The Hamas-Israel War Obliterated the Campus Microaggression – The Daily Beast
2023/12/11 Leave a comment
One of the better commentaries from a free speech advocate following the disastrous testimony to congress by Ivy League university presidents:
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A culture of free speech can lead to hurt feelings or a sense of unsafety. But it is not a “tool of the oppressor,” it is a righteous principle—like due process—that earns its strength by being applied to both the minority and majority, the popular and the unpopular, the righteous and the wrong.
Colleges can choose to do away with their overbroad speech codes and systems of discipline that lack due process or consider intent, nuance, and context. Or they can keep them, and defer to the feelings of the offended.
But what is clear is that you can’t have it both ways. For the authority to police speech to hold any legitimacy, it must be applied universally, and not excluded when the aggrieved are pro-Israel Jews. (Once again, there’s a word for that.)
I’ve argued this relentlessly over the years, but principled support for free speech is always under siege by the side that thinks the other has gone “too far”—so it’s worth repeating again: Do not demand fallible authorities to be the arbiters of acceptable discourse, because you will not always be favored by the authorities.
Many on the progressive left are shocked to find themselves and their allies labeled as unacceptably “problematic.” It’s a situation they could not previously conceive—but they should have. Real free speech advocates have been warning of this very situation the entire time.
The only way to ensure that your own ideas won’t be shut down when they are unpopular is to support—and demand—a culture of free speech, which does not include the right not to be offended.
Source: The Hamas-Israel War Obliterated the Campus Microaggression – The Daily Beast
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Multicultural Meanderings 