March 25, 2021 - 2:00pm
The trouble began on Tuesday. In a reddit board devoted to UK Politics, r/ukpolitics, a user had linked to a Spectator article.
The article had been written by Julie Bindel, who, in little more than a glancing aside near the bottom of the piece, mentioned Aimee Challenor, a transgender woman and former Green Party activist.
Challenor has an extraordinarily dark Wikipedia page, the most uncomfortable sections of which refer to her father’s conviction for child rape. In 2016, while Challenor was running for the deputy leadership of the Greens, she hired her father as her campaign manager — at the same time as he was on bail on 22 charges. This, a Green Party report later concluded, was a ‘major failure of safeguarding’. More recently, Challenor’s husband has posted erotic fiction online about children.
But Challenor now works for reddit — and the company has policies in place which are designed to prevent the brigading of its employees by angry site users. So the original poster was banned, and subsequent accounts which mentioned Challenor also found themselves nixed.
This entrained a kind of mass strike by the serfs of reddit, who keep the site ticking over with all their free content and free moderation. Suddenly, over a hundred subreddits had set themselves to ‘private’ (meaning no new users could access them).
Reddit climbed down. After a couple of earlier attempts at damage limitation, by last night, CEO Steve Huffman was forced to issue a statement that they would no longer be censoring the references. Apparently, it was an ‘automated bot’ that had tripped the initial bannings. And that ‘the employee in question is no longer employed by Reddit’. The statement also noted that the company failed to vet this background ‘before formally hiring her.’
All of which is a perfect picture of the present inanities of Silicon Valley.
Either the company knew who Challenor was, but didn’t wish to disbar an individual with such heavily protected characteristics. Or, an org whose data systems are so sophisticated they can delete hundreds of user accounts in real time on the basis of two words, can’t use Google. That a workplace with armies of HR staff, more money than God, operating at the sharp end of the culture wars, in litigious California, would not be running elementary background checks should surely be grounds for Huffman to tender his own resignation too.
Yet as the game is played, to please a user base with wings that support transgender rights and ones that bridle at limits on free speech, Huffman must now talk out of both sides of his mouth. To please one lobby, he is under pressure to hire people of transgender status and ‘prevent hate’. Yet on the other side, the instinctively libertarian side of reddit fought a famous culture war in 2016 over whether deleting subs like ‘r/jailbait’ (teen girls in sexualised poses) was a case of free speech martyrship.
In the end, he has insulted both sides. It was Challenor who spearheaded the deletion of some Gender Critical sub-reddits viewed as ‘anti-trans’, via an open letter to the company in 2020. That wave of mass-deletion has in turn re-shaped the moral landscape of the site, and tightened the ratchet on acceptable opinion. Not disagreeing with Challenor has seemingly been reddit policy for a while now. Yet Huffman was prepared to chuck his thought leader out on her ear the moment things got hot. This is what passes for values in the Valley.
Normally, social media can last out simply by playing all sides a bit. But when all of these conflicting rules directly come together in this case, the mealy mouthed morality of the new media CEO class begins to warp and fold under the pressure. Yet what else is there to do, except carry on, visibly bent, disfigured, incoherent, repugnant? This is what happens when you crowdsource your ethics.
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Subscribe“…its president, provost and deans would no longer make public statements on current events…”
So, a handful of administrators will remain studiously mum while–wink wink–thousands of faculty are free to continue indoctrinating students in progressive orthodoxy. These are meaningless actions meant only to silence critics without changing the underlying source of the problem.
Correct, this has got mainly to do with appeasing sponsors. A very important stakeholder in US Ivy league education.
Not so fast. President Pollack was pushed out and her successor is on thin ice while they search for a new Prez. The Cornell Free Speech Association has been at the forefront of bringing pressure to bear on the administration. Things are changing. CFSA will continue to monitor and act on any official actions of the university like deplatforming of speakers, harrassment, etc. I expect the Admin will become neutral.
That’s all you can expect. Individual professors have as much right to speak freely as you do.
Unfortunately many of those professors are still indoctrinated and insist on doing the same to their students. It will take much longer for universities to shed the neo-marxism that has contaminated higher education.
I’m not being fast. You are slow to appreciate the current state of academia. You seem to take comfort in the ability of “individual professors having the right to speak freely” but that is moot if the professors are homogeneously progressive, which they are. Generations of potential conservative professors have opted out of academia for the last quarter century because they rightfully perceived as undergrads that a university neither offers them opportunity for advancement nor even welcomes their presence. They’ve gone into other professions instead. Many existing conservative faculty left academia when they saw the handwriting on the wall. The demographic compositions of faculties is now above 90% liberal. Contracts for new faculty require the signing of progressive compliance documents that make a mockery of free thought. And institutions blatantly discriminate in hiring against those known to profess conservative ideas. So what good is free speech if the composition of faculties are effectively unanimously progressive? There are no longer significant numbers of alternative faculty voices willing to confront the status quo. Academic “freedom” policies in such a context only codify coverage for leftist faculty’s continued condemnation of the rara avis conservative. We also have recently seen the hollowness of university administrative actions vis a vis recent protests where in the overwhelming majority of cases the miscreants who defied policies and (seldom) received some type of suspension or dismissal saw the punishments quietly vacated. Only the credulous would expect administrations to enforce policies in the future if doing so is inconvenient to the prevailing established orthodoxy.
