Campus deplatformings hit record high

birdsongs

It's not deplatforming if campuses don't want to hear someone speak. This seems like a bonkers term to use. 200 deplatforms in a year? (There were 75 in 2003, the 30 year trend is gentle at best.) There's almost 6000 higher education institutions in the US. This is fabricated outrage.

rch

FIRE does excellent work.

arjie

Academic campuses are just a specific battleground for this sort of thing with a highly motivatable group of people with sufficient time. To be honest, campus speakers are rarely of value. Most content is better transmitted through text than through speech. The latter has substantially more density per unit time and allows for per-reader sophistication with modern interrogation tools. The reason for campus speakers falling out of favour so that only unthreatening ones are accepted is perhaps troubling but the outcome isn’t so bad. The utility of a college is primarily certification because pedagogy for a motivated learner is superior with an LLM. So few who desire to learn will be impeded by this process and few who wish to be certified will either. This society being a democratic republic, there is quite some risk in the sort of purity seeking combined with a weakness against external nations becoming the cultural norm, but so be it. The tribe of Mankind is an evolving creature and if the democratic republic faction burns itself and the autocracy does not then that’s as much natural selection as melanin adaptation in Africa.

nixon_why69

I'm very much for free speech but FIRE here is cataloging "attempts to oppose invited guest speeches" at a time where actual students have been expelled or sent to guantanamo for political speech. Have some perspective.

ceejayoz

Article: > Almost all of the deplatforming attempts involving politicians or government appointees since 2023 have come from the right of the expression. First comment: > Democrats are Fascists, they hate free speech, hate private property and individual rights, support massive wealth redistribution, and they always have. Sigh.

datsci_est_2015

I take this as a stronger signal that too many people with shitty opinions have a microphone these days, and they make it their entire career to "tour" and manufacture outrage. We're really complaining that students objected to Tim Pool speaking on their campus? Freedom from association can be as strong of an argument as freedom of expression. Negative / positive rights and all that. Hopefully we're hitting peak podcast / ragebait culture and Gen Alpha will call out their elder Gen Z cohort as "cringe" for listening to so many low-signal podcasts.

aqme28

I cannot be bothered to care about this kind of thing. A student group submitted a proposal that an event be canceled but the proposal didn't succeed? That sounds like something that happens a normal democratic society. How is that newsworthy in a world where we have actual students being expelled for partaking in protests or e.g. arrested for an op-ed in the student paper.

jswelker

I worked at a regional state uni in middle of nowhere Midwest for 10 years. A non negligible number of ultra right provocateurs would come to campus and say hateful culture wars shit for no purpose but to "own the libs" and post about it on social media. The fact that some students complain about it is not surprising -- it's pretty much the intended effect. And I guess now that goes on a list so that right wing groups can fundraise off of it.