Daily Archives: March 27, 2017

Yasmine Akki, Columbia Daily Spectator

Charles Murray speaks on Thursday night at Columbia U. to a quiet audience. His talk three weeks ago at Middlebury College resulted in violence and roiled higher ed. What does it say that the reaction hasnt recurred?

"We can all relax now, nothing exciting is going to happen," Mr. Murray said at the opening of a talk here Thursday night at Columbia University that was devoid of the conflict that made his Middlebury visit national news.

His roughly 90-minute speech touched on class divisions and his argument that much of America was living in a bubble. A few protesters greeted Mr. Murray at the university, but he spoke without disruption just as he did on Tuesday at Duke University, his first campus stop since Middlebury.

An informal survey of the campus before the speech on Thursday revealed that many had heard about the Middlebury fracas, but not the man at the center of it.

That raises a critical and slippery question for colleges: Mr. Murray, white-haired and even-tempered, is no Milo Yiannopoulos, the flashy provocateur, and the last campus speaker whose presence whipped campuses into a frenzy nationwide. But in an age of charged politics and social-media overexposure, every speaker has the potential to go viral in a way that might be detrimental to colleges. How can they tell one from the other? Should they try?

Mr. Murray is best known for the 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, in which he and Richard J. Herrnstein argue that genetics may be partly responsible for the achievement gap between white and black students. But he came to Columbia to talk about his 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 19602010. Mr. Murray is currently a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank focused on public policy.

Chronicle photo by Chris Quintana

Protesters at Columbia U. speak out against an appearance on Thursday by the political scientist Charles Murray, whose 1994 book "The Bell Curve" asserts that genetics partly account for the achievement gap between white and black students.

The Middlebury College violence on March 2 left a professor injured in the scrum. The ripples of that incident have elevated Mr. Murray's prominence in recent days.

His visits to Duke and Columbia were his first speaking engagements since Middlebury. He will speak on Friday at New York University and next week at the University of Notre Dame and Villanova University.

A spokeswoman for AEI said Mr. Murray was not available for an interview with The Chronicle, and the political scientist slipped away from the stage quickly after Thursday's event concluded.

Jonathan Schatz-Mizrahi, a student organizer, arranged the Columbia lecture before the incident at Middlebury. Since then, he said, organizers have thought more about security and free-speech issues. But the attempt to silence speech at Middlebury, he said, actually emboldened his decision to bring Mr. Murray to Columbia.

Mr. Schatz-Mizrahi, a self-described conservative, said before the talk that he didn't think a protest would be a problem. And he was largely right. A group had announced plans to walk out of the talk at 8 p.m., but a large-scale departure didn't materialize. Rather people filed out one-by-one from the hot basement where the lecture was held. Dozens attended, and security was tight.

Mr. Schatz-Mizrahi was pleased with the turnout. "I don't think what he said was very controversial, but I think it was valuable," he said.

Some faculty members had urged in an open letter to the Columbia Daily Spectator that Mr. Murray be permitted to give his speech free of interruption. "Any attempt to obstruct Murray will be instantly weaponized by supporters of President Donald Trump into yet another reason to hate 'elitists' and to divert from the damage his regime intends," the letter stated.

"Although his writings carry the rhetorical patina of science, Murray is largely regarded in academic circles as a rank apologist for racial eugenics and racial inequality in the United States," they wrote. "Murray has every right to publicize his ideas, but we have a duty to object when he does so by assaulting foundational norms of sound scholarship and intellectual integrity."

An op-ed published Wednesday in the Spectator and signed by "Barnard Columbia Socialists" criticized Mr. Murray and urged that his ideas be confronted. "This is a moment that calls for us to use our right to free speech to challenge the widely discredited, racist, and profoundly elitist ideas of Charles Murray," they wrote.

Some activists created Facebook pages announcing plans to protest Mr. Murray at Columbia and inviting others to join them. Early this month at the affiliated Barnard College, someone defaced posters announcing the scholar's visit.

Mr. Murray largely avoided discussing race in his lecture on Thursday and instead focused on class division. The thrust of his argument was that the elites should live away from communities of their rich peers.

"I am just saying, get out of this claustrophobic class that you live in because maybe you'll love it and in the process learn to love America in the way which has been sadly reduced in recent years," Mr. Murray said.

Donald J. Trump, the elephant in the room during every campus political discussion, did not go unmentioned. Citing accusations of unpaid subcontractors on Mr. Trump's business projects, Mr. Murray offered his blunt opinion of the president. "I think he's a despicable man."

