“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.” --Richard M. Rorty (1931-2007), Left-wing philosophy professor

The Narrative and Political Correctness


“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.” -George Orwell

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

CAMPUS CENSORSHIP & CULTURAL WARFARE

For over a generation, shocking cases of censorship at America's colleges and universities have taught students the wrong lessons about living in a free society. This video explains how higher education fails to teach its students to become critical thinkers by supercharging ideological divisions, promoting groupthink, and encouraging an unscholarly certainty about complex issues.



The video is drawn (no pun intended) from Unlearning Liberty, a book by Greg Lukianoff of FIRE.  In it, Lukianoff walks readers through the life of a modern-day college student, from orientation to the end of freshman year. Through this lens, he describes startling violations of free speech rights: 

  • a student in Indiana punished for publicly reading a book
  • a student in Georgia expelled for a pro-environment collage he posted on Facebook
  • students at Yale banned from putting an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote on a t-shirt
  • students across the country banished to tiny “free speech zones.” 

But Lukianoff goes further, demonstrating how this culture of censorship is bleeding into the larger society. As he explores public controversies involving Juan Williams, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, and Larry Summers, along with campus uproars in which Dave Barry and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show played a role, Lukianoff paints a stark picture of our ability as a nation to rationally discuss important issues. Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate reveals how the intolerance for dissent and debate on today’s campus threatens the freedom of every citizen—and makes us all just a little bit dumber.

 
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  1. Speaking of bleeding into society, the following was an article in the latest edition of "Michigan Alumnus". This kind of drivel is not unique to this publication; and, when you consider it is dispersed to the largest body of living alumni of any American University, the content is indeed bleeding out into the population and not just confined to current students.

    ***Battling Misinformation: Do Not Repeat!

    Childhood vaccines do not cause autism.Barack Obama was born in the United States. Global warming is confirmed by science. And yet, many people believe claims to the contrary.

    “Misinformation stays in memory and continues to influence our thinking, even if we correctly recall that it is mistaken,” said Colleen Seifert, a U-M psychology professor who is co-author of a new study on the phenomenon. “If the topic is not very important to you, or you have other things on your mind, you are more likely to make use of misinformation. Most importantly, if the information fits with your prior beliefs, and makes a coherent story, you are more likely to use it even though you are aware that it’s incorrect.”

    Moreover, attempts to correct misinformation often spread the false beliefs even further. Corrections often repeat the false information when explaining why it’s wrong, and hearing it again makes it more familiar and more likely to be accepted.

    “To be effective, corrections need to tell people what’s true without repeating all the stuff that’s wrong,” said Norbert Schwarz, another co-author and a U-M professor of psychology and marketing.

    The research, which included coauthors from the University of Western Australia and University of Queensland, offer some strategies for setting the record straight:

    • Provide people with a narrative that replaces the gap left by false information.

    • Focus on the facts you want to highlight, rather than the myths.

    • Make sure that the information you want people to take away is simple and brief.

    • Consider your audience and the beliefs they are likely to hold.

    • Strengthen your message through repetition.***

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