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A university president makes a case against cowardice

newyorker.com

471–480 of 934 posts

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#471
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took me all of 5 seconds to find an example. Tattoos are a form of protected speech: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-041258/https://www.theatlantic...

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You have no intention of having a discussion in good faith. You're going to use whatbaoutisms, pedantry, and goalpost moving. Kindly stfu

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#472

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If there's no due process for everyone, that distinction literally does not matter in the slightest!

Dozens of citizens could have been sent into slave labor for all we know, and no judge has been able to provide the constitutionally mandated oversight. It has been upheld many times and for hundreds of years that the Due Process clause applies to non-citizens for this reason.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#473
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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The government may be within its legal rights. As an expression of values however it's hard not to see the expulsion of these students as petty politicalized retaliation. The sort of thing you would see in an electoral autocracy as opposed to a liberal democracy.

If you're a guest, act like a guest. Anti-Israel protests are by extension a protest against the US foreign policy, so yeah... You protest your host in a violent and disruptive manner, you probably shouldn't have been allowed in to begin with.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#474
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the past decade is any indication, nothing has stopped the long list of cancelled right wing grifters, racists, and various other flavors of fools and bigots from finding gainful employment and signal boosting and platforming among like-minded people who do exercise their right to associate with them, despite their behavior. For (allegedly) being so persecuted and silenced, it's weird how so many of them have so m…

In the past decade, the left got so cancel-happy that "cancellation" by the left-wing activist crowd lost pretty much all of its weight among anyone who isn't an ideologue. In 2016-2018, if you got canceled, you would have a very hard time finding any white-collar job afterward.

Well what did they do to get called out?

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#475
Columbia has an endowment that stands (pre- Liberation Day) at 15 billion dollars.

They kowtowed to some of the militant Zionist interests involved in that endowment in order to attain a fractionally higher return, and betrayed their students.

They kowtowed to the fascist administration on the grounds that it was threatening 400 million dollars in grants, and betrayed their students to the point of facilitating a project to unilaterally deport many of them based on Constitutionally protected quasi-private speech.

At this point I don't think they want or deserve to be called a university. Let's go with "Tax-exempt investment fund".

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#476
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You really don't see a problem with this? I consider myself more on the left, but this practice has always seemed highly antithetical to liberal values to me.

If somebody in their off hours says something assinine, and telling (some might call that "snitching to") their employer in a public forum like Twitter (in a clear attempt to get a social media frenzy going to ultimately get them fired) is a good thing, then wouldn't it logically follow that an employer should not only be permitted but actively encouraged to monitor employees 100% of the time so they can fire them if they ever step out of the corporate line? Amazon does this to many low-level employees just on-the-job and most people think that's creepy and unfair, I can't imagine extending that to off-hours as well. At a minimum wouldn't it follow that it would be great for employers to set up a snitch line so anybody could (even anonymously) call to make reports on people? Is that a world you'd want to live in?

On the next line, let's say the person is fired from their job for a gross tweet. Should they be able to get a new job after that? If so, how does the previous history get erased so the prospective new employers don't see it and avoid them (this very type of thing is by the way, a huge problem for formerly incarcerated people especially felons). Add in that there was no trial, no standard of evidence, no due process, just a swinging axe from an executioner. Should this person (and often their families) just be relegated to extreme poverty the rest of their lives? Blacklisted from employment like the communists in Hollywood were?

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#477
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember all those people who are resentful (of course that word) towards degree-holders because they wish they had one themselves? Me neither. That’s a they-hate-me-cause’-they-ain’t-me kind of logic.[1] True othering comes from people living in different worlds and hating the other person’s world. [1] I did not read the the article but I’ve read this argument in a Graeber article.

I don't think you're necessarily drawing the right conclusion from what the GP said. It seems more likely to me that non-degree-holders aren't resentful about not having a degree, but are resentful that white collar work more or less requires a degree these days. It wasn't always that way; degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work. Why has that shifted? Can we blame the university system and their "ma…

> Can we blame the university system and their "marketing" that has pushed a degree as the One True Way of leaving the working class?

I’m not sure Universities are to blame for this so much as lazy ass HR departments looking for an easy filter.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#478
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government may be within its legal rights. As an expression of values however it's hard not to see the expulsion of these students as petty politicalized retaliation. The sort of thing you would see in an electoral autocracy as opposed to a liberal democracy.

If you're a guest, act like a guest. Anti-Israel protests are by extension a protest against the US foreign policy, so yeah... You protest your host in a violent and disruptive manner, you probably shouldn't have been allowed in to begin with.

Not in my America.

I welcome any and all persons from anywhere in the world if they want to come and protest the American war machine

Our forefathers would be absolutely ashamed at what you just said. Protesting a totalitarian government that lacks proper representation is the most American thing you can possibly do, and that makes these immigrants more American than you will ever be, as long as you hold such views.

Edit: It seems you have edited your post in order to remove the extremely distasteful language you originally expressed. I assume you still hold such views or you'd not have expressed them to begin with, and as such my comment still stands.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll bite: in your view, what were the illiberal "demands" post-2020? Reading tfa, this kind of rendering feels a little too pat for him. Namely, its one thing to argue against the kind of knee-jerk moralism of well-meaning woke liberal arts kids, its quite another to imply a kind of "capital L" program to "chill speech." Like, c'mon, are we really still doing this now ? Roth himself is sensible enough to not be,…

It is a smaller step to further the justifications than to deal with the often severe implications (to the self-image) of having been wrong. The more obvious it becomes having been wrong, the more necessary the justifications are and the more absurd they become. As having someone accepting your absurd justifications becomes proof of being blameless.

I should add that I'm not referring to beepbooptheory, but in response to "are we really still doing this now?".

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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If there's no due process for everyone , that distinction literally does not matter in the slightest! Dozens of citizens could have been sent into slave labor for all we know, and no judge has been able to provide the constitutionally mandated oversight. It has been upheld many times and for hundreds of years that the Due Process clause applies to non-citizens for this reason.

Due process only means “This is the minimum required process for the government to act”. It doesn’t mean that every non-citizen is entitled to a jury trial that can escalate to the USSC.

In some cases, “due process” is “Your name made it into a spreadsheet, the President can drone strike you”

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