Sorry to clue you in, but it’s not a tide, it’s a river.
Is “suppress my own free speech” a code word for “Allow me to experience consequences of being a jerk and an asshole?”
Let’s say you have an awesome job, and get fired for exercising your free speech. The reality is that your boss is not required to associate with jerks and assholes. Your speech hasn’t been suppressed, you’re just experiencing the consequences of letting your boss know what a jerk you are.
Let’s say you are a student at a great university, and get bounced for exercising your free speech. Again, your attendance, your acceptance into the school is a voluntary choice by the school administration. They are not required to let any particular person attend the school, and certainly aren’t required to let racist assholes be chosen as part of the community.
If you have a business, and get boycotted for exercising your free speech, blah blah blah, I don’t have to buy shit from jerks, and I don’t have to keep your jerkiness a secret from the rest of your customers.
OTOH, college administrators can (and I’d prefer they) have their professor’s backs WRT allowing Sinclair or Twain into the curriculum, their choice not to is their own choice, one they have the right to make, and one they have to live with.
What if one of the consequences “they have to live with” is being fired for being “a jerk and a racist asshole” for daring to teach Sinclair and Twain? It seems the complaint is that administrators don’t necessarily “have their backs”, and the general difficulty of getting tenure makes that a concern.
The problem with this position is the general lack of tough-mindedness as to exactly what consititutes being a “jerk” and a “racist asshole”. Seems to me that these can be, and are, awfully subjective terms. Making the accusation of jerkishness and racist assholism an awfully attractive weapon in the hands of those who harbour grudges of any sort, or who simply like stirring shit for fun and attention … which describes a small (but certainly existing) number of college students.
What’s the harm of making untenured staff walk on eggshells anyway? Only this: an impairment to the full and frank thrashing out of ideas, which was I suppose one of the truly attractive things about a liberal education.
If you want college professors to challenge and offend their students (and I do), you have to make their job secure from student protest. It’s really as simple as that.
The reality is that there’s a glut of adjunct supply and many colleges see themselves as being in the customer service industry. Until you solve one of those problems, adjuncts will remain vulnerable, and they aren’t going to rock the boat as much as we want them to.
I agree with your second paragraph.
There is a reason these problems exist at colleges in particular: College students are paying customers. A college administration would be foolish not to listen to them. The kids can close a college by refusing to attend classes or refusing to pay for the next semester. He who pays the piper calls the tune. If enough of the students want something, they’ll get it.
OTOH, any administrator will acknowledge that you don’t put the inmates in charge of the insane asylum. Let the kiddies run the place and they’ll trash it. There are still matters to be considered like accreditation, reputation, donations from alumni, and so on.
So the administrators walk a fine line between coddling the kiddies and trying at the same time to look like a genuine center of higher learning and research. But it takes some juggling, and some eggs get dropped. The eggs being untenured staff, unpopular commencement speakers, etc.
It has always been like that. Untenured staff know that it’s practically impossible to get tenure; if the students don’t get you, the tenured staff will. The untenured folks wait half a lifetime for one of the tenured staff to drop dead and open up a slot. And yeah, the students always were and always will be a pain in the ass for any of the teaching staff or administration. PC or not.
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Which is not directly tied to the idea of political correctness, or freedom of speech, but the overall lack of support professors get in the face of student (customer) complaints. I’m in agreement, by the way, that professors should get support for ‘controversial’ topics, and the admins should not give much weight to PC complaints.
Certainly they’re subjective, but that’s OK, because we’re talking about individual choice. If I think that a particular person is a jerk, I can take personal action, exercise my freedom of choice, and take any lawful individual act I deem appropriate. I only give it this much leeway because I don’t see an alternative that doesn’t restrict my lawful freedom of choice.
If that choice is to fire someone, I have the right to do so. In the USA, you can generally hire or fire for any reason or no reason, as long as you steer clear of protected classes. We’re not going to make “asshole” a protected class any time soon.
The administration, through their choice of not supporting the staff, are handing the students long handled paddles to stir shit with. Take the paddles away, refuse to sanction professors for silly complaints, and all the students will do is smear shit on themselves. That might make a few students decide to take their business elsewhere, but that’s part of business.
What worries me is that society considers sensitivity to be more important than truth.
“Your facts are offensive.”
Facts often are. Context is important in how they are presented.
What a lot of the “WAHHHH this PC bullshit pisses me off” crying boils down to is people that are in favored categories (white, male, cis, hetero, etc) not being willing to consider the effect that their words and actions have on others. It’s not about facts at all - it’s about enforcing a certain worldview, a certain dominance.
People like myself who view this social change as a good thing see it as an eroding of the old patterns of society.
Okay, so rather than the tide turning on political correctness, perhaps at least the draconian consequences of minor violations of whatever code there is will end? IMO, consequences should be reserved for hate speech, not for ignorance, misspeaking, or microaggressions. Ignorance can be corrected. Anyone can misspeak. And microaggressions by definition are small slights almost always based on the fact that you’re simply not walking in the shoes of the person you’re speaking to.
We also need to get over this idea stated by the liberal professor in my second link that injury must always be actionable. Sorry, but getting your feelings hurt in a minor way does not demand action. Getting your feelings hurt is part of living.
One thing that many people who advocate censorship fail to understand is that it seems all fine and well to suppress opinions you don’t like, but if the tide of culture ever turns against you, suddenly all those mechanisms of censorship that you put in place to squelch your opponents could be used against you.
You can ban someone’s opinion today, but tomorrow people may ban yours.
I’m still missing the actual draconian consequences issued for ignorance, misspeaking, or microaggressions. An investigation is not a draconian consequence; if the investigation is itself draconian, then it needs to be changed so that it’s not draconian even for folks who are truly guilty. Which specific examples are you talking about?
The 1980s called. They want their catchphrases back. Also their big hair and hornrimmed glasses.
Meanwhile, a teacher reads his students a story about two princes who fall in love, and gets formal complaints lodged against him. A gay student at a charter school is not allowed to give the valedictorian speech because he was going to come out as gay in it. A parent tried to ban “The Kite Runner” from a public high school because SPOILER ALERT the rape in it is gay.
This thread, of course, focuses not on threats educators face from adults, threats students face from adults, but on adults being frightened of kids. Why, I wonder, is that? Why does the OP see the threat of political correctness going only one way?
I think liberal accusations of “But right-wingers *also *stifle free speech!” only *strengthens *the argument *for *free speech.
Censorship has been abused by both sides.
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The thing I find oppressive about Pc is that for folks like myself with very limited vocabularies it makes it tough for us to express ourselves and be heard. It is almost like saying only the educated have a worthwhile opinion.
What do you think I’m trying to do? I’m massively in favor of free speech. My objection isn’t that we ought to have less of it, my objection is to the idea that “political correctness” is the major force limiting free speech in the US, and that the blowback is against political correctness instead of folk objecting in general to stifling free speech.
Without that stupid partisan sniping in the OP, you’d have a very different thread. Imagine that it was instead asking whether the tide was about to turn against censorship. In that case, the examples I chose–in which people tried to stifle “politically correct” speech (children’s books with gay characters, gay valedictorians, multicultural modern literature) and failed–would be examples FOR the OP. As it is, they’re examples AGAINST the OP, as they show how the tide continues to favor “politically correct” speech.
+1.
And really, what Rune said, about how it’s “PC” that allows you to figure out whose opinions aren’t worthwhile? He’s half-right. It’s the folks who use “politically correct” without air-quotes who are self-identifying themselves. Which is helpful.