We recently saw rather bizarre case of a college president having to publicly apologize for saying the “all lives matter” rather than “all Black lives matter” in supporting protests over the Ferguson and New York grand jury decisions. (Ironically, I listened this weekend to protests where leaders chanted “all lives matter” in Washington). Now, Serhat Tanyolacar, a University of Iowa visiting professor and printmaking fellow, has been denounced for a piece of art designed to protest racism after the decision. Iowa officials have declared the art to be the equivalent to hate speech and ordered its removal within hours — with President Sally Mason denouncing the art and apologizing profusely. Now, however, students are calling for the artist to be fired and for a new speech-regulating committee to be established for such public forums.
The Klu Klux Klan figure is covered with newspaper clippings on racial injustice and violence. It is a powerful image that is both artistic and political speech. Tanyolacar sought to create something to “facilitate a dialogue.” He got it. The university however has abandoned any defense of the free speech expression or even tried to understand the obvious purpose of the art. The piece was placed in an area designated as a public forum. Nevertheless, Mason and her staff threw Tanyolacar and free speech under a bus. Smith has said that the school failed “to meet our goal of providing a respectful, all-inclusive, educational environment, the university apologizes.” She has demand that the school “prepare a detailed plan of action” to presumably protect against such expressions of free speech in the future.
Much like law schools supplying professional counselors after the Ferguson decision for students, Mason has ordered university-provided counseling for anyone traumatized by the art work.
I do not question the impact of such an image and I can understand why the image was disturbing for so many. While I cannot say that I share the same cultural and personal pain of African-Americans in relation to such images, I was raised with stories from my mother of how she would often go to sleep with a burning cross on a nearby hill when the local KKK would terrorize her Italian and Catholic community in Ohio. However, this artist was using this well-known image as an important statement against racism an hate. It has now become for many an image of growing speech regulation and intolerance on university campuses.
What is equally shocking is the statement of David Ryfe, director of UI’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UI, who supports viewpoint discrimination, stating “If it was up to me, and me alone. I would follow the lead of every European nation and ban this type of speech.” That is the director of a school of journalism.
We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here) and England ( here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Much of this trend is tied to the expansion of hate speech and non-discrimination laws. We have seen even comedians targets with such court orders under this expanding and worrisome trend. (here and here). However, it is the appearance of effective speech codes on campuses that are the most worrisome. We have even saw a professor attack demonstrators with the later support of faculty and students who have justified her actions as responding to the “terrorism” of pro-life displays.
The statue tar screen prints of newspaper clippings depicting coverage of racial tensions, riots, and killings dating to the early 1900s was a faculty member’s effort to express his own creative feelings in a place for public discussion. Nevertheless, he was forced to apologize and issued a statement that “I sincerely apologize for the pain and suffering I caused to the African American community on Friday,” he said. “I am hoping that I will be able to be forgiven for the pain I have caused with my sculpture.”
Tanyolacar is the father of a mix-raced 8-year-old boy and has faced “racism and prejudice” in his own life. He recently participated in an exhibition project called, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Artists Respond” in St. Louis.
Nevertheless, students are continuing to protest and complain over the now removed art. Kayla Wheeler, a third year doctoral student in the UI Department of Religious Studies, has criticized the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for promoting the statue on social media and demanded a “social media oversight committee” to regulate such speech in the future to satisfy the sensibilities of the public. Moreover, she and others want the artist fired. Wheeler stated “If he is not fired immediately and returns to campus next semester, he should not be allowed to teach any students.”
By the way, Nic Arp, director of strategic communications for the college, who earlier attempted to defend the expression of free speech removed that defense from social media and issued his own apology “for contributing to people’s very real and understandable pain. I have learned a lot about how my own privilege and culture bias informed my own initial reaction to it.” He added:
“I’m a white person and responded to it first and foremost as a piece of art and not in the way an African American might — as a very real and scary symbol. I wanted to take personal responsibility and say, hey, I’ve learned a lot and I’m embarrassed by my own insensitivity about it.”