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.

Here is the original post:
Subdued Reception for Controversial Scholar Shows Just How Fluky Free-Speech Flashpoints Can Be - Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

Ocheesee Creamery"The leftover product is skim milk: milk that has had the fat removed through skimming."

If those wordsfrom a unanimous 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling earlier this weeksound like some sort of dictawords in a court decision which represent a judge's ideas or observations but aren't part of the holding of the case and which, therefore, carry little legal weightthen it may surprise you to learn the question of whether all-natural skim milk is skim milk actually go to the heart of the case in question.

The case, Ocheesee Creamery v. Putnam, has its roots in 2012, when Florida's state agriculture department ordered Ocheesee, a small creamery in the state's panhandle, to stop selling its skim milk. The state claimed Ocheesee's skim milk ran afoul of Florida's standard of identity for skim milk, which requires creameries and dairies to add vitamin A to their skim milk.

In response, Ocheesee, which prides itself on its all-natural milks, proposed instead of introducing vitamin A additive to its milk to label its skim milk as "Pasteurized Skim Milk, No Vitamin A Added."

The state rejected that label, telling Ocheesee they could sell their skim milk only if it were labeled as "Non-Grade 'A' Milk Product, Natural Milk Vitamins Removed" or, later, as "imitation skim milk." For a state that argued it was in the business of protecting consumers, and that Ocheesee's use of the term "skim milk" to describe its skim milk (ingredients: skim milk) was misleading, it's worth noting both of Florida's recommended terms for a skim milk that contains only skim milk are patently and grossly misleading.

Ocheesee was forced to sue the state. Last year, the U.S. District Court sided with the Florida regulators.

The appeals court win this week is an important victory not just for Ocheesee Creamery but also for free speech, consumers, small businesses, and food freedom. It's also a big win for the Institute for Justice, which represented the plaintiff creamery.

"This decision is a total vindication for Ocheesee Creamery and a complete rejection of the Florida Department of Agriculture's suppression of speech," said Justin Pearson, a senior IJ attorney, in a statement this week. "Today, thanks to the 11th Circuit, [Ocheesee owner] Mary Lou [Wesselhoeft] is no longer denied her First Amendment right to tell the truth."

I served as an expert witness for Ocheesee Creamery in the casewriting an expert report and testifying in a deposition on its behalfand describe the case in some detail in my book, Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable. Like Pearson, I couldn't be happier with the outcome of the 11th Circuit case.

The intervention of one of America's largest dairy lobbies into the case in support of the Florida regulationswhich I wrote about in Septemberis one interesting facet of the case.

"Food processors, such as Ocheesee, who choose not to replenish essential nutrients to the standardized level, must label those products as 'imitation,'" the International Dairy Foods Association argued.

Thankfully, the 11th Circuit Court saw otherwise.

As I've argued for yearsand first argued in a 2012 column herefood labels should be open "to any and all statements that aren't demonstrably false."

Use of terms like "natural," "almond milk," and "Just Mayo" on food labels are not the least bit misleading. Government efforts to stifle such speech and to rewrite the meaning of common dictionary terms to fit government ends are draconian, Machiavellian, Orwellian, and all sorts of other bad things ending in the suffix "-ian."

What's next for the Ocheesee case? I suspect Florida will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take up its appeal of the case. That's when things could get even more interesting.

If the U.S. Supreme Court decides not to hear Florida's appeal, then the 11th Circuit Court's ruling will be the law of the land in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, the three states within the court's jurisdiction. On the other hand, if the Supreme Court chooses to take up the casea distinct possibilityand to uphold the 11th Circuit's rulinganother distinct possibilitythen many state and federal standards of identity could rightly be in peril. The FDA's own requirements for skim milkwhich form the basis for Florida's standardcould be challenged.

But even if Florida doesn't appeal, or the Supreme Court decides the time isn't ripe to hear the Ocheesee case now, the toothpaste may already out of the tube. That's because the 11th Circuit ruling covering three adjoining statesFlorida, Alabama, and Georgiameans some enterprising dairy could begin transporting skim milk across state lines from one of those three states to another of those three states. As soon as the milk crossed state lines, it would be in violation of FDA rules, which govern interstate commerce.

Now suppose the FDA were to seize those shipments in interstate commerce. Where might a Florida, Alabama, or Georgia dairy or creamery that's been told by the FDA that it's run afoul of agency rules pertaining to the addition of vitamin A to skim milk take its case? More than likely, they'd take it to U.S. District Court in Florida, Alabama, or Georgia, federal courts which are bound by the precedent established by the 11th Circuitassuming the same facts are in evidenceand, I suspect, rule against the FDA. Of course, the FDA would appeal such a ruling. Who would hear the appeal? The 11th Circuit, the same court that just ruled against the Florida regulations.

Free speech won an important victory this week. Thanks to this win, I'm optimistic Florida's skim milk rules are the first of many similar ones that will fall in the coming months and years.

See more here:
Appeals Court Embraces Free Speech, Rules Skim Milk is 'Skim Milk ... - Reason (blog)

Documentary filmmaker Rob Montz produced a short last year which focused on free speech at Brown University.

Now, Montz has created a sequel which focuses on Yale and the incident at Silliman College which we covered extensively,Yale SJW Student to Professor: I want your job to be taken from you:

Last fall at Yale University, an administrator and professor named Nicholas Christakis, Master of Silliman College at Yale was confronted by a mob of angry students over a nontroversy regarding Halloween costumes and cultural appropriation. Christakis and his wife, who also worked at the school, ultimately resigned over this.

We covered the story, see here and here.

New videos of the confrontation have been posted online by Tablet Magazine which shed new light on the situation. It was much worse than anyone knew.

Although Montz focuses on Yale, he makes a broader point which applies to campuses across the country. He acknowledges this in the description of the film on YouTube:

This documentary focuses on Yale, but it has implications for colleges nationwide. With incidents from Brown to Middlebury to Berkeley, universities are grappling with issues of free speech and free expression amidst student demands for inclusive environments as well as students and administrators who are afraid to say anything controversial or interesting for fear it will negatively affect their job prospects. With numerous concerned students too afraid to speak on record in the documentary, the silence is deafening.

Montz suggests that the entire point of the university has been corrupted by this social justice warrior culture and that schools are expanding their administrations in order to cater to it.

Intellectual Takeout describes the video this way:

Documentary on Yale Reveals How Scary U.S. Campuses Have Become

We have written a lot about the suppression of free speech on campuses and touched on some of the things that have gone on at Yale.

But I have seen nothing better on this front than the 12-minute YouTube video I watched this morning, We the Internet TVs short documentary Silence U Part 2: What has Yale Become? Its the follow-up to its 2016 viral hit Silence U: Is the University Killing Free Speech and Open Debate?

The new documentary explores Yales infamous attempt to tell students what types of Halloween costumes were appropriate for students, and the fallout that ensued when one faculty member asked if such a policy was really necessary.

This is a little over 12 minutes long and worth watching in full:

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Featured image via YouTube.

See the article here:
VIDEO: Yale SJWs gone wild against free speech - legal Insurrection (blog)

By SherAli Tareen || Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

The controversy over the recent Flemming Rose lecture at F&M highlights certain vexing conundrums over the problem of free speech on campus, especially as they intersect with questions of religion, race, and minority sensibilities. In an opinion piece published in this paper, Professor Matt Hoffman (the primary organizer of the event) sought to shed light on the question: why is it that of all people he could have invited to talk about free speech, he chose in particular Flemming Rose, a central figure of the 2005 Danish cartoon controversy. Remember, this question did not originate with Professor Hoffman; it was raised to him in anguish and pain by a female Muslim student protesting at the door of an event that to her represented an affront to her religious sensibilities. It is debatable whether Professor Hoffman addressed this question adequately. But his explanation does offer a useful opportunity for reflecting on some of the conceptual shortcomings with dominant strands of the free speech discourse at F&M.

At the heart of the problem in much of the conversation surrounding free speech on campus (as exemplified by Professor Hoffmans response) is a failure and refusal to think through questions of context and power. Free speech is not an ideal that hangs suspended in the sky. It is exercised, negotiated, and at times imposed in specific contexts and under particular relations of power. Who has the power and authority to decide what forms of speech and offence are permissible and what forms are not? Whose desires, experiences, and normative viewpoints inform that decision? Whose logics and views are privileged? A careful consideration of these questions is critical to nuancing the conversation on free speech in a manner that is not imprisoned to the facile binary of ban speech/celebrate free speech through offense. The point is not to ban any speaker or viewpoint and neither is it to stifle difficult or uncomfortable conversations. The larger point is this: there is no universal consensus on what constitutes offence and moral injury. And the free speech principle of say what you wish so long as you dont break the law by its nature privileges majoritarian priorities and sensibilities. The law, with its foremost concern for maintaining public order, cannot help but prioritize the normative expectations and pressures of the majority population. Back to Rose, it is precisely this haughty indifference towards any attempt to entertain a different logic of offense and pain that does not fit a dominant liberal secular narrative that is at the crux of the issue.

