response to Colleges Need Speech Codes Because Their Students Are Still Children
When I was fifteen my high school banned bake sales to fight obesity. I and my friends thought this was stupid and disrespectful of high school students, who were mature enough to make healthy decisions for themselves and who benefitted from the space to make those informed choices now rather than, once we were adults, be responsible for our own groceries while having been shielded our whole lives from the temptation of a cupcake. We did some reading and found that banning bake sales did not improve student health. It was also devastating to high school student groups, who depended on bake sales for revenue. We scraped together hundreds of petition signatures, we wrote up a clumsy summary supporting our claims that it wouldn’t improve health outcomes, and we spoke to the Board of Education, who listened but didn’t change anything.
So we started holding ‘napkin sales’, in which we’d sell napkins for $1 and give away free cupcakes and donuts with purchase of a napkin.
I learned more from our failed campaign to overturn the bake-sale ban than I learned from all of the rest of high school.
This is the first of my many objections to Eric Posner’s appalling new article defending bans on free speech on college campuses. Why? Because students, who are emotionally still children, don’t need open and free debate - they start out knowing nothing, and they really just need to be informed by people who know better. Lest you think I’m strawmanning:
They think universities are treating students like children. And they are right. But they have also not considered that the justification for these policies may lie hidden in plain sight: that students are children. Not in terms of age, but in terms of maturity. Even in college, they must be protected like children while being prepared to be adults.
“Protected”, here, means “forbidden from voicing opinions that I deem to be hateful”. If you’re wondering how it protects anyone to face academic sanctions unless you hide or lie about your beliefs, don’t read on, the article never returns to that. It also takes a while to return to the ‘students are too immature to have rights’ argument, instead throwing out various other justifications for banning free speech and repeatedly, aggressively conflating ‘hearing opposing views’ and ‘being a victim of violence’.
Once again lest you think I’m strawmanning:
If students want to learn biology and art history in an environment where they needn’t worry about being offended or raped, why shouldn’t they?
BECAUSE THOSE TWO THINGS ARE NOT REMOTELY EQUIVALENT AND BASICALLY NONE OF THE SAME CONSIDERATIONS APPLY WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU.
This is 60% contrarianism because you’er clever and I like debating with you, 20% “Richard Posner is brilliant and I suspect I have more respect for him than you because I like his other work,” and 20% actual disagreement. That said:
1. You completely fail to engage with his market argument: to be fair, I think his market argument is terrible, we probably have similar reasons for thinking it’s terrible, I could try to make it a competing access needs point (or how liberal do you think the University of Alabama, last in the news for all-white fraternities, is?) but that’s obviously not what actually happens, let’s move on.
2. You attack over reality what he defends in principle. Richard Posner is a judge (and, frankly, one who plenty on both sides of the aisle is more deserving than Thomas is or was, and the only reason he isn’t on the SCOTUS is that he’s too old)(OK, I”ll stop the fangirling now)( But comparativelysuperlative, you know where I’m coming from). He is writing to defend the position that schools should legally be allowed to act in loco parentis. So the argument that schools are censoring only one side, while true, seems somewhat orthogonal to what he is saying.
3. I would love to see a writeup of your high school misadventures and tangles with the bureaucracy some day. No, this has no relevance to anything else.
4.(This is running on raw contrarianism) There’s no age where we should protect children from saying what they believe. But it’s much more reasonable to say “given the number of students who need this and are harmed, on this campus you can’t make homophobic comments”. This relies on a belief that people can be harmed by speech, but I don’t think we disagree here. It seems that you think that the harm of enforcing the speech codes, and the bad lesson censorship teaches, outweighs the harm caused to students from the types of speech that are banned. I suspect typical mind might apply here: I suspect you have an unusually high desire to be able to find and understand truth. I wish to note that I acknowledge that this does in fact also argue against you being able to set up a GSA.
The article is actually by Eric Posner, Richard Posner’s son. I was disappointed because I read a good article by Richard Posner the other day but I guess his son did not turn out as well :(
On the market analogy, I think I actually considered ideological diversity at some point in my college decision. I came to the conclusion that at the level of academic quality I’d be okay with there was basically no difference. I’m not sure if I believe this but if I were being contrarian I’d say that there are no conservative students to put pressure on colleges to be more accomodating of conservative viewpoints because college admissions discriminates against conservative students.
You make defending this article hard, you know. :)
doing my best ^_^