I will confess that I have a “bias” in favor of free speech that shades my view of this incident. Public forums come with all types of speech: good, bad, valuable or valueless. Bad speech is combatted with good speech — not pre-speech approvals or firing artists. Some of us have growing concern over the level of speech regulation that is occurring on our campuses, which were once bastions of free speech.
Source: KCRG
The wiring is different all right.
To make a liberal just take a conservative, and take away reason and accountability.
And an additional thought on the phenomenon. I think they enter some sort of confusion fugue, because they can’t wrap their heads around the fact that they so misread the original commenter, they are SO sure that the original commenter meant what they THINK all liberals mean. They so often completely misread liberal’s comments and meanings, like they truly have no mechanism to process the liberal ‘thought’. Makes me tend to think that the liberal brain and the conservative brain are wired quite differently.
Inga –
I am sure you can back this up from some medical journal.
ElsDL,
What you observed is a very common occurrence with certain commenters here. It’s frustrating to say one thing and then have another commenter completely mischaracterize the original comment. I’ve even had the mischaracterizer then go on to quote my comment in quotation marks, only to double down on the mischaracterization once again. It’s almost unbelievable that this happens so often and by the same few people.
I think they have a preconceived notion of what one’s meaning is and cannot seem to believe it when one corrects their mischaracterization. When it first starting happening , I thought perhaps it was done purposefully, but I’ve since come o think they really can’t help themselves. They have ‘heard’ a meaning in the comment that isn’t really there and they won’t or can’t believe that their understanding of the original comment didn’t match up with their preconceived notion of what they think someone meant. It’s convoluted but an interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen among conservative commenters.
I’m interested to hear how the quote was out of context.
There is a statement posted by Issac above which includes the following sentence: “This stuff has little to do with left and right regardless of how it seems to serve those who are hopelessly politically aligned. This has to do with stupidity and confidence.” Not long after the posting we read a response from Paul Shulte to Issac: “progressives have no problem with The Piss Christ, but they fall into vapors over this statute. What delicate flowers have been raised by our educational system.
You did it again, Paul: you read something and then picked what you wanted to read and went off on a rant. This tactic is getting really tiresome.
On the issue of this artist and free speech: I agree with Prof. Turley and others here: ridiculous to attack the artist’s free speech right. The artist should not have apologized. Happy to get an update from Mr. David Ryfe.
Els DL – the question is who is doing the protesting over the statue? I doubt very much that it is the conservatives who are crying for the statue to be taken down. If you can prove my statement wrong, rather than just complain about it, then do so.
Paul wrote: Els DL – the question is who is doing the protesting over the statue? I doubt very much that it is the conservatives who are crying for the statue to be taken down. If you can prove my statement wrong, rather than just complain about it, then do so
How about you prove your statement right, that it is “liberals” only?
The hatred expressed towards those who are not conservative posters here, is appalling. You seem to have forgotten that there are 2 sides to every issue, that honest and open minds can disagree. This is tea party behavior- I am right and everyone who disagrees with me is a “liberal” and therefore without reason and accountability”, as one of the nicer insults said by Pogo. (“To make a liberal just take a conservative, and take away reason and accountability” ie. there is no intelligent thought but mine because everyone who thinks intelligently agrees with me and those who don’t are just idiots.)
Funny how countries like Iraq, Iran, etc want you to only believe only one line, espouse only one point of view, not far off from what you and others here espouse.
(This is exactly why we have the impasse we do in government, neither side, but more the repubs since they stated obstruction was their main goal and everything else can go by the wayside, are willing to be bipartisan. and btw That made McCain’s statement in support of the torture report even the more surprising.)
leejcaroll – are you through ranting? If so, are you for or against the statue?
Mr. Turley,
I appreciate your column but must let you know that while I was not misquoted the quote of mine you include in the piece is out of context and does not reflect my views. I am on the record as stating that the art display at issue is and should be protected by the first amendment. In addition, I support the modrn interpretation of the First Amendment that speech is a fundamental right.
