171–180 of 241 posts
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Did you read the article? From what I understand there’s not enough evidence to make this conclusion.
To make what conclusion? That some students believe that they are being harmed? That language exactly is what is used in the article. Why do you think it's not supported?
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Though it doesn't entirely answer your question, several philosophers of speech have identified no metaphysical difference between speech and non-speech, and some find the justifications for a law guaranteeing freedom of speech to be ultimately unfounded[0]. The issue for them is not whether speech causes harm (it does) but whether the harms are sufficient to allow some kind of regulation on speech; there is no evide…
Your premise is flawed. Unless it's a direct incitement to violence, speech does not cause harm.
Put it this way: if speech cannot cause any harm, then it would be almost pointless to have a law which guarantees freedom of speech.
Aside from all this, the first source I linked is a good paper that already goes over this distinction of harm which you've outlined and how baseless it is. As I have already said: there is no metaphysical difference between speech and non-speech actions:
>I argued that all speech is conduct, involving an agent, and all conduct, being intentional action, is expressive (of the motivating intention); that speech does not differ from other conduct in being context-dependent and subject to interpretation; that speech is a physical phenomenon, having physical effects on its listeners, effects which can be caused by the content of the speech; and that verbal assaults can be harmful in the same ways that assaults involving direct bodily contact are. For these (and other) reasons, I concluded that the attempt to assimilate freedom of speech to freedom of thought and in that way distinguish it from freedom of action fails.
I think there is something to the notion that there should be schools which are inclusive to students who would struggle under teachers like this. I just don't see why that school should be Duke University. I don't understand why the most elite schools seem to be among the most likely to decide that their students need protection from harm. Polarizing teachers seem like they should be right in an elite universities w…
If you struggle with a teacher who respectfully challenges your views, you don't belong at any college.
I believe higher education should be that PARTIALLY. However lots of students can get value from school without being put into a class which has difficult discussions about sensitive polarizing charged issues.
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>> microagressing them > Somehow I'm reminded of the debate over corporal punishment in schools, where pedagogical effectiveness takes a back seat to more primal ideas about punishment, conformity, and order. People used to be beaten for being left-handed, remember. Can you provide some context to justify comparing microagressions with beating people with sticks?
Difference between "agression" and "microagression" is one of scale - and they are at a very different scale, hence the "micro". But the intent to hurt is common. We can see even in this thread people talking about the need to "toughen" up students. Some people who think that any form of physical hurt would be completely unacceptable still seem to think that emotional hurt is completely fictional and it's totally OK…
I believe HN has both right and left leaning individuals, but I wonder if most people would condemn the practice of professors being ousted from schools for daring to challenge their students' "safe space" notions and microagressing them? This is not an isolated event and universities skew heavily in one direction politically. Is it universally agreeable that the end of healthy debate in college is a really, really b…
I think there is a large amount of misunderstanding (and misinformation) about what safe spaces and trigger warnings are actually all about. They have also been subject to a certain amount of .. inflation? But the core ideas are important. "Trigger" originally referred specifically to PTSD. There is a small number of students, such as women who have experienced sexual assault, for whom the subject is more than merely…
A healthy debate around PTSD might include listening to professionals that treats PTSD and follow their recommendations.
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>> microagressing them > Somehow I'm reminded of the debate over corporal punishment in schools, where pedagogical effectiveness takes a back seat to more primal ideas about punishment, conformity, and order. People used to be beaten for being left-handed, remember. Can you provide some context to justify comparing microagressions with beating people with sticks?
Though it doesn't entirely answer your question, several philosophers of speech have identified no metaphysical difference between speech and non-speech, and some find the justifications for a law guaranteeing freedom of speech to be ultimately unfounded[0]. The issue for them is not whether speech causes harm (it does) but whether the harms are sufficient to allow some kind of regulation on speech; there is no evide…
Terrifying
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While I agree and sympathize with Professor Charney's on one level, on another the real problem (IMHO) is the lack of legit opportunities in Higher Ed. In the corporate world people are fired or let go for silly reasons or non-reasons all the time: that's at-will employment. But for people in most fields they just find another job and move on; the problem here is there aren't many opportunities to teach at a prestigi…
>the problem here is there aren't many opportunities to teach at a prestigious university, at least not at anything resembling a living wage. I’m not so sure about this. I went to a school that is not very well known outside my state/neighboring states. Even though it was the 2nd largest school in Georgia at the time. The teacher teaching HTML/CSS in dreamweaver was making $95k. 2 professor getting PhDs in security w…
This "trigger warning" and "harm" thing.. I've been out of tertiary education too long to understand it. I'm sure it's not only American but it feels like an American crafted problem taken worldwide. Future leaders in minority communities need to be able to defend themselves but learning to do it by firing academics on negative feedback feels like the wrong lesson. I'd rather they did it in a real ballot box, not in…
You mentioned you're not american so please allow me as an american to educate you on how minorities and voting work. Minorities are systematically targeted in america to prevent voting. America, in fact, has a long and fairly recent history of attempting to prevent minories from voting or to make their votes literally worth less than others. The electoral college, for example, is a system that allows rural white communities to by and large have votes that are worth more than the votes of urbanites, which are often more diverse and have more people of color. Areas with significant people of color voting populations have historically had laws in place or new policies being pushed to make it more difficult to vote (see: voting is on a weekday, voting booths are hard to get to and lines are long due to lack of voting booth number, the disallowance of mail in voting or the outright throwing away of mail in votes.)
That is to say, this sentiment is all well and nice, and I agree with this sentiment. But in America it is unrealistic to say minorities should stop using what benefits they can and should continue operating under systems that devalue them.
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No, there is nothing specific in linked docs. It seems administration decided to get rid of him, appointed two faculty members to form committee and didn't followed their own bylaws. The tiny glimpse in the doc is that there were some low student ranking in 2018 and few people had negative experience interacting with him - but nothing specific. As per the doc, no one has made any formal complaints. It's however quite…
> I think it's a clever twist of the word "authority" There is overwhelming evidence that established science is correct, and the scientists are using objectively powerful techniques to establish truth. However, the mechanisms society at large uses to test and assimilate that knowledge are exactly the same as those used for religious authority. The major difference is that rituals invoking science tend to correlate m…