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A university president makes a case against cowardice

newyorker.com

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Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#351

Post by rob_c »

mlindner wrote: post #275
necubi wrote: post #213

Oh hey, Wesleyan on HN! I’m an alumnus (matriculated a year or two after Roth became president). Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point). I’ve had a few opportunities to speak with Roth since the Gaza war started, and I’ve always found him particularly thoughtful about balancing freedom of expressio…

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I strongly agree, unfortunately they feel strongly differently after spending a lot of money to get on the courses. Frankly the law of the land is the latter, but this is one of the problems with cladding cultures and attitudes which needs addressing rather than glossing over...

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#352

Post by hayst4ck »

lurk2 wrote: post #331
hayst4ck wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two basic world views. One is based on order and rule. You have a leviathan, an absolute ruler, who imposes order on society. The other is one based on freedom and law/justice. A society based on affirmative mutual consent and a system orthogonal to power to handle disputes. Unfortunately, power determining the outcome of disputes is the default, and a system of law or justice cannot enforce itself without…

> The core founding principle of western society is solidarity via collective bargaining What is the basis of that assertion? If you go back as far as the Greeks, this only holds true if you focus on one specific city-state, and ignore that said city-state disenfranchised foreigners and legally permitted the ownership of slaves. Similar problems occur if we attribute western civilization to the Romans.

I am far from a historian, but my understanding is that the protestant reformation birthed the enlightenment by shifting people's idea of god as something to be interpreted by an authority structure (the church) to something that is interpreted internally. Is your relationship with god mediated by a church or a direct relationship with god? The reformation is more closely related to "westenrism" than the Greeks or Romans who laid some of the philosophical groundwork.

Out of the enlightenment we get John Locke who provided much of America's founding philosophy:

Locke argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence (reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation"), along with elements of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation) as necessary to achieve the goal of security through granting the state a monopoly of violence, whereby the government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to administer and enforce the law, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner—the condition in the state of nature.

My claim is that this is isomorphic to solidarity via collective bargaining when you account for the idea that the government being an impartial judge is not black and white but grey.

I think it's fair not to say that it is not the core founding principle. I think it's probably more correct to say that it's the theory of power that must be true to support human rights or ideas of freedom.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#355

Post by nosianu »

siliconc0w wrote: post #237

They could fight back with, "We will not accept students from politicians that support anti-education policies". Further they could kick out any students currently enrolled, "if they wrote a college essay promoting their anti-education values, we wouldn't have let them in - so they were clearly lying and we're just remedying that mistake"

> "We will not accept students from politicians that support anti-education policies"

Given how many stories there are about children seriously at odds with their parents about political issues, I don't think that is a good idea. At all.

Do you want to be judged by how your parents think or behave, or think that is acceptable?

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#356

Post by immibis »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #330
mlindner wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> Many countries completely ban non citizens from joining political protests, even ostensibly western countries. Which ones?

Germany bans pro-Palestine protests (officially they're still legal, but they've been arresting people since it began and they've just started deporting people for participating in completely legal protests) but I think that's a slightly different criterion than the one you asked for.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#357

Post by immibis »

jajko wrote: post #341
hellotheretoday wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Extremism on any side is bad, period. 'But they are worse' is sort of moot point and most people don't care about details, you simply lose normal audience and maybe gain some fringe.

Telling your employer you were a dick is extremism?

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#358

Post by immibis »

robertlagrant wrote: post #343
vkou wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One ban consists of the exercise of their right to... Not associate with you. The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.) It's odd that one ban operates within the constraints of freedom (the freedom to associate requires the exercise of the freedom to not associate), while the other does not. It's almost like there's a categorical distinction.…

> One ban consists of the exercise of their right to... Not associate with you. Many people have been fired / expelled / and many more silenced by those examples. If you can't tell the truth about your side (from how you're writing I assume you think in sides) then there's no point saying it. > The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.) I have…

I agree that at-will employment is a problem. So is a lack of safety nets. Do you know who supports at-will employment and a lack of safety nets?

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#359

Post by nosianu »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #138
carbocation wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wesleyan does not have a medical center and according to the NIH’s public reporting, they have under $2 million in NIH grants, compared to $600 million for Columbia. ( Edited from $400 million, which is the value cut. ) Wesleyan has a $250 million operating budget, so the (from what REPORTER indicates) $1.6 million in NIH funding represents 0.6% of their budget. In contrast, the $600 million in NIH funding to Columbi…

That makes a strong case for academic institutions not being substantially dependent on government research dollars.

It's nice to be against something, but incomplete to uselessness if you are leaving out your alternative suggestion(s). They will always be dependent on someone.

If you were to go the most direct route, you might want to let the actual "customers", the students, pay for it all, delayed until they have a job of course?

A different version of student loans, it's the university itself that lets them study for free to collect later. I have no idea how that would turn out, I'm sure there would be so many different cases, impossible for me to tell what this would mean and look like.

The biggest problem I can see right away is that it's probably going to increase inequality between institutions. Ever more sorting of the rich and the poor into different places, with huge disparity of funding. So, probably a terrible idea unless the goal is dystopia.

Which leads me back to my question: What is your alternative? I think the government is better than pretty much all others. Private donors are quite problematic to rely on, and you only get the 1% to have even more power over education.

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