You could knock me over with a feather at this completely surprising news.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17644180/political-correctness-free-speech-liberal-data-georgetown

Data shows a surprising campus free speech problem: left-wingers being fired for their opinions

Does “political correctness” really crush conservative speech on campus? The data suggests no.

By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Aug 3, 2018, 9:30am EDT

The American college campus, we are led to believe, is a dangerous place: If you say what you really think, particularly as a conservative, a mob of young social justice warriors will come for your faculty position or invitation to speak on campus. Entire books and online magazines are premised on the idea that political correctness is sweeping the American university, threatening both higher education and the broader right to free speech.

But a brand new data analysis from Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project suggests that this “crisis” is more than a little overblown. There have been relatively few incidents of speech being squelched on college campuses, and there’s in fact limited evidence that conservatives are being unfairly targeted.

The Free Speech Project’s researchers have cataloged more than 90 incidents since 2016 that fit their criteria for a person’s free speech rights being threatened. Of those 90, about two-thirds took place on college campuses. These incidents range from a speaker being disinvited to a faculty member being fired over allegedly offensive comments to a student-run play being canceled over concerns it would offend.

The raw numbers here should already raise questions about the so-called political correctness epidemic. According to the Department of Education, there are 4,583 colleges and universities in the United States (including two- and four-year institutions). The fact that there were roughly only 60 incidents in the past two years suggests that free speech crises are extremely rare events and don’t define university life in the way that critics suggest.

Moreover, there’s a consistent pattern in the data when it comes to conservatives — one that tells a different story than you hear among free speech panickers.

“Most of the incidents where presumptively conservative speech has been interrupted or squelched in the last two or three years seem to involve the same few speakers: Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Ann Coulter ,” Sanford Ungar, the Free Speech Project’s director, writes. “In some instances, they seem to invite, and delight in, disruption.”

What Ungar is suggesting here is that the “campus free speech” crisis is somewhat manufactured. Conservative student groups invite speakers famous for offensive and racially charged speech — all of the above speakers fit that bill — in a deliberate attempt to provoke the campus left. In other words, they’re trolling. When students react by protesting or disrupting the event, the conservatives use it as proof that there’s real intolerance for conservative ideas.

The other key thing that emerges from the Georgetown data, according to Ungar, is that these protests and disruptions don’t just target the right. “Our data also include many incidents, generally less well-publicized, where lower-profile scholars, speakers, or students who could be considered to be on the left have been silenced or shut down,” he writes.

Examples include Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s commencement speech being canceled after receiving death threats for criticizing President Donald Trump and the president of Sonoma State University apologizing for allowing a black student to read a poem critical of police violence at commencement.

There’s little reason, according to Ungar, to conclude from any of this that conservative views are uniquely unwelcome on campus.

“One among many untested concepts,” he writes, “is whether the survey results would be different if conservative student groups, instead of repeatedly inviting campus visitors who have built a brand of disruption, were to sponsor serious intellectual dialogue with thinkers on the right.”

What free speech crisis?
Ungar notes that his data is preliminary and not necessarily a full or representative sample. So we can’t put too much weight on the Georgetown findings. However, it’s strikingly consistent with what other academics and free speech watchdogs have found when they looked into the issue.

Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist at Canada’s Acadia University, put together a database of all incidents where a professor was dismissed for political speech in the United States between 2015 and 2017. Sachs’s results, published by the left-libertarian Niskanen Institute, actually found that left-wing professors were more likely to be dismissed for their speech than conservative ones:

The pro-free speech Foundation for Individual Rights in Education keeps a database of speaker disinvitations from campuses. It finds only a handful of disinvitations — somewhere between 20 and 42 — in every year between 2011 and 2017. The highest single-year spike, from 21 in 2015 to 42 in 2016, is mostly the work of one provocateur launching an intentionally inflammatory college tour.

“11 of the 42 disinvitations were for a single speaker: Breitbart editor and right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos,” FIRE’s Alex Morey writes. “His controversial ‘Dangerous Faggot Tour’ traveled to colleges across the country this year and seemed to prompt a new report of attempted censorship in some form or another each week.”


That’s not to say that there aren’t disturbing incidents on campuses. Robby Soave, an editor at the libertarian magazine Reason (and a good personal friend of mine), has unearthed some troubling examples of students and faculty tossing free speech ideals to the side.

But I keep coming back to the denominator here: There are well over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. And multiple attempts to catalog free speech incidents on campus, from different sources, keep coming up with numbers in the dozens. And of those dozens, a fairly large percentage of the targets are liberals, and a fairly large percentage of the others were conservative speakers who seem to have come to campus with the intent of provoking students.

It’s possible that these few incidents have a broader chilling effect: that no one is willing to advance conservative positions on campus because of Milo Yiannopoulos’s chilly reception during his speaking tour. But the sheer existence of conservative campus publications across the country would strongly suggest that isn’t true. Conservative students and faculty have plenty of venues through which they can, and do, speak.

Some campus free speech critics, I suspect, aren’t operating in good faith. For them, the entire debate is a way to attack universities as hopelessly and dangerously liberal — to undermine higher education for nakedly partisan reasons.

Indeed, four Republican-controlled state governments have set up new rules for political speech in public universities in response to concerns about free speech. At least seven other state legislatures are considering doing the same, efforts that the New York Times reports are “funded in part by big-money Republican donors” in a “growing and well-organized campaign that has put academia squarely in the crosshairs of the American right.”

In Wisconsin, the strictest of these states, rules drafted by the state university’s board of regents allow students to be expelled if they are found to have disrupted the speech of other students three times.

Protecting free speech on campus by expelling students for their political activism: just what the First Amendment’s drafters intended.

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"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

this century who genuinely believe the "campus war on conservative free speech" narrative. But all types of normally smart, well-meaning people still fall for it, because the propaganda is just that omnipresent.

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12 play and 12 planets are enlighten for all the Aliens to Party and free those on the Sex Planet-maxxx

XBL: trkc21
Twitter: @tyrcasey

Presently, at the height of this dumb debate, I teach at a sub/ex-urban community college. It's always been bullshit. I recognize that this isn't the environment that's at the center of this made-up issue, but it's incredibly weird going to work with all my reactionary white students and realizing that there are people out there who think that:

a)they're being indoctrinated
b)that they're listening enough for indoctrination to be successful

I'm surrounding election day this year with Marx and liberation theology. So we'll see how that goes.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

or just syllabus in general

So far, I've only assigned any liberation theology in my very, very introductory class on how to study religion as an academic discipline. As the kind of spinal textbook, I use a book by Daniel Pals called "Nine Theories of Religion" that runs through pretty much all the usual suspects for classic theories of religion: Tylor and Frazer, Freud, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, William James, Eliade, Evans-Pritchard (though I skip him depending on how long the term is), and Geertz. Pals is a nice writer and does a good job of systematizing these fairly complex and often really, really long theories for religion's origin and how it informs (and is informed by) our relationship with society or our own twisted psyche or whatever.

With each of those theories, I try (often poorly) to pin one or two primary source texts from across different geographies and points in history and different religious and cultural traditions to each theorist. For instance, if we're talking about Durkheim's functionalist view of religion - that it is constructed to preserves and renews individual association with society - then I'll make them sort through some really specific and in-depth lists of structural rules, like have them focus on the back half of Exodus or the Laws of Manu. Or both. That works really well, so they can interrogate other questions like: if God(s) has a way that God wants us to live, do faith traditions prefer a general guideline like "be good" or, if you're already getting information from the divine anyhow, do you want it to be as specific as humanly possible? It's a silly question, but it helps kids who've never done this before start to engage the "why" of different types of religious texts.