Additionally, the lock on thought-expression in academia extends beyond universities to the realms of academic journals, where heterodox ideas are professionally dangerous to submit and usually rejected, and to professional associations that have become politicized in conformance with progressivism. University administrations have no control over these entities but these entities police and enforce academic orthodoxy. Finally, MY “speaking freely” that you refer to is on any platform like this contingent upon the whims of some nameless, faceless, content mediator and algorithm. Many of them would block what I’ve written or, in the case a social media, withdraw amplification of it.
Institutional neutrality, most famously articulated in the 1968 Chicago Statement
I’m always proud of my alma mater’s continued commitment to academic freedom.
There you are. No speech without responsibility for what’s said.
So a handful of universities are starting to appear to be fair-minded. Whoop-de-do ….
These are important universities that the less famous ones will follow. This represents an early step in the new, conservative march through the institutions to take them back to sanity.
Not a conservative match, thank goodness, but the simple acknowledgement that statements confer responsibility. If you can’t take it, don’t make it.
And the pendulum continues to swing, back and forth, back and forth…
Now only if the major news outlets will get the hint!
Time will tell whether these universities really live up to these commitments, but it is most certainly really encouraging that the dawn following a very dark night of wokism is really breaking in the USA. It is such a shame that the UK is heading further into the darkness with freedom under attack from every direction at the moment. The US experience does however show that it is possible to wake up from the woke nightmare.
Sorry, it’s a dawn following a very dark night of ‘free speech’.
Here are some well developed thoughts on free speech.
Doesn’t seem that complicated.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/not-in-our-name
To find Cornell’s position on anything look up Harvard’s six months earlier.
Ouch!
Which shows how little novelty of thought exists in academia and how much pure mimesis.
I have zero confidence this will make one iota of difference. Progressives are accustomed to, and take actual pride in, being heartily disliked by ordinary people. They will redefine doing the same thing as making a huge change and then carry on as usual.
It’s ‘ordinary people’ who push for progress. That’s what reactionaries can’t stand.
I strongly suspect that most ordinary people want to not have obstructions imposed on their lives and to not be told what they should think. In our times, that would be progress.
Greek life?
I wondered that.
Fraternities and Sororities. Think “Animal House”.
Sounds great…on paper. But will these woke institutions really permit free speech, or will they find ways to continue speech codes and censorship of non-woke beliefs as they have tried to skirt SCOTUS rulings on affirmative action?
What a morose and skeptical (US spelling) collective reaction here! Of course these moves don’t establish a sincere or total change of campus atmosphere, but they are a legitimate good start—right? Even 12-plus years of your favorite MAGA strongmen—for those who are fans of such flame-fanners— won’t create the ideal conservative/radical-right Academy of one’s dreams, but why not relax your pessimism and gloom for a moment?
Those charlatans Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are exposed—though way belatedly—and Woke Racism by John McWhorter and The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk are more in line with the zeitgeist. That’s better than nothing.
How staggeringly stupid for an institution ever to have taken any other position. That they did speaks volumes for the intellectual mediocrity of these universities.
What matters more than staying mum is that university presidents are not DEI types and know how to handle issues. It is also important that university life is not brought to a halt by any side in a debate.
I’m deeply sceptical. Vast swathes of academia have basically given up on empiricism and trying to think beyond one’s biases. I’m not just trying to be insulting here – many academics across the social ‘sciences’ and humanities will freely admit to that, though language like ‘prioritising individual subjectivities and reflective analysis’ or all things ‘critical’ (which specifically sets out to ‘counter hegemonic narratives and elevate marginalise voices’, meaning ‘I write what I do to further social justice’)
You can’t have free and open debate at an institution when over half of the professors there don’t rely on rationalism as a means of deriving truth, and will hound and isolate anyone who does fundamentally disagree with them as a bigot. It’s like expecting the Catholic Church to be home to spirited debate about the existence of god, it’s not a neutral environment for that discussion.
True political neutrality at these institutions would mean that half of all faculty will need to be replaced by conservatives and/or right wingers. That the administrators will henceforth hold their tongue on political issues is just a gesture to ensure continued enrollments into what are really left-wing indoctrination centers.