I am sorry to see that the snippet of a quote I gave this student reporter has ricocheted across the media. But not surprised.
The issue of hate speech is a difficult and complicated one for college campuses, deserving more care in our public utterances than I gave in that comment.
[music to Ohio]
My name is Bark In Dog!
Solders are cutting me down.
How could I run when I know?
What if you knew about laws and left rights dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?
Theres Nazis in Iowa colleges
The pigs there have lots to know.
Those people need leashes and collars.
Those criminals have got to go.
Iowa, Ohio, what difference does it make when your state is a four letter word? Crosby Stills Nash and Young said some things which are relevant:
Play Music
“Ohio”
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
By “people” you mean, here, college students.
But having never learned logic, argument, reasoning, facts, or tolerance, these sophomoric unteachables leaned on the only device they ever grasped: shouted grievances.
Art out of context.
Had this been an installation in a gallery with a guide available for the viewer to use for perspective, the reaction may have been different. The picture shows it on public display on the street without any guide from the artist. Of course people will become upset seeing a white hooded KKK statue on the street.
Clowns to the left of me jokers to the right. Here I am stuck in the middle with you…..
“… an opportunity for an educational institution to engage the community in a civil discussion about…”
The last thing they want is a discussion, much less a civil one.
What they want is shouted slogans and compliance.
Seriously, Isaac, the left has done this same stuff repeatedly over the last 100 years.
Soviets, Maoists, Pol Pot, etc etc etc.
Same tactics every time.
This is simply denouncing the heretics, a particularly horrible kind of crazy-making, because the rules change every day, and in effect you are always guilty of something.
No one is safe. Best not to speak at all.
And in no, this is not a problem from the right.
Here’s another article on this issue: http://thegazette.com/subject/news/free-speech-or-fighting-words-20141214
““The situation I find exceedingly frustrating,” said Kathleen Richardson, director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Drake University. “This is a perfect case study of an opportunity for an educational institution to engage the community in a civil discussion about the importance of freedom of expression.” (Drake University is in Des Moines.)
To be fair, Prof. Ryfe did say,
“As to whether the statue should be excepted from First Amendment protections due to “fighting words” limitations, David Ryfe, director of the UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said he doesn’t think so.
“This wasn’t an instance, by any definition, of hate speech,” Ryfe said. “It was intended as an artistic expression raising issues around the subject.””
At least someone at The Iowa State Daily thinks free speech is for everyone:
http://www.iowastatedaily.com/opinion/article_6f1ecde4-80ef-11e4-b211-cba68efb8939.html
There’s more in the first article that will leave you shaking your head, though.
“This stuff has little to do with left and right regardless…”
What the left says whenever the left does something stupid, evil, illiberal, or tyrannical.
Which is fast becoming a daily thing.
It’s the natural result of the New Left highjacking academia and indoctrinating students in “Critical Theory”. If Herbert Marcuse, Adorno, and the rest of the Frankfurt School founders were alive, I’m not sure they’d be proud of what they helped create. Yes, they hated Western Civilization and Judeo-Christian values, for sure, but I don’t think they anticipated that in destroying it the end result would be complete and total intolerance. But after the ’60s radicals took over academia using Marcuse’s writings as their “Bible”, this is the ugly monster that’s been created: a generation that would rather destroy the livelihood of someone who utters something that doesn’t fit the orthodoxy than tolerate it.
Now the Democrat Party wants to amend the First Amendment. The editor of the Harvard Crimson wrote an editorial bemoaning academic freedom and thinks “academic justice” – whatever that is – is a higher cultural value than academic freedom. This generation has absolutely no tolerance – zero – for views they don’t like. Free speech was born in the Enlightenment Era and it had a great run while it lasted. But it is deliberately being destroyed by this generation.
Free speech is on its way to the dustbin of history. Use it while it lasts.