In any case, when it comes to Marx, I like to go extremely on the nose and pin some works of liberation theology on there. I finished a summer term in June where I gave them this excerpt from Gustavo Gutierrez (http://cdn.theologicalstudies.net/31/31.2/31.2.1.pdf) and another one from James Cone that I can't seem to find in my utterly disorganized list of for-class PDFs. I choose Gutierrez because it's easier for me to assimilate that into a broader tradition like Catholicism. And I choose Cone because:

a)his message is formed around historical events they're more likely to be aware of, in terms of the civil rights movement

b)he's an incredibly aggressive writer, and that usually makes them pay attention

Again, those choices are more on the nose than I usually go for the religious theorists, but they make a nice avenue for examination for my doofuses because Marx is so clear in his antagonism: God doesn't exist. So they get to wrangle with Gutierrez and Cone, who see themselves to at least some degree as Marxists and gave us texts that are rich in the same language of class struggle but who also affirm something that Marx's materialism would have never permitted.

Gutierrez and Cone are nice too because I'm a medievalist by training and if I'm not careful then my readings will be 100% white guys. That'd be super easy for me but not a particularly good shape for the class that mostly exists to say: if you want to study religion as a past time or even as a job (and please don't do that because there's absolutely no money in it) then these are the ways that people typically do that and these are the texts they typically focus on.

If this hasn't bored you to tears, I'd happily send along a syllabus to your inbox. Just remember that it's a community college and that we're trying to start something from scratch. And if you've got any liberation theology recommendations besides the two that I've got (I love Leonardo Boff, but I thought he was too jargon-y for my students) then holler along. I'll try to track down the James Cone thing too.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

think of what you do as boring at all lol


I have a friend who's a theoretical physicist by training but enjoys studying religions as a hobby (strictly hobby, he is atheist).

So far, from what I've seen, he hasn't gotten into various theorists or theoretical underpinnings per se.. but he currently reads scriptures for fun and likes engaging in or listening to interfaith debates and forming his interrogations that way.

He's so into it, though, that he's thinking of pursuing a second doctorate to gain the training formally.. He likes the idea of being well-versed in thinking about the universe from a physical science perspective and different religious perspectives.

Any tips or advice to pass on? lol

>He's so into it, though, that he's thinking of pursuing a
>second doctorate to gain the training formally.. He likes the
>idea of being well-versed in thinking about the universe from
>a physical science perspective and different religious
>perspectives.
>
>Any tips or advice to pass on? lol

I mean, not specifically. I knew a few people in graduate school, even through doctoral work, who were studying because they were fascinated by the topic and wanted some expert help in directing their interest. That's a ton of time, effort, and money to devote to an intellectual hobby but everybody I knew who did that was cool as hell. Lot of people really successful in other fields who never got that humanities itch scratched but understood, as I'm sure your friend does given the physics background, the value in being taught. The idea of some pure autodidact is really romantic and appealing, but in real life nobody has time to read *every book* and a pretty unfortunate chunk of people who only ever do study like this on their own just end up creating their own little echo chamber. Having actual classes and an academic advisor that helps clarify which books are useful and which ones aren't for the questions you want to ask gives somebody the sort of framework I know I never could have given myself.


But already being in a career where there's a narrative arc to the direction of scholarship and an understanding that peer review is a good thing, your friend can maybe steer clear of a lot of mess and study in a more systematic way. School is a skill, after all. Graduate professors can really help with that, but so can a clear sense of why you're interested in studying something. You gave a "what" with study of scripture and interfaith dialogue and a "why" with respect of approaching study of the natural world from two wholly different angles. It's raw, but that's an actual research agenda that can be padded out (for instance - this is hardly the only way of doing that) by looking at thinkers in time periods when the distinction between looking at the universe in terms of faith and physical science was just starting to form. There's a wonderful book by a guy who just retired at Yale named Karsten Harries called "Infinity and Perspective" and it's about the development of these concepts in the Christian west during the late medieval period.

