Everyone deserves to be well fed and not starve, but you’re not obligated to invite a self-proclaimed cannibal over for dinner and feed them their preferred meal.
Everyone deserves to speak their mind, but you’re not obligated to hand a fascist or disingenuous trolley a bullhorn and shove an audience in auditory range of their bigotry.
Edit: WTF? And an hour later…
No, just noting that, since this is a new term for most people, we should be prepared to see it used in many ways, both for and against good and evil. And of course, in the grey areas in between that do exist.
I’m not going to address the substance, or lack thereof, of your issues with Dreger in terms of trans activism. But she’s not a fringe scholar. She’s about as mainstream as it gets in the history of science and medicine.
I mean, you can say otherwise, but at that point you’re basically in Trump territory with respect to the degree of wanton disregard for the truth. (You know, the whole “Everybody agrees, I won the popular vote” / “Nobody reads the failing New York Times” schtick.) And as with Trump, who can say if you actually believe it or if you just thought it’d sound good.
You can hate her or her work, if you want. Maybe you’re right to. Maybe someday everyone will see how right you were all along. But for now, neither trans activism nor membership in the HSTM discipline are defined solely in terms of their proximity to you.
That’s kinda funny since didn’t Dreger complain about a student union in the UK trying to do that to Germaine Greer? It’s really silly how far these right wing types will go to defend free speech but not for their ideological opponents. Cute. lol
She lost any respect when she tried to dress up an unsubstantiated claim about gender desistance. Until she retracts her claims on that matter no scholar should give her the time of day. I don’t care how good her previous work is, if she’s willing to sacrifice every bit of integrity she had to attack a minority population with falsehoods then she doesn’t deserve a hearing.
Dreger was the subject of a target article in The American Journal of Bioethics for her fringey self-promotional shenanigans. She is absolutely a mainstream writer who presents herself as an academic edgelord and defender of the academy, but she supports a lot of evo-psych nonsense as well as fringe and discredited scientific sexism.
Prediction: Dreger will have a Sabrina Rubin Erdely-level demise in the fullness of time.
I’m suing! I know where I can get some real good lawyers!
It’s not intrinsically good or bad: it’s a decision about who you give a (literal) platform to.
In my view, choosing to exclude Martin Luther King would be obnoxious, and doing the same to Bull Connor would be laudable. In much the same way that organising a white supremacist rally is obnoxious, and organising the Great March on Washington wasn’t. But that’s because I’m a Quaker and a leftist. I’m sure that Liberty University isn’t going to invite Bernie Sanders to speak either, and that’s fine.
I think “no-platform” is perhaps more familiar to British persons:
Origin
1980s: from the No Platform policy of the UK National Union of Students (NUS), forbidding individuals identified as holding racist or fascist views from standing for election to NUS positions or speaking at NUS events. (link)
Interesting. At most places I know of, “academic freedom” is used by faculty to fight against being forced to use such packaged resources. The AAUP has even found it necessary to promulgate a policy recommendation on this.
Speakers who have been invited by the Wellesley Freedom Project include Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” a 2014 volume that David and Charles Koch, who have massive stakes in the energy sector, recommended to their donors.
When Epstein came to Wellesley in September 2015 to discuss his book, he launched the talk with a brief self-narrated video. “Without fossil fuels society slides backward,” Epstein said in the video. “It’s good that we use fossil fuels. Our world would be better if we used more.”
Wow.
And Wellesley shouldn’t have Koch-connected speakers. But it gets more difficult to determine exactly who to no-platform when the University in question is public.
Yes, it does. And especially in the US, where the first amendment applies. As a student union, we had no such problem: we were a voluntary association (albeit one governed by charity law) and we could make our own minds up.
Though, to be fair, I still think it would be moral to deny platforms to fascists in public universities; just not legal.
It means “attempted to prevent the opportunity to speak, but failed”.
It’s a standard term in discussions around hate speech. It’s been in use for about thirty years.
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/no-platform
Academic freedom seems to be like a union. It can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you choose to use it. It also probably differs in use at different institutions.
Some instructors will apply the “academic freedom” argument to control aesthetic aspects of their online courses, which doesn’t follow under their subject matter expertise and specifically falls under the expertise of the instructional designers. They’re apparently just used to scaring deans with the phrase so they think it’s a spell they can cast to get their way.
And the moment after a university uses that as an excuse for giving a pass for fascists, hit them with applications for talks on the benefits of ISIS, NAMBLA, pro-rape and cannibalism.
“But… those are illegal!”
“And genocide, ethnic-cleaning and slavery aren’t?”
On that last point, I hear the Cannibal Witch is looking for paid campus speaking gigs now that she lost her job at Jezebel. It is illegal under the First Amendment for a public university to deny her (or any other rando’s) free speech right to take over one of its lecture halls whenever it suits her, especially when sponsored by a student group.
As we speak, Bret Stephens is writing a supportive opinion piece in the NYT about how she’s just trying to pierce a liberal academic bubble that has a kneejerk negative reaction toward entrancing children and then consuming their tender and succulent flesh (an activity that many in the American Heartland find acceptable even if they don’t wear pointed hats and carry brooms themselves). His headline: “We are All the Cannibal Witch Now.”
That probably won’t work without some patsy on campus to invite her in. (Sort of like vampires that way.)
We need to find some despicable billionaire to fund a network of Fine Young Cannibals on Campus student front groups to open the door.
There’s already a chapter of a group like that on many college campuses. I believe they’re called Young Republicans. The Cannibal Witch’s unique and challenging views on population control and feeding the planet will fit right in with their Malthusian philosophy of life and economics.
Why are libruls so scared to hear her speak her truth? In a more just world she’d be a tenured professor despite her complete lack of peer-reviewed publications and a high school diploma.