This stuff has little to do with left and right regardless of how it seems to serve those who are hopelessly politically aligned. This has to do with stupidity and confidence. This is why we have artists and court jesters, to point out what is going on, regardless of the subject.
The artist was spot on. He did not make a statement pro or con. He made a statement that invited, encouraged, perhaps demanded thought. Those that lack a spinal column and prefer the view from up out of the hole in the sand where they stick their heads, are the real problem.
If something is taboo then you can’t talk about it. If you can’t talk about it then you can’t fix it.
issac – progressives have no problem with The Piss Christ, but they fall into vapors over this statute. What delicate flowers have been raised by our educational system.
@Squeeky:
the quote on Nikolai Bukharin is the one you are referring to, I suspect.
Excerpts from the opinion by Abe Fortas in Tinker v. Board of Education of Des Moines, IA:
In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are “persons” under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved. In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views. As Judge Gewin, speaking for the Fifth Circuit, said, school officials cannot suppress “expressions of feelings with which they do not wish to contend.”
In Meyer v. Nebraska, Mr. Justice McReynolds expressed this Nation’s repudiation of the principle that a State might so conduct its schools as to “foster a homogeneous people.” He said:
“In order to submerge the individual and develop ideal citizens, Sparta assembled the males at seven into barracks and intrusted their subsequent education and training to official guardians. Although such measures have been deliberately approved by men of great genius, their ideas touching the relation between individual and State were wholly different from those upon which our institutions rest; and it hardly will be affirmed that any legislature could impose such restrictions upon the people of a State without doing violence to both letter and spirit of the Constitution.”
This principle has been repeated by this Court on numerous occasions during the intervening years. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN, speaking for the Court, said:
“‘The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.’ The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.’ The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.'”
The principle of these cases is not confined to the supervised and ordained discussion which takes place in the classroom. The principal use to which the schools are dedicated is to accommodate students during prescribed hours for the purpose of certain types of activities. Among those activities is personal intercommunication among the students. This is not only an inevitable part of the process of attending school; it is also an important part of the educational process. A student’s rights, therefore, do not embrace merely the classroom hours. When he is in the cafeteria, or on the playing field, or on the campus during the authorized hours, he may express his opinions, even on controversial subjects like the conflict in Vietnam, if he does so without “materially and substantially interfer[ing] with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school” and without colliding with the rights of others.
Under our Constitution, free speech is not a right that is given only to be so circumscribed that it exists in principle but not in fact. Freedom of expression would not truly exist if the right could be exercised only in an area that a benevolent government has provided as a safe haven for crackpots. The Constitution says that Congress (and the States) may not abridge the right to free speech. This provision means what it says. We properly read it to permit reasonable regulation of speech-connected activities in carefully restricted circumstances. But we do not confine the permissible exercise of First Amendment rights to a telephone booth or the four corners of a pamphlet, or to supervised and ordained discussion in a school classroom.
If a regulation were adopted by school officials forbidding discussion of the Vietnam conflict, or the expression by any student of opposition to it anywhere on school property except as part of a prescribed classroom exercise, it would be obvious that the regulation would violate the constitutional rights of students, at least if it could not be justified by a showing that the students’ activities would materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school. In the circumstances of the present case, the prohibition of the silent, passive “witness of the armbands,” as one of the children called it, is no less offensive to the Constitution’s guarantees.
As we have discussed, the record does not demonstrate any facts which might reasonably have led school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities, and no disturbances or disorders on the school premises in fact occurred. These petitioners merely went about their ordained rounds in school. Their deviation consisted only in wearing on their sleeve a band of black cloth, not more than two inches wide. They wore it to exhibit their disapproval of the Vietnam hostilities and their advocacy of a truce, to make their views known, and, by their example, to influence others to adopt them. They neither interrupted school activities nor sought to intrude in the school affairs or the lives of others. They caused discussion outside of the classrooms, but no interference with work and no disorder. In the circumstances, our Constitution does not permit officials of the State to deny their form of expression.
Reversed and remanded.
JT – it is coming to your campus if it is not already there.