Improving MIT’s written commitment to freedom of expression

Is this really needed? I'm not trying to be obstinate. But in the north european country where I reside, while we have hate speech laws etc., my speech is protected by the law - both from the state and my employer (a university).

This commitment seems very bombastic for what feels like a work environment policy to me. Am I misunderstanding something cultural here?

EDIT: thx for the comments, it makes it more sense to me now.

Damn, this is actually a lot worse than it sounds. Rather than requiring an arguably hollow oath like the infamous UC loyalty oath from the 50s, they actually grade each applicant against “DEI” rubrics and eliminate applicants based on that. You don’t get a job without demonstrating tangible contributions to DEI in the past (no, treating everyone equally doesn’t count) and plans to promote it in the future. According to UC Davis math chair Abigail Thompson:[0]

> Nearly all University of California campuses require that job applicants submit a “contributions to diversity” statement as a part of their application. The campuses evaluate such statements using rubrics, a detailed scoring system. Several UC programs have used these diversity statements to screen out candidates early in the search process.

> A typical rubric from UC Berkeley[1] specifies that a statement that “describes only activities that are already the expectation of Berkeley faculty (mentoring, treating all students the same regardless of background, etc)” (italics mine) merits a score of 1–2 out of a possible 5 (1 worst and 5 best) in the second section of the rubric, the “track record for advancing diversity” category.

> The diversity “score” is becoming central in the hiring process. Hiring committees are being urged to start the review process by using officially provided rubrics to score the required diversity statements and to eliminate applicants who don’t achieve a scoring cut-off.

[0] https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf

[1] https://ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversit...

Glad I’m no longer in the academic job market…

Edit: And I wonder if and when these will start to appear in PhD applications, as PhD students are employees in a sense and often need to teach, too.

On #2,

I dont engage with others really to change the mind of the person I am engaging with. That is much to hard and a high bar.

No, I engage to ensure there is a dissenting view point read by observers to the debate, those people I can sway with my arguments, the people that simply read HN never commenting themselves. That is my target.

I want to ensure HN is not just an echo chamber of one political ideological take on a political topic

>>I bet comparably inflammatory articles from the woke side of the debate are flagged equally much.

That has not been my observation. HN is less Echo chambery than say Reddits political subs but there is still a clear political bent here

I think it is mostly a reasonable constraint. But I think it needs to be said that it is prudent to err on the side of freedom. Not prosecution of twitter comments and youtube videos. Everyone that was part of that should be deeply ashamed.

In my (backward) country a disturbance of the public order is illegal. Some old vices are hard to get rid off.

Some speech issues that come to mind which, I sometimes wonder, how they would have gone down today:

* The 6.001 porn

* The ghetto party

* The Reg Day porn (particularly Deep Throat, but many)

* The Visualizing Cultures display (with CSSA opposition)

* Some 10% of the day to day traffic on senior-house@, bexley-minus-fascists@, and ec-discuss@

Norms around speech have evolved a lot even as the fundamentals of ethics and laws on the electronic frontier have stayed the same. I often think that folks in the 80s and 90s enjoyed, for better or worse, considerable latitude in their speech which wouldn't fly today.