The final paragraph of Professor Hoffmans letter captures this point to great effect. In the course of apologizing to students who may have been hurt by the lecture, Professor Hoffman proceeded to suggest that only if these students had not let their emotions primarily guide them and had they read Roses book, they would have been better able to grapple with his [Roses] words, ideas, and arguments. A rather peculiar apology this is. The exhortation to jettison emotion in favor of dispassionate reading has all the trappings of the colonizers demand that the native abandon her irrational attachment to emotion and embrace the light of reason and civilization. This patronizing gesture is both conceptually clumsy and deeply condescending. Only if these emotionally overpowered Muslims read Roses writings, they would realize that their rage is misplaced; it may even dawn on them that Rose is in fact an advocate of their rights and freedoms. This seems to be the suggestion here.

Lurking in this suggestion is a dismissal of the legitimacy of the pain and injury felt by Muslim and other minority students who protested on the evening of the lecture. By diagnosing their pain as a symptom of emotional excess, Professor Hoffman attributes that pain to a condition of false judgment that can (must?) be treated with the proper dosage of liberal knowledge and reason. This kind of a framing hinges on an equally problematic binary between the virtue of secular reason enshrined in the right to satire and offend and religious emotion that supposedly prevents unlettered souls from enjoying the fruits of that virtue. The inadequacy of such a framing also explains Professor Hoffmans bafflement at the sight of protesting Muslim students who were unprepared to eagerly embrace the protocols of liberal discipline.

A blind faith in free speech precludes one from considering the secular theology operative in the expectation that Muslims should after all not be so offended by caricatures or cartoons of the Prophet. As anthropologist Saba Mahmood has best argued, at work in this demand is a secular ideology of language. According to this secular language ideology, as she explains it, since signs are only arbitrarily connected to what they represent, a rational person should be able to distinguish images and icons from the actual figures they represent. Hence, since an image of Muhammad is not really Muhammad just like an image of Jesus is not really Jesus; a rational believer ought to be able to distinguish images of these sacred figures from their actual personhood. This seemingly secular position is in fact deeply embedded in and indebted to quintessential modern Protestant/colonial assumptions regarding authentic religion that continue to inspire varied strands of secular humanist thought. The suggestion that Muslims ought not take cartoons of Muhammad too seriously rests on the assumption that since the true locus of religion is in the interior of a person and because religion is ultimately a matter of choice, a properly modern subject must have the capacity to separate inner belief from the external world of objects, images, and materiality.

This impoverished understanding of religion can only show bemusement towards alternative logics of life whereby venerating a figure like Muhammad is not just a matter of choice consigned to the privacy of inner belief. For many Muslims, Muhammad represents the most intimate moral exemplar and model for inhabiting the world: bodily, ethically, and materially. Venerating Muhammad above all represents a quest for cohabiting the body of the Prophet. This means striving to cultivate a pious and virtuous self through a rigorous regime of imitating intimate details of Muhammads life and example, as if by cohabiting his body. The cohabitation of the Prophets body does not follow the modern liberal imperative of distinguishing between the inner essence of religion (belief) that is protected by law and its external manifestations that are entirely available for offense and injury.

In no way unique to Islam or Muslims, this idea of cohabitation might help us better appreciate the forms of reasoning that animate the pain and moral injury caused by satirical cartoons of Muhammad. To be clear, my point here is not to explain or demystify Muslim responses to satirical representations of Muhammad or to homogenize such responses. Readers who reacted to all this with the objection but not all Muslims were offended by the cartoons or but there were Muslims who did not protest that evening and happily listened to the speaker will have missed the entire point. The point is this: framing this issue in terms of a standoff between liberal free speech and religious taboo/sensitivity is singularly unhelpful. This is so because the principle of free speech is enwrapped in a set of deeply problematic normative assumptions regarding the proper place and form of religion in the modern world. And it is precisely the refusal to interrogate or to critically evaluate these assumptions that generate diagnoses of pain and moral injury as the product of misplaced emotional outburst, as in Professor Hoffmans apology of sorry not sorry.

The broader context in which this lecture took place is also critically important to consider. To begin with, just how thoughtful is Flemming Rose is wholly debatable. The evidence of his writings reveals at best a tabloid thinker with a rather unsophisticated and yawningly repetitive insistence on a classic liberal conception of offense as a pillar of free speech. There is little in his work to suggest any sustained theoretical reflection on or engagement with questions of power, histories of colonialism, race, religion, or any attempt to even hint at let alone address, his white privilege. We do the intellectual standards of this college no favor with such speakers whose underlying attraction is tethered to their provocateur shock value. There are many other scholars, from a range of ideological backgrounds, who have written about free speech and about the Danish cartoon controversy more specifically, in far more thoughtful and nuanced ways. But to give the podium to Flemming Rose, who rose to fame precisely through insulting Islam and Muslims, during a moment when the Muslim community in this country confronts an incessant barrage of vitriol, bigotry, and violence, is, to put it mildly, astonishing. The irony involved in the fact that in an event on free speech, student protestors were not allowed to display signs inside the auditorium, as non-uniformed (likely armed) security officers monitored their movement, cannot be more telling.

There was one beautiful aspect to this event: the way in which some members of the Black Student Union came together with Muslim students in solidarity to speak some truth to power. These students made us proud but I am not sure whether their voices were adequately heard. Indeed, while some both within and outside the college may celebrate the Flemming Rose lecture as a shining example of F&Ms commitment to free speech, for many others, including those among the most vulnerable in our community, this event was but a painful reminder of the marginality of their voices.

SherAli Tareen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. His email is sherali.tareen@fandm.edu.

Read more:
Op-Ed: Complicating the free speech discourse at F&M and beyond - The College Reporter

BLOOMINGTON Legislation co-sponsored by state Rep. Dan Brady would create a Campus Free Speech Act requiring public colleges and universities in Illinois to adopt policies on free expression to protect the free speech rights of invited speakers.

The measure, House Bill 2939, was introduced last month by state Rep. Peter Breen, R-Lombard, and is based on but not identical to a model bill developed by a conservative research organization, the Goldwater Institute. About a half dozen other states are considering similar bills.

A hearing on the bill is scheduled for 4 p.m. Wednesday before the House Higher Education Committee.

Brady, a Bloomington Republican, said he became chief co-sponsor because he agrees with the intent of protecting our free speech and ability to express that message.

I think for all of our universities to be responsible for having on their books a protocol and policy for freedom of speech is a good thing, Brady said.

The model legislation was developed in the wake of several incidents on campuses across the country in which protesters disrupted talks by controversial speakers or invitations to such speakers were withdrawn.

The legislation also was inspired by situations in which colleges limited the ability of students to protest or distribute literature.

One such incident occurred in 2015 at the College of DuPage, where students handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution were confronted by a security officer because they had not obtained a permit from officials.

Breen said, This is something that continues to come up nationally and within my own district, which includes the College of DuPage.

Although Breen based his initial bill on the Goldwater Institute's model, he is filing an amendment to revise parts of it after consulting with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

Among other things, the changes would remove references to sanctions for infringing on the rights of others to listen or engage in free expression. The original bill stated that a student infringing on such rights would be suspended for a minimum of one year for a second offense and included financial damages of at least $1,000.

Illinois State University spokesman Eric Jome said ISU has policies and practices that cover most of what's in the bill.

Although Schroeder Plaza on the north side of the quad tends to be the site of many demonstrations because of its openness and visible location, ISU doesn't have specific speech zones, said Jome.

The student conduct code states that students are free to assemble and to express their free speech in a peaceful and orderly manner but that disrupting or obstructing activities or inciting others to do so is a violation of the code.

Jome noted that ISU President Larry Dietz has talked about being respectful of other people's opinion and people's right to express themselves.

But Jonathan Butcher, education director of the Goldwater Institute, said that hasn't been the case everywhere.

Butcher, who helped develop the model legislation, said there have been a number of incidents where protesters have tried to silence others. This is the crux of it.

He cited a case earlier this month at Middlebury College in Vermont where chanting demonstrators prevented a controversial speaker from delivering a talk.

You can yell when it's your turn, Butcher said, but civil society depends on the ability of people to express themselves.

Butcher said the Goldwater Institute is a Phoenix-based research institution, founded in 1988, that works to protect individual liberties and constitutional rights. Butcher categorized it as conservative.

Butcher said universities should be places where you can have debate about uncomfortable things and it is wrong when you forcibly stop someone else from speaking.

He said, We need to educate students on what it means to protect the First Amendment.

Follow Lenore Sobota on Twitter: @pg_sobota

Link:
Bill would create Campus Free Speech Act | Local Education ... - Bloomington Pantagraph