education

Recollections of Ergo

This entry was posted in History Writing and tagged education history MIT writing on by

Ergo: The Campus Voice of Reason. That was the name of our paper. Like all college students, we were more confident we were right than we should have been, but we stood apart from the crowd. As an organization, we were never “liberal” or “conservative” in the popular sense of the words. Our position was libertarian, strongly influenced by Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. Ergo challenged university administrators, the campus left, politicians, and academics. My association with Ergo helped me to develop a framework of thought that I still go by. My views on what is important and how to achieve it have changed, and so have some of my conclusions, but my basic principles have changed very little.

Ergo came into being during a time called the “sixties,” which lasted from about 1965 to 1975. The founder was J. R. M. Seitz, who allegedly acquired all the parts necessary to build an Atlas missile (except the nuclear warhead) on the open market. It was the time of the Vietnam War and urban riots. It was a time of protests and violence. People marched and occupied buildings. Some thought that totalitarian Communist states were a great idea. Others just wanted the government to stop drafting people and sending them into an undeclared war on the other side of the globe. Once I was punched in the nose, and another time the sweater I was wearing was set on fire. I can’t count the number of times I was called a fascist. Interesting times.
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Two views on open discussion

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged censorship education on by

Is open discussion with minimal limitations a value or a danger? Here I try to understand the people who are afraid of it and answer their concerns.

The starting point for this post was a Code of Conduct posted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It doesn’t specify severe penalties for violation, though groups within W3C could in principle reference it as a basis for draconian rules. It recommends resolving issues by discussion in preference to censure or expulsion. So that much is OK. This code is much less of a problem than some which certain science fiction conventions have proclaimed.

Still, its list of “unacceptable behaviors” is broad, and that raises concerns. Many refer to remarks that have no place in a professional organization, such as “deliberate misinformation,” “personal attacks,” “unwelcome sexual attention,” and so on. Others, though, could be used to discourage or punish unpopular ideas.
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Hostility as a tool of persuasion 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged education psychology on by

A lot of people act as if mockery and denunciation are effective ways to convince others that they’re wrong. Not many of them, though, come out and endorse this principle. A Liberal Currents article called “Deradicalizing the Center” offers qualified support for it, though, and it’s not just a rant. It contains a lot of good thinking. I’d like to take a look at it to see what the author claims and argues.
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New Hampshire bill seeks to mandate book rating system

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary News and tagged censorship education libraries New Hampshire on by

A bill before the New Hampshire legislature, Senate Bill 523, is a frontal attack on school libraries in the state and the vendors that provide books to them. The bill is sponsored by State Senator Kevin Avard. It’s the kind of lunacy you’d expect in Kansas or Texas, not New Hampshire.

It would set up a bounty system for bringing complaints against material which is allegedly “harmful to minors.” Anyone claiming to be aggrieved under the bill’s terms would be able to sue for damages. A person bringing a successful suit would be guaranteed a minimum payout of $1,000. What Avard is trying to set up isn’t just a way to remove inappropriate books but a way to incentivize gratuitous challenges.
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Plagiarism accusations against Harvard’s president

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged education Harvard plagiarism on by

Taking a principled approach means that sometimes you support a person in one respect while being severely critical in another. I supported Harvard president Claudine Gay when she said that calls for genocide don’t categorically qualify as harassment. But now there’s evidence that she’s a repeat plagiarist, and that demands strong criticism if she is.

Update: Claudine Gay has resigned as president of Harvard University. See also the new paragraph at the end of this post.

Plagiarism consists of using someone else’s words or ideas and passing them off as original work. If you cite the source, it isn’t plagiarism (though it might be a copyright violation if you use too much). Sometimes it’s tricky to identify. Two people can have the same idea independently. Words can stick in your mind, leading you to use them without being aware that you’re lifting them from another author. Sometimes there’s just one good way to say something.
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Cancel culture goes mainstream

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged censorship education liberty on by

“One down. Two to go. This forced resignation of the president of @Penn is the bare minimum of what is required.”

That’s the kind of language you might expect from the Minister of Truth in a socialist dictatorship. It’s from Elise Stefanik, a Congresswoman from New York. The offense for which Stefanik and many others are seeking to remove three university presidents is the failure to regard advocacy of genocide unconditionally as harassment.
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To kill a student’s mind

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary and tagged books censorship education on by

A teacher who wants to limit students’ minds and close off their horizons is a vile person. To Kill a Mockingbird is a powerful, moving novel about racial injustice in the South. It presents a world that’s different from today’s America and presents the suffering and hope of the people who suffered and tried to correct its injustices. A man defends the target of a false criminal accusation at great personal cost. For this reason, four progressive teachers in the state of Washington wanted to keep their students from reading it. A Washington Post article tells the tale.

In their formal challenge to the book in the Mukilteo School District, the teachers claimed, “To Kill A Mockingbird centers on whiteness. … It presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature and should be removed.” Three of the four are white, just by the way. Claiming that the novel “centers on whiteness” shows either gross ignorance of the book or gross dishonesty. In normal use, the Civil Rights Era began in the 1950s, and the novel is set during the Depression. It’s true that it doesn’t celebrate what it was like to be black in Alabama in those days.
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Book review: The Canceling of the American Mind

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged books censorship education liberty on by

Cancel culture is a prominent, ugly feature of public discourse today, yet many claim it doesn’t exist. They say there are only “consequences,” which amounts to saying that if you’re subjected to abuse because you said something controversial, what else did you expect?

Gangs of goons shout speakers down and claim that doing so is part of the right of “free speech.” By their logic, DDoS attacks on websites and jamming of radio communications are free speech. They shout “Shame! Shame!” as if anyone besides themselves were acting shamefully. They have only one standard: their authority to command others and demand silence from anyone who doesn’t think as they do.

It wasn’t always this way. Threats and demands for punishment of heretics have always been around, and some periods in American history have been full of open violence against opposing views, but the present levels of hostility are the worst in decades. In The Cnceling of the American Mind, Greg Lukanioff and Rikki Schlott document how frequently people on both the right and the left have come to regard anyone who disagrees as an inherently evil person, an enemy to be brought down.
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(Un)banning the Bible in Utah

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The Davis school district in Utah has reversed an earlier decision removing the Bible from middle and elementary schools. Few people thought it should be banned; the challenge to it was supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum of the policies that led to the removal of other books. Unfortunately, the appeal committee and the district officials missed the point. They said that “the Bible has significant, serious value for minors which outweighs the violent or vulgar content it contains.” Of course it does. The point is, so do many other books. Violence and vulgarity, even outright immorality, aren’t a sufficient reason to exclude books from school libraries.

The Bible is a horrible book. The Old Testament presents a sadistic, murderous God who drowns nearly the entire world population, firebombs cities, orders the extermination of every man, woman, and child in other cities, and decrees death penalties for many kinds of actions. In the New Testament, this sadist comes to us, not to beg for forgiveness for his crimes, but to say that he’ll forgive us, on the condition that we believe he turned himself into a human in order to be executed. People who don’t believe that claim will be tortured forever.
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CUNY misrepresents American freedoms

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary and tagged censorship education law on by

The bogus claim that there’s a “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment of the US Constitution usually comes from a left-wing position, but anyone can use it. The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York claimed that the speech made by student Fatima Mousa Mohammed at the May 12 Law School commencement constituted “hate speech.” The statement asserts that “hate speech … should not be confused with free speech and has no place on our campuses or in our city, our state or our nation.” Presumably the university plans or has already engaged in some action penalizing the speaker, though I haven’t been able to find out what it did or is going to do.

This case is particularly interesting because it doesn’t follow the usual script of people holding a left-wing view claiming that positions they don’t like are unprotected “hate speech.” According to an article on FIRE’s website, Ms. Mohammed “accused Israel of ‘indiscriminately raining bullets and bombs’ on Palestinians, criticized CUNY for working with the ‘fascist’ New York City Police Department and military, and expressed disdain for ‘capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism.'” Those sound more like the positions of someone who’d fling “hate speech” accusations rather than being on the receiving end.
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