Monthly Archives: September 2021

Stop Bill C-36

Help us stop the world's worst censorship law!

Country AfghanistanAlbaniaAlgeriaAmerican SamoaAndorraAngolaAnguillaAntarcticaAntigua and BarbudaArgentinaArmeniaArubaAustraliaAustriaAzerbaijanBahamasBahrainBangladeshBarbadosBelarusBelgiumBelizeBeninBermudaBhutanBoliviaBonaire, Sint Eustatius and SabaBosnia and HerzegovinaBotswanaBouvet IslandBrazilBritish Indian Ocean TerritoryBrunei DarussalamBulgariaBurkina FasoBurundiCambodiaCameroonCanadaCape VerdeCayman IslandsCentral African RepublicChadChileChinaChristmas IslandCocos (Keeling) IslandsColombiaComorosCongoCongo, the Democratic Republic of theCook IslandsCosta RicaCroatiaCubaCuraaoCyprusCzech RepublicCte d'IvoireDenmarkDjiboutiDominicaDominican RepublicEcuadorEgyptEl SalvadorEquatorial GuineaEritreaEstoniaEthiopiaFalkland Islands (Malvinas)Faroe IslandsFijiFinlandFranceFrench GuianaFrench PolynesiaFrench Southern TerritoriesGabonGambiaGeorgiaGermanyGhanaGibraltarGreeceGreenlandGrenadaGuadeloupeGuamGuatemalaGuernseyGuineaGuinea-BissauGuyanaHaitiHeard Island and McDonald IslandsHoly See (Vatican City State)HondurasHong KongHungaryIcelandIndiaIndonesiaIran, Islamic Republic ofIraqIrelandIsle of ManIsraelItalyJamaicaJapanJerseyJordanKazakhstanKenyaKiribatiKuwaitKyrgyzstanLao People's Democratic RepublicLatviaLebanonLesothoLiberiaLibyaLiechtensteinLithuaniaLuxembourgMacaoMadagascarMalawiMalaysiaMaldivesMaliMaltaMarshall IslandsMartiniqueMauritaniaMauritiusMayotteMexicoMicronesia, Federated States ofMoldova, Republic ofMonacoMongoliaMontenegroMontserratMoroccoMozambiqueMyanmarNamibiaNauruNepalNetherlandsNew CaledoniaNew ZealandNicaraguaNigerNigeriaNiueNorfolk IslandNorth KoreaNorth Macedonia, Republic ofNorthern Mariana IslandsNorwayOmanPakistanPalauPalestine, State ofPanamaPapua New GuineaParaguayPeruPhilippinesPitcairnPolandPortugalPuerto RicoQatarRomaniaRussian FederationRwandaRunionSaint BarthlemySaint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da CunhaSaint Kitts and NevisSaint LuciaSaint Martin (French part)Saint Pierre and MiquelonSaint Vincent and the GrenadinesSamoaSan MarinoSao Tome and PrincipeSaudi ArabiaSenegalSerbiaSeychellesSierra LeoneSingaporeSint Maarten (Dutch part)SlovakiaSloveniaSolomon IslandsSomaliaSouth AfricaSouth Georgia and the South Sandwich IslandsSouth KoreaSouth SudanSpainSri LankaSudanSurinameSvalbard and Jan MayenSwazilandSwedenSwitzerlandSyrian Arab RepublicTaiwanTajikistanTanzania, United Republic ofThailandTimor-LesteTogoTokelauTongaTrinidad and TobagoTunisiaTurkeyTurkmenistanTurks and Caicos IslandsTuvaluUgandaUkraineUnited Arab EmiratesUnited KingdomUnited StatesUnited States Minor Outlying IslandsUruguayUzbekistanVanuatuVenezuela, Bolivarian Republic ofViet NamVirgin Islands, BritishVirgin Islands, U.S.Wallis and FutunaWestern SaharaYemenZambiaZimbabweland Islands

Secure

Help fund our 2021 Canadian election coverage and view our election plans below!

Justin Trudeau told media that Canadians don't have the freedom to hate during a press conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia this morning.

The prime minister was nearly one hour late for the event, which included appearances by fellow Liberal Party of Canada candidates Andy Fillmore, Bernadette Jordan and Dominic LeBlanc.

A reporter asked Trudeau:

On another topic, we seem to be seeing more hate [and] vandalism along the campaign trail, and now this latest example of your candidate, Marc Serr, who was physically assaulted. I'm wondering if you're sending a message to candidates and volunteers to step up safety or security considerations.

Serr was allegedly assaulted in his campaign office on Monday. A woman has since been charged with assault with a weapon related to the incident.

In response, Trudeau stated:

Absolutely. Um, people need to be safe. People need to feel safe in Canada, and over the past years, unfortunately, we've seen a rise in intolerance and hates of hatred, not just in a political context, but across the country.

That is why we need to continue to be unequivocal about standing up against hatred and discrimination. As we have as a government, as we need to continue to.

There's not a debate around vaccines, there's not a debate around climate change, we know for the safety of Canadians and future generations we need to step up. It is unacceptable there continue to be acts of racism and intolerance in communities across the country, whether it's political or not. We need to do more, which is why we're going to be moving forward on stronger controls over online hate, and harms, while respecting freedom of speech.

But you don't have the freedom to hate, you don't have the freedom to incite to violence, and our government, that is taken many steps on this, will continue to, because no one should feel unsafe, particularly not someone who's coming out to volunteer and support in a political campaign to make this country even better.

Section 318 of our Criminal Code makes it a crime to advocate for genocide; Section 319 makes it a crime to incite hatred, but hatred is a feeling, a human emotion.

And Trudeau's Bill C-36 goes much, much further.

Read more about Bill C-36 here.

Read the original here:
Trudeau on free speech: You don't have the freedom to hate - Rebel News

Disappointment in government brings an otherwise divided country together once again, as Americans lose faith in the state's ability to protect civil liberties. Granted, people are often their own worst enemies, threatening the freedom of those they don't like. But there's a realistic and growing recognition of the danger posed by the powers-that-be, and loss of confidence in their supposed roles as protectors.

"In 2011, 10 years after the terrorist attack, nearly two-thirds were willing to sacrifice rights and freedoms to protect the country from terrorism" finds a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (AP-NORC) poll. More recently, "just over half were willing to surrender their civil rights and freedoms to combat terrorism."

More remarkably, when asked about specific rights, the percentage of the public saying the government does a good job protecting them has declined sharply in the past decade. In 2011, 84 percent of respondents said the U.S. government did a good job protecting the right to vote; that dropped to 43 percent in 2021. For peaceful assembly, the number dropped from 75 percent to 42 percent. For freedom of speech, