8 ms·

Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

• lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  When "conservative speakers" has expanded to include literal white supremacists it's somehow hard to empathize with the plight of the conservative mindshare among the educated. The first amendment gives citizens the right to hold ideas free of government prosecution; it does not include any mandate for the population to buy into any of those ideas. Trying to sell a philosophy of "fuck you got mine" to young people might be an uphill battle.
  • nilkn 9y ago
    I don't think this is really about free speech in the sense of the First Amendment. Universities are supposed to be about the pursuit of knowledge, and it's pretty unlikely that conservatives are wrong about everything and liberals are right about everything. Moreover, I don't think any reasonable person would say that any historical political party has ever been correct on every issue. So again it's quite unlikely that the present-day left is the first ever exception to that pattern. You mentioned white supremacists, but I think you're focusing on a fringe and extreme element of the right in an attempt to discredit all right-leaning speakers. There are similarly fringe left-leaning speakers, and a lot of interesting, well-spoken, articulate folks in between, so I don't find this argument very compelling.
    • stupidcar 9y ago
      How are white supremacists a "fringe", when you have a US President who openly supports and defends them? Who spreads their propaganda to his 40 million Twitter followers? You can argue about to what extent his views are shared within the wider conservative movement, but when the conservative movement's democratically chosen leader supports an ideology like this, it is clearly not a "fringe".
      • Helloworldboy 9y ago
        Openly supports and defends? I'm no Trump fan but this seems blatantly false. He seems to have been disavowing racists since the start.
        • nasredin 9y ago
          Have we discovered parallel alternate realities while I was asleep? The ones were Trump quickly condemned people shouting Nazi slogans without qualifications? Not to mention the vehicular murder.
        • Buttes 9y ago
          > He seems to have been disavowing racists since the start Pandering to racists since the start: * Initial refusal to rebuke David Duke. * "Rapists" remark. * Violence on "both sides". * Not mentioning the Jews on Holocaust Remembrance day. * No traditional White House Ramadan celebration. * Attacking the hispanic judge in the Trump U case because of their race. * Calling for and attempting to implement a "Muslim Ban". * Appointing Jeff Sessions, who had been denied a judgeship due to his racist beliefs. * The dog whistling about the lawless "inner cities". * Supporting the birther theory. The list goes on and on. Even when he does rebuke racists, it's never prompt, and always with a wink and a nod. If you don't believe me, go peruse stormfront and look at all the threads celebrating their "victory" when Trump says these things, they recognize what's going on.
          • Helloworldboy 9y ago
            You just listed a bunch of events with zero context that require initial bias to dry racism over. This "wink and nod" idea seems pretty tin-foil hat to me
            • Buttes 9y ago
              You're hopeless, this is not subtle stuff, you're being deliberately obtuse, or you're just plain stupid.
    • lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
      The "interesting, well-spoken, articulate" folks have no issue speaking at college campuses. Playing the "good people on many sides" card ignores who these people are that are being forced off of college campuses. Alan Greenspan could show up to give a talk and be well received; Richard Spencer is going to spark riots (for good reason). Most issues have a gradient or contextual answers so I don't buy the argument that just because someone maybe wrong implying their opponents are necessarily correct. The "pursuit of knowledge" predisposes that not all ideas are created equal. That "fringe, extreme" element of the right holds the presidency of the United States; pretending they don't exist, or don't hold power is ridiculous in 2017.
      • Helloworldboy 9y ago
        When you have riots over right-leaning moderates like Ben Shapiro, I think it's clear that there is a free-speech problem at universities in the US.
        • lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
          In which universe do you live in that Shapiro is a moderate?
          • ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
            Curious which views of Shapiro's do you believe are extreme? Are you a person who believes gender is merely a social construct whereby the genetics of a person hold no bearing on their attributes?
            • lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
              He's cited a solution to the divide between Isreal and Palenstine as being >"The Jews don't realize that expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements...." That's decently non-moderate if not extreme as far as that debate goes. Nice strawman with the gender thing. The nature v nurture debate will continue but the fatalist "genetics trump all" sort of thinking is pretty solidly false. And the amount of bad stats in trying to apply population level trends to self selecting sub groups is just mindnumbing (ie the school of thought around woman tend to have these traits ergo the self selecting group that go into this field must also follow that distribution). As for the specifics of current progressive politics, I think the pendulum has swung a bit too far in direction of needless specific taxonomy; however that's a better state of affairs than the prescriptive "a man is this; not that" sort of thinking that dominated previous generations. As a bisexual man Im a bit biased though; I think the average American is way too hung up on tying sexuality and gender into their identities.
    • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      More: Thinking you're right about everything and your opponents are wrong about everything, and therefore not bothering to listen to your opponents, is a great way to become more and more wrong over time.
• TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  As the American right-wing moves further right and further way from participating in consensus reality, it should be no surprise they are increasingly less welcome in spaces dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. If you reject not only the politics of your opponents, but the value of fact itself, why should they listen to or accommodate you? https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16588964/america-epistemic-crisis https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16588964/a...
  • ThrowawayR2 9y ago
    > If you reject not only the politics of your opponents, but the value of fact itself, why should they listen to or accommodate you? Because "you" (i.e. the right wing, in your analogy) can muster more votes from the political center than "they" can and can put into place governmental and economic policy that can disrupt or damage said "spaces dedicated dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge" greatly. The ivory tower doesn't exist in a vacuum. Its gates can be besieged by the populace and it can fall to its besiegers.
    • vannevar 9y ago
      It can, but the notion that ignorance can triumph by force is not the fault of the universities. What is their alternative? To pander to people who believe that Islamic terrorists are a greater threat to them than the ladder in their garage, that being gay is a conscious moral choice, and that tax cuts stimulate economic growth? Conservative backlash against science and mathematics is a consequence of the increasing availability of data directly contradicting most of their core intuitive beliefs. That they're choosing to shoot the messenger is not the messenger's fault.
      • creaghpatr 9y ago
        >To pander to people who believe that Islamic terrorists are a greater threat to them than the ladder in their garage A poor straw man argument, and it's telling that you need untruthful hyperbole to make your point.
• PatientTrades 9y ago
  > to tax large university endowments and make other tax and spending changes that might adversely affect universities Why shouldn't major universities pay their fair share to help society? Most of these elite universities literally pocket billions of dollars at the end of the fiscal year. Major universities have essentially evolved into corporations.
  • Helloworldboy 9y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted, this is absolutely the case. Just look at the exploding expenditure on "administration" rather than education at these universities. Universities exploit ridiculous student loan programs to make indentured servants out of their customers.
    • jseliger 9y ago
      It's being downvoted because a sentence like this: "Most of these elite universities literally pocket billions of dollars at the end of the fiscal year" is so vague that it's hard to tell what exactly he meas.
      • ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
        I'd imagine he's discussing the endowments of said universities, which are earning billions of dollars a year
  • jostmey 9y ago
    It angers me that the top Universities sit on billions of dollars while at the same time restricting the number of incoming students to just a few thousand. IF THE ENDOWMENTS WERE TAXED THE UNIVERSITIES WOULD WANT TO SPEND THE MONEY, AND HOPEFULLY THEY WOULD OFFER MORE SLOTS TO APPLICANTS.
• mixmastamyk 9y ago
  I agree that the folks on “one side” get crazy at times, but without their presence to provide an anchor, the other is unrestricted and just as willing to go off the deep end.
• CJefferson 9y ago
  I'm in the UK, working at a university and I'm going to say, the conservatives do have something of a point, although they greatly exaggerate it. Before the Brexit vote, I found it would offend many academics to even discuss that the vote might pass, and people might have legitimate greviences that would make them vote for Brexit. Now, I'm personally against Brexit, but i think the main reason it passed was the "liberal elite" refused to even discuss with the people who wanted Brexit, so they they turned to the likes of UKIP, who would talk to them about the problems (and then lie to them, which is how we ended up in this Brexit mess).
• smallnamespace 9y ago
  Just as an anecdote, met a recent state school grad who said he arrived on campus as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, tried to get into campus activism, and his fellow activists and teachers scared him so much that he's now not sure where he stands politically. Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all immigration policies of any sort are illegitimate and harmful. France was brought up as a particular example. Also, this view point was not up for classroom debate -- you would get a bad grade if you deviated from this in homework essays. I think true liberalism is not just having a general set of 'progressive' values, but also being open to dissenting opinions and facing them honestly and openly. That doesn't mean agreeing with those opinions, but it does mean being exposed to them and debating them. What we see on campuses today doesn't sound like liberalism to me, but a reactionary movement that aims to protect an orthodoxy composed of generally liberal viewpoints not by engaging in debate, but by preemptively shaming and denouncing anyone who disagrees. Even if you believe liberal viewpoints are generally correct, nobody has a total monopoly on Truth.
  • jrjririr828283 9y ago
    That’s a lot of description about campuses in general based upon one anecdote As a counter anecdote, a small campus I worked at in rural Pacific Northwest, a liberal bastion right? This campus was swarming with traditional values students who want to strike down gay marriage and cut all taxes And I found them much less open to being reasoned with than extreme liberals who think nation states are social constructs (since they don’t exist in physics, they kind of are human social constructs? Not judging them, just pointing out a potential point of reference for viewing them that seems valid)
    • SamReidHughes 9y ago
      If something's morally wrong, you can't "reason" for or against it. Like, God says so, end of discussion. The only way to attack that stance is to break their faith.
  • klank 9y ago
• j4ship 9y ago
  I thought we were going to stay away from politics on hacker news. especially becuase of the liberal bias in the community and the mods.
• d3fr4gm3nt 9y ago
  I think the article makes good points about some craziness on college campuses, particularly regarding actions restricting freedom of speech, but to use that as a justification to hurt seemingly left tilted institutions is a weak argument. This kind of justification doesn't help the already partisan environment and further encourages tribalism and defence of bad ideas. The optics of the article makes it looks like "we don't like you, so we're going to hit you where it hurts", something that the constitution seeks to prevent(re: "tyranny of majority"). Freedom of speech suppression isn't exclusively a left problem as can be seen in the link below, I'd agree that it's more of a left problem than right: https://www.thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database/ https://www.thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database/ What we need is more debate not less, and taxing endownments isn't going to help that, I'm, not sure what will though either, people seemingly don't want to debate anymore.