{"id":9403,"date":"2011-05-18T07:18:52","date_gmt":"2011-05-18T11:18:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9403"},"modified":"2022-06-24T10:15:27","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T14:15:27","slug":"wendy-kaminer-university-students-are-unlearning-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/05\/18\/wendy-kaminer-university-students-are-unlearning-liberty\/","title":{"rendered":"Wendy Kaminer: University students are “unlearning liberty”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wendy Kaminer<\/a> looks at the disturbing trend in universities that shows female students seeing themselves as helpless and in desperate need of protection from (and active suppression of) the free speech rights of others.<\/p>\n

\n

I don\u2019t know the ages of Obama\u2019s OCR<\/acronym> appointees, but they seem to be operating under the influence of the repressive disregard for civil liberty that began taking over American campuses nearly 20 years ago. As FIRE<\/acronym> president Greg Lukianoff remarks, students have been \u2018unlearning liberty\u2019. Concern about social equality and the unexamined belief that it requires legal protections for the feelings of presumptively vulnerable or disadvantaged students who are considered incapable of protecting themselves has generated not just obliviousness to liberty but a palpable hostility to it.<\/p>\n

Sad to say, but feminism helped lead the assault on civil liberty and now seems practically subsumed by it. Decades ago, when Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and their followers began equating pornography with rape (literally) and calling it a civil-rights violation, groups of free-speech feminists fought back, in print, at conferences, and in state legislatures, with some success. We won some battles (and free-speech advocates in general can take solace in the Supreme Court\u2019s recent decision upholding the right to engage in offensive speech on public property and public affairs). But all things considered (notably the generations of students unlearning liberty), we seem to be losing the war, especially among progressives.<\/p>\n

This is not simply a loss for liberty on campus and the right to indulge in what\u2019s condemned as verbal harassment or bullying, broadly defined. It\u2019s a loss of political freedom: the theories of censoring offensive or hurtful speech that are used to prosecute alleged student harassers are used to foment opposition to the right to burn a flag or a copy of the Koran or build a Muslim community centre near Ground Zero. The disregard for liberty that the Obama administration displays in its approach to sexual harassment and bullying is consistent with its disregard for liberty, and the presumption of innocence, in the Bush\/Obama war on terror. Of course, the restriction of puerile, sexist speech on campus is an inconvenience compared to the indefinite detention or showtrials of people suspected of terrorism, sometimes on the basis of unreviewed or unreviewable evidence. But underlying trivial and tragic deprivations of liberty, the authoritarian impulse is the same.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wendy Kaminer looks at the disturbing trend in universities that shows female students seeing themselves as helpless and in desperate need of protection from (and active suppression of) the free speech rights of others. I don\u2019t know the ages of Obama\u2019s OCR appointees, but they seem to be operating under the influence of the repressive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,10,13],"tags":[987,1476,186,355,764,43],"class_list":["post-9403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-feminism","tag-fire","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-prejudice","tag-university","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2rF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9403"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74567,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9403\/revisions\/74567"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}