It might kind of give some form to your friend's way of looking at this stuff, and give him some primary source avenues to explore beyond scripture.

edit: I'd recommend that Pals from the previous book to pretty much anybody starting to study religion too. Religious scholarship has mostly moved on from those classic theories of religion, but there was something so direct about the purely functionalist thinkers that came from the comically overstated era of big ideas in the late 19th and early 20th century. They just came out and said "when you do religion, you're ACTUALLY doing ______" and supplied a simple, universal answer for the blank space. So Freud was resolving some internal neurosis and for Marx it was either class struggle or avoiding class struggle (opiate of the masses, and all) and for Durkheim it was preserving and strengthening the social order and so on and so forth. Those theories are way too universalized, but there's a lot to be learned from their overstatement. Like finding out what's too much, too far. And how there can be more difference within a category than between two categories.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

Take one isolated incident where a conservative or white person got wronged by a liberal or POC and make it out to be some kind of epidemic that must be stopped at all costs. And it works almost EVERY time. Then deny all evidence to the contrary that shows the real problem is them doing the same thing prolifically to the disenfranchised.

Will never not piss me off
The way they consistently see themselves and others like them as “good” flies in the face of all of history.

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“There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” -Albert Camus

the most effective propaganda machine in the history of the world + people seeing themselves as the hero of their story = recipe for disastrous delusions.

everything is done with the intent of working the refs. everything is in furtherance of the agenda. and people still treat them like they have genuine intentions.

even conservative 'news' outlets are bad faith propositions. they operate with the sole and express purpose of pushing their narratives. when was the last time a conservative outlet broke a big scoop? when was the last time they brought forth some major piece of investigative journalism? do they even have investigative journalism teams or do they just comment on and re-frame current news events?

'bias against conservatives' has been one of their most effective weapons. thats the bread and butter of their faux outrage machine.

they said facebook manual news reviewers were biased against conservative sites and suppressing their content. so facebook booted their entire manual review team and relied strictly on their algorithm. cue all the fake news and conspiracy sites being automatically promoted more than legit news sites on the fb 'trending' section. and we see how that turned out.

then when facebook implemented a new policy to de-prioritize news publishers in peoples feed, it hammered legit smaller news outlets and fox news gained the most from the move in terms of engagements. but it did dramatically decrease traffic to sites like breitbart and the conservative fake news sites. so the 'trending' basically became mostly legit msm sites (which repubs called liberal media) and fox news. so repubs were still mad that their cult were being exposed to real news. so they pressured facebook into shutting down the 'trending' section altogether lol. for no real damn reason.

now theyre holding congressional inquiries into social media bias against conservatives based on people like alex jones and diamond and silk. they even have social media sites handing over data to trump administration officials and conservative think tanks to examine for 'bias'. of course the execs at these social media sites know its bullshit but we all know how this shit is gonna turn out.

instead of trying to win the game of ideas they just constantly rig the rules of the game in their favor. and theyve pretty much been able to do it without any resistance.

>even conservative 'news' outlets are bad faith propositions.
>they operate with the sole and express purpose of pushing
>their narratives. when was the last time a conservative
>outlet broke a big scoop? when was the last time they brought
>forth some major piece of investigative journalism? do they
>even have investigative journalism teams or do they just
>comment on and re-frame current news events?

Cause usually the breaking news is something shitty Repugnantcans did or are trying to do so they gotta spend time figuring out how best to spin it before they can report on it. Hence all those juxtapositions we see/talk about of CNN headlines vs. Faux News headlines during the same news cycle, i.e.:

CNN:
"BREAKING NEWS: PRES. TRUMP MURDERED AN IMMIGRANT CHILD DURING FIRST VISIT TO BORDER"

FOX:
"REPORT: BARACK OBAMA ONCE LEFT THE TOILET SEAT UP IN THE WHITE HOUSE"

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"This (and every, actually) conversation needs more Chesterton and less Mike Francesa." - Walleye