It seemed to me like the actual problem was not intolerance of free expression per se, but rather that the administration had adopted a position of submission with respect to student activism. As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw. Frankly, as though they were terrified of their own students. The loss of academic freedom follows from that, but only as a consequence of the administration losing their grip and being unable (or unwilling) to sustain it. Others in this thread are, I think, safely predicting that this declaration will turn out to be toothless — if so, I think the explanation will be that you can't drive from the back seat.
That's the problem with bureaucracy- risk aversion wins because the administrators end up only caring about their own jobs and power and lose sight of the original point of their jobs. It's happened everywhere in society. Once you're number one priority is minimizing risk, you've failed the core mission.
MIT admin specifically have repeatedly shown themselves to be cowards who don't care about students/values/etc on issues other than free speech, so it's not like they're being inconsistent here. (the aaronsw situation, drinkordie, war on student life after the scott krueger alcohol death, etc.)
This happens when titles, prestige or unfairly high compensation gets attached to any otherwise easy job. People hold on for dear life, because they know they're getting out way more than they're putting in.
Let’s not forget that administrators who allow views unpopular to some are attacked and harassed with some who will try to destroy their livelihoods and future.
> It seemed to me like the actual problem was not intolerance of free expression per se, but rather that the administration had adopted a position of submission with respect to student activism.
Contrast this "capitulation" to activism to, say, UC's lengthy reluctance to capitulate to the grad student union's wage demands. Even more instructive: compare it to UC Davis' outright refusal to allow a handful of students to camp out on a grassy area in front of the dining hall on a Friday.
Student activists barely have sufficient solidarity and numbers to successfully demand something as universally desired as a higher wages. And they didn't have sufficient leverage to even complete a successful sit-in at Davis (and similar "occupy" groups got easily shut down at other universities).
Yet in your assessment, there are enough students in lock-step against free speech to terrify the admin into working against its own professed principles. How did that organizing prowess happen-- seemingly without any struggle-- in the latter case but not in the former cases? This doesn't pass the smell test IMO.
Alternative explanation: an administration vastly prefers less chance of unpredictable controversy over a dissident speaker, less chance of run-ins between dissident students and law enforcement, less chance of lawsuits over a prof's material, etc. It's not capitulating-- rather, the admin would naturally support any student move that limits the kind of speech that could potentially cause problems for the university.
If it were my first day fresh out of college admin boot camp, that's the first thing I would do to try to rise up the ranks. It's a no-brainer.
>Yet in your assessment, there are enough students in lock-step against free speech to terrify the admin into working against its own professed principles. How did that organizing prowess happen-- seemingly without any struggle-- in the latter case but not in the former cases? This doesn't pass the smell test IMO.
I think you want to consider the admin as individual agents, and think about their career downside risk.
Remember how James Bennet had to resign after publishing the Tom Cotton editorial in the NY Times? Imagine if L. Rafael Reif had taken a stand on the Dorian Abbot lecture. Students start calling for his head, fellow admin say "you're on your own bud". He goes the way of James Bennet. Then just like Bennet, his personal brand is tarnished. He struggles to find further work in academia.
Alternative explanation. They are happy to fall over to student demands about issues related to "social justice" and the culture war because it costs them nothing and they don't care and they know there is nothing to be lost or effort on their part. In contrast things like grad student wages becomes a very painful thorny issue that actually bothers them and would inconvenience them so then they'll put the foot down.
Basically rainbow capitalism or focusing and elevating issues that are less likely to have a direct impact in order to divert us from meaningful change.
It isn't that they're terrified of their own students, but rather that the free expression things are easier to just surrender on instead of having it potentially blow up, since usually there isn't enough opposing sentiment (either because students don't want to risk their careers or because they're just busy trying to move on to paying back their loans).
I've noticed similar behavior at my own university over the years. There are always several emails from the university president and the mental health office promising assistance when anything even slightly likely to matter to some of the student body happens anywhere in the world. IIRC some time ago they sent out an email to the entire student body about something scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall.
Yet it took a lot of protesting and boycotting to get fair action taken back when Covid was just getting started (IIRC they tried to kick everyone out of the dorms without refunds and without enough time to arrange for alternative housing, which was especially bad given the large international student body and lack of clarity on student visa handling at the time). Similarly, the graduate student union has been gradually dialing up its activism just to get the university to pay enough to keep up with local cost of living with no acknowledgement from the university.
Right. The fact that the administration, like so many others, has simply given the loudest radical students carte blanche — is definitely crucial to understand and to acknowledge. I am encouraged though to see language in this statement that they won't disallow speech even if it "may be harmful to some." I feel like this is a direct blow to the safetyism and "words are violence" that has taken over some college campuses. They seem to be preemptively taking the legs out of attempts to quash speech by claiming it's "harmful."
> The fact that the administration, like so many others, has simply given the loudest radical students carte blanche
I don’t think it is purely about how loud and radical some students are, it is also about how they align with the pre-existing ideological dispositions of the average university bureaucrat. Imagine, hypothetically, that the loudest and most radical students on campus were right-leaning rather than left-leaning: somehow, I doubt the same university administrators would be so quick to give in to their demands.
I disagree. Bureaucracy as an institution is psychopathic and only cares about power. If the establishment was right wing (as it had been in the past and still is in some places) the bureaucrats would line up behind it. It's about power, institutional power, not about ideology.
Let me put it this way: assuming the current situation in which most university bureaucrats lean centre-left, I think they are far more likely to resist the demands of loud and radical right-leaning students than loud and radical left-leaning students.
Now, if we are talking about a different situation, in which most university administrators were centre-right, then it could well be the other way around.
Bureaucrats respond much better to activists who (in broad outline) agree with their ideology, but who claim they are failing to live up to it, than to activists who are promoting a very different ideology instead.
Many of the demands which radical left-wing students make - such as cancellation of events, or that academics be fired - could also in principle be made by radical right students, just with different individual targets and justifications
For example, right-wing students might demand an art exhibition at the university be cancelled because they believe it to be “blasphemous” or “obscene”. Or they might object to a Marxist being allowed to deliver a guest lecture on the grounds that it is insensitive to the victims of communism.
I guess that makes sense. I don't think of there being a lot of prominent marxists or whatever in economics circles, but surely they're around somewhere.
There are some prominent Marxist academics – just off the top of my head, Adolph L. Reed Jr (professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania). Although he is probably one of the Marxist academics right-wingers are least likely to want to cancel, because he's actually very critical of the contemporary "social justice" left. Reed (who is African-American) attacks Black Lives Matter as making the fundamental mistake of viewing race-based oppression as more fundamental than class-based oppression, when in his view it is actually the other way around.
I knew of Reed but didn't know he was a Marxist. I guess it's not terribly surprising. The closest thing I could think of would have been David Graeber, but he's dead now.
I don’t think Graeber identified as a Marxist. He identified as an anarchist, and Marx and the anarchists were opponents of each other. I’ve read an interview with him in which he expresses sympathy for some aspects of Marxism, but also says Marx and his later followers got some fundamental things wrong (which is pretty much what you’d expect a left-anarchist to say)
Thinking of contemporary academic Marxists - how did I forget Slavoj Žižek. Another is the Marxist feminist Nina Power (although I’m not sure if she still identifies as a Marxist). Both, however, like Reed, are the kind of contrarian leftists who are probably more useful to the right uncancelled.
Surely that statement admits the possibility that some words are 'violence'. It just specifies that the signatories think that harm is a necessary cost of the speech. If the signatories instead thought that words were incapable of violence, there would be no worry of speech which is "harmful to some". I would also argue that that view severely downplays the power of speech, both for good and evil.
This seems so opposite to me to the only example of student activism at MIT that I'm aware of, which was against the closing of Senior House. Administration didn't care about students raising an issue. Students felt totally unheard and disrespected.
What's the difference here? Different, better-connected students? A campaign that better aligns with the broader zeitgeist in our society? Something administration _wanted_ to capitulate over?
Admin just doesn't care that much which speakers are allowed on campus. Like many progressive things students loudly champion, it's pretty immaterial and easy to just give in. It's not like it affects MIT's status or funding as a world-leading research institute.
By contrast, Senior House was a significant legal liability due to large, public parties with a habit of sending people to the hospital for more interesting reasons than booze. That, the institute has financial, practical, concrete reasons to care about.
It's unclear to me that SH created more liability than frats and alcohol, but maybe, and it was certainly the perception.
>By contrast, Senior House was a significant legal liability due to large, public parties with a habit of sending people to the hospital for more interesting reasons than booze. That, the institute has financial, practical, concrete reasons to care about.
Did they think about putting Senior House on probation or something like that?
I honestly forget. I don't think they were ever on probation per se, but it's not like SH was blindsided. There was plenty of awareness that admin was increasingly unhappy. What I won't claim to understand is what pushed them over the line to actually doing it. I think it was more slow, evolutionary decreasing of tolerance for everything than any particular incident.
I'm bitter about the whole thing, and also the upcoming [renovation of EC](https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/nfpumq/east_campus_is_...) (the next dorm over, physically and culturally). The building is realistically past due for some TLC, but it's hard not to feel like it's motivated from more than that.
I suggest you hit 'em where it hurts: Refuse all alumni donation requests, and give your money to impoverished people in Africa instead. https://www.givedirectly.org/
It’s all about incentives. The downside to more drinking deaths if the university did nothing is much worse than the downside to killing off Senior House. In the latter case, students are annoyed. In the former case, there’s a probability of expensive litigation.
In the case of cancelling speakers, there’s a bit of outrage and annoyance on the part of free thinking folks and fascists (who are two separate groups with a bit of overlap on the Venn diagram on this issue). But those groups don’t tend to form effective mobs on campus and aren’t terribly litigious compared to the vocal cancellers on the left.
> As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw. Frankly, as though they were terrified of their own students.
How familiar are you with the students and the faculty of MIT? Are the students even pressuring faculty enough on any given issue that we could characterize this statement from MIT as capitulation?
The report from the MIT faculty working group on freedom of expression, who originally proposed this statement, touches on this topic:
"Recommendation 5: The chair of the MIT faculty should explore how to develop a
faculty-governed resource for the MIT community when contested matters of speech arise. "
The faculty-governed aspect seems to be a counterpoint to the administrators. Though in this proposal they clarify that this would just be a resource and wouldn't have "adjudicatory responsibilities".
> As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw.
If the students and their parents pay the administrators' salaries, they are in charge. These clashes between students and faculty tend to be much more maintainable in countries with free public education, because the students aren't customers.
If the students are united against this statement, and only the administration and current faculty are for it, then the battle is already lost. Because the students of today are the faculty of tomorrow, making this statement a temporary patch that masks how bad things have gotten.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Some of the students of today are the faculty of tomorrow; in my experience the students that eventually become profs are not representative of the student body as a whole.
For example, much of the funding available in US physics is DoD funding. Many students (and grads / postdocs) have ethical issues with working on DoD projects. However, refusing DoD funding is not a good move for early-career researchers. So in my experience successful new profs tend to be more "hawkish" than grad students in general.
