We recently discussed schools joining the University of Chicago free speech alliance. Now, the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have adopted a resolution defending freedom of speech and expression, including speech deemed “offensive or injurious.” It is a triumph for free speech. However, while 98 faculty voted for the resolution, 52 professors voted against the free speech principles.
“A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not extend to suppressing or restricting such speakers from expressing their views. Debate and deliberation of controversial ideas are hallmarks of the Institute’s educational and research missions and are essential to the pursuit of truth, knowledge, equity, and justice.”
What is unnerving is that a third of the faculty disagreed with the resolution despite the following reservation:
“MIT does not protect direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment. Moreover, the time, place, and manner of protected expression, including organized protests, may be restrained so as not to disrupt the essential activities of the Institute.”
However, the statement makes the key acknowledgment that “we cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious.” That is clearly unacceptable for many in academia. Silencing opposing views or voices has become a core principle for many professors who now refer to free speech as an ever present danger on campuses.
MIT has not always stood by free speech. As we previously discussed, the university yielded to cancel culture by barring a guest lecture to be given by University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot in 2021.
MIT also attracted criticism over abandoning standardized testing to achieve greater diversity. It later reversed that decision.
The new resolution is a victory for the “MIT Free Speech Alliance,” which has fought to defend free speech against a growing number of faculty.
University of Chicago emeritus biology Professor Jerry Coyne raised some good-faith objections on his Why Evolution Is True blog, including the resolution “calling for ‘civility and mutual respect’, as well as ‘considering the possibility of offense and injury’. You simply cannot have free speech without offense and injury. Abbot’s invitation provoked precisely such offense and injury, with many people supporting his deplatforming.”
However, the references are part of a graph that refers to the personal responsibility of faculty to maintain civility and mutual respect. It follows an express protection for offensive speech:
“We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious. At the same time, MIT deeply values civility, mutual respect, and uninhibited, wide-open debate. In fostering such debate, we have a responsibility to express ourselves in ways that consider the prospect of offense and injury and the risk of discouraging others from expressing their own views. This responsibility complements, and does not conflict with, the right to free expression. Even robust disagreements shall not be liable to official censure or disciplinary action. This applies broadly. For example, when MIT leaders speak on matters of public interest, whether in their own voice or in the name of MIT, this should always be understood as being open to debate by the broader MIT community.”
Overall, the resolution is a powerful defense of free speech. MIT has joined a growing minority of schools resisting the anti-free speech movement discussed in my recent law review article. Jonathan Turley, Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
They’ve politicized the colleges which will trickle down through society in a profoundly negative way as an extremely powerful mechanism of control.
Politicization is so effective at manipulating the populace because most people emotionally connect their personal belief system to the belief system of their political party, and so then any attack on their party – legitimate or otherwise – is interpreted by their brain as an attack on themselves. Reason and logic then jump out the nearest window as raw emotion takes the helm, thus making them even more susceptible to the predatory controlling influences…
https://tritorch.com/folly
Unless you can make a case of “Shock the Conscience” then in a Free an Open Society all speech is welcomed in the public square . .
Taking from a speech by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1961, he offered: “As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately, none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound”.
Our forefathers fought for the rights that are God given and set aside in our Constitution and accepted Law there under. Yet we have shameless authoritarians preaching that there is no right to speech that counters their illusory ideology that words can harm. What harm do words have? If words indeed are harmful, too what the Brain? I’m figurative and metaphorical speaking of those apathetic authoritarian dolts who have great distain for freedom of speech.
This Tyrannical and I’d say juvenile perception that freedom is just another fancy word, is indicative of Woke and its haltered left.
If extrapolated to the population as a whole, 65% of the country holds firmly to the First Amendment and 35% don’t. As elections go, that is considered a landslide. Civil libertarians win and illiberal progressives lose.
Dear Prof Turley,
While it may be true that it is only from ‘the clash of differing opinion that the spark of truth may be realized’, this is probably why Noam Chomsky, an MIT faculty member since 1955, gave up the ghost and split for West coast sunshine. You just can’t argue with some people.
To be fair, the 52 MIT professors ‘against Free Speech’ most likely haven’t read Manufacturing Consent for a long time, if at all, and only mean they’re against Trump free speech, in particular. Specifically. All of it. Like Hitler, Trump speech should only be studied by professional academics (if at all).
For example, if Trump says the sky is blue for many (I know) that could only be a lie masquerading as the truth, because everything Trump says is, by definition, a lie. A walking Putin talking point dressed up as a Kremlin ‘asset’. TDS is real. Imho.
Sadly, this, obviously, can have real world-shaking consequences If, e.g., Trump is against U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, (see @ Putin), they must, therefore, be all for it. The truth is always the opposite of Trump. No matter what.
At this point, I am not that ‘civil’ about it anymore: anybody buying what Zelenskiy was selling in congress the day before this Christmas past is either too stupid to breath or crazier than Joe Biden .. . or both.
*Weapons of Mass Destruction .. . symptoms of madness.
ps. above them, however, shines the last full measure of devotion of untold countless Ukrainians/Russians who, through sacrifice, will hopefully lead mankind to more spacious blue skies .. .
Well, good! I am pleased to read that diversity of opinion thrives at MIT. Of course this is diversity of opinion about expressing opinion…
Maybe MIT really is a bastion of intellectual integrity.
Universities used to be know for delivering uncomfortable content. Bring in an anti Semite and let them defend their beliefs in front of the students and faculty. Give the haters and kooks sunshine and exposure
Instead we get some silly notion promoted at the University, and any debate is silenced. No examination of new policy. The worst way to run anything, but deadly for institutions of learning.
Here’s some irony…
I read articles like this and it makes me think back to the 60’s song by Buffalo Springfield’s “For What it’s worth” (Stop, Hey what’s that sound…)
As we watch the pendulum swing back towards center.
Unfortunately, before the pendulum reversed course and swung back… damage/harm had been done.
-G
Allow me to add my own recommendation that you read Professor Turley’s piece, “Jonathan Turley, Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.” It is a strong, well thought out and clearly put affirmation of the importance of free speech.
Good to see in 2022 that some places are standing up and yelling STOP. Hope it continues in 2023 and beyond
“What is unnerving is that a third of the faculty disagreed …”
It then follows that MIT has a serious problem. Who hires the totalitarians? Faculty? Who allows them to create these oppressive results? The president and the trustees.. and the donors who support it.
My hope is that this re-evaluation of authoritarian speech policies by an elite school will encourage more instructors to come out of the closet. It is not a surprise that many of the instructors still favor censorship of unapproved opinions. At least in this case they are the minority.
That we are even having these conversations in this country is madness enough. A red under every bed? No, they are right there, out in the open, in prominent positions in every industry and leftist organization. Lee Harvey Oswald would blush.
Bravo, MIT. I know the reversal is just a trickle presently, but it’s a necessary start.
Good.
Well, is is a step in the right direction.
I hope those who voted against it, their names on record.
Those 52 faculty should “have their heads examined” as my father used to say.
I predict Arkanci…I mean suicides will mysteriously happen on campuses committed to free speech. Notes will be conveniently found describing the overwhelming pain and suffering the victims endured from these rigorous free speech commitments.
The one-third of the faculty who apparently oppose free speech will benefit from the passage of this resolution. They will always be cowards and totalitarians, but they will be free to express their views nevertheless.
“What is unnerving is that a third of the faculty disagreed with the resolution despite the following reservation:”
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Once you realize a third of the population are bona fide, history-challenged communists or their sympathizers, it all comes into focus. Add that to the third of the population who believes in Big Foot and no moon landing and you see why my “2/3 of the people you meet on the street are flat-out stupid” theory of society has so many subscribers.
So, you are stating that, demographically, we are screwed and that 1776 was just one extraordinary fluke in time? You may be correct because I see the same dull eyes gazing in amazement at video games and “The View”.
Mespo was being generous. Regardless of academic pedigree, folks with PhDs in the biological sciences, MDs, hospital administrators (JDs and CPAs are the worse), it seems most folks have lost their minds. A PhD colleague works with me where he has published 50+ academic articles in top notch journals on heart disease. He is in his 40s, and weighs about 280 lbs. he used to a handsome, built guy. I have seen him grow over the years, alarming me. When I have invited him to join me in the gym, he protests. He is on maximum strength statins and anti-hypertensive. Some MDs I know wear 3 masks plus a face shield, while sitting 10 feet apart from patients. I take mine off if the patient is OK with it. I prefer patients not wear them so i can read their lips. Yesterday at Costco Pharmacy I got my first shingles vaccine shot. (NB: If you are over 50, you should consider getting a shingles vaccine x 2).
While at Cosco, I observed about 40% of customers were wearing masks, some face shields as well as masks. They were pushing grocery carts with food they do not need (all snacks, garbage foods), with a Body Mass Index that rivals an elephant, but clutching a mask as if that will protect them from a virus that targets…..obese people. Utter madness. Many were wearing masks while sitting in the cars in the parking lot. Just stunning. Happily none of the pharmacy staff were wearing masks but most of their customers, deer in headlights look, masked, scared sh|tless. I practically sprinted out of the Costco warehouse because people there….not a good look
Estovir, the lack of advice to slim down and get in shape during the reign of terror (the pandemic) was epitomized by the doctors and nurses that were calling anyone that dared to leave their house a murderer and then waving on the BLM riots and mass protests. The game was over at that point and having the state close gyms, parks and beaches was a perfect manifestation of this phenomenon. They would demand you stay home, not work and not visit families that were sick and dying, but they wouldn’t cross the bridge that was to say lose some weight.
It all came together on the cover of the magazine showing a very obese woman with the headline, “This is Fit”! They wouldn’t dare tell the hordes that fat was the killer.