I was, you know, actually in college I paid a certain amount of attention to this kind of thing, at least when it happened on our campus, but it's really not of earth-shattering significance, especially when the complainers are failing to get speech restrictions put in place. The gang at the Volokh Conspiracy gets a partial exemption from this criticism since they actually work at universities, but still. The kids nowadays are, well, a bit immature, but that's just how it goes.I think this is a point that deserves a response. It's not just "the kids" being a "bit immature." The leading force trying to get the Daily to stifle the ad in question was no immature kid, but Mohammed Esam, "a mechanical engineering graduate student and president of the Islamic Society of Stanford University." Islamic and Arab student societies throughout the U.S. are engaged in an organized effort to have any pro-Israel speech be deemed racist; after all, the U.N. says "Zionism is Racism." Moreover, and more generally, many attempts at speech repression on university campuses have the support and/or acquiescence of faculty and administrators, including at public universities. Indeed, as far as I can tell, the average speech code at a public university is pushed by university bureaucrats and faculty activists, not by students. But my ultimate concern is that the radical Left would like to bring to society as a whole the kind of authoritarianism they are constantly trying to, and sometimes succeeding in, bringing to universities. Universities are their friendliest turf, but the ultimate goal, to be achieved through "harassment" law, hate speech rules, and changes in First Amendment jurisprudence, is to have the government enforce PCism throughout society. It's already happening in Canada, where, for example, it's become illegal to place an advertisement in the newspaper quoting biblical passages condemning homosexual acts, or severely criticizing Islam. Things started slowly in Canada, where just over a decade ago the Supreme Court held first that Holocaust denial and then "degrading" pornography could be punished criminally. By 2003, Robert Martin, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Western Ontario, commented that he increasingly thinks that ?Canada now is a totalitarian theocracy. I see this as a country ruled today by what I would describe as a secular state religion [of political correctness]. Anything that is regarded as heresy or blasphemy is not tolerated.? [The Left has also been victimized by the anti-pornography and anti-hate speech rules in Canada that the Left itself has supported, but that's the subject for another post] So I don't see the attempted supression of speech on campuses as mere sophomoric antics, but as a step in the authoritarian radical Left's broader agenda. Anyway, "unhealthy obsession"? Hardly. What I would really like is for nonauthoritarian folks on the left, including Yglesias, to take this stuff more seriously. The main reason that the PC police sometimes succeed at universities is that left-liberals too often see the authoritarian elements on the far Left as merely overenthusastic liberals, instead of as the true opponents of liberalism that they are. [By the way, I should emphasize that a s a good liberal in the broad sense, I support the right of private universities to establish any speech codes they desire, so long as they give students and faculty fair warning of what may or may not be said, and so long as they are not doing so in response to government regulations or potential lawsuits under "harassment" law.] -- Posted by David Bernstein to The Volokh Conspiracy at 11/9/2003 11:14:38 PM Powered by Blogger Pro |
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