Again, People Pointing Out That You're Stupid Is Not An Attack On Freedom Of Speech

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://abovethelaw.com/2022/09/again-people-pointing-out-that-youre-stupid-is-not-an-attack-on-freedom-of-speech/

We have reached that point in the academic calendar where law professors begin bawling crocodile tears over the loss of “free speech” on campus. And by “free speech,” these professors aren’t concerned that the government will crack down and silence the whiff of protest, but that students who say ignorant nonsense in class might have their feelings hurt when professors or fellow students explain how wrong they are.

What’s that we hear crackling over the conservative echo chamber radio? “We have met the snowflakes, and they are us.”

George Washington Law professor John Banzhaf put out a press release summing up the latest in this ongoing pity party:

At GWU, a well known law professor reports that he routinely has visits from students who wonder if they dare to speak freely in classes without being penalized by professors; a fear he has heard about only in the past several years. He suggests that “it is the widespread fear of conservative students who have faced faculties with overwhelmingly liberal viewpoints and growing intolerance on virtually every campus.”

The “well-known law professor” here is Jonathan Turley and the ocean of salt you have to consume is that he actually hangs out in his office. One suspects that directly interfacing with students would take a significant bite out of his daily routine cold-calling cable news outlets and begging for 5 minutes to describe why defrauding banks should be legal or whatever.

But let’s do the arguendo thing and assume he is in his office and these anonymous students are real people. The most, and probably only, important point in this anecdote is the idea that students fear that their grade will be impacted. If that’s really what students are telling him, a responsible professor wouldn’t be writing about it and misleading the public that law schools are handing out grades to their favorites. The responsible professor would be telling the students that the school employs blind grading procedures to avoid bias and that if they feel that their anonymous answers will be penalized that’s not discrimination, that’s a matter of failing to learn the material.

*snip*

[grumpyduck]

1. Yes, but there's a difference between saying

"That's incorrect" and "You're stupid."

And "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard" and "You're stupid."

[blogslug]

2. "his daily routine cold-calling cable news outlets and begging for 5 minutes"

Ouch. I wonder if Turley has enough Bactine for that burn.

[Carlitos Brigante]

3. K&R! nt

[Hermit-The-Prog]

4. The radicalized Republican party desperately wants to replace facts with beliefs.

It makes takeover, suppression, and indoctrination easier if you can get everyone to accept your beliefs as equivalent to facts.

Law schools have predominantly liberal faculty the way physics departments are overwhelmingly heliocentrists. No one — outside of Texas maybe — demands that schools hire more Ptolemaic geocentrist professors willing to offer a sympathetic voice to students who think the ocean swallows the sun every night. We should hold legal training to the same standard.

Banzhaf, perhaps unintentionally, strikes at something important in the last sentence of his summary. “[T]ruth may be dying if students are afraid to say what they believe to be true for fear of being penalized.” The operative phrase is “believe to be true.” These aren’t firebrand academics taking their depth of experience and formulating a new model to break up the establishment… it’s a bunch of 20-somethings who want a cookie for believing in a truth at odds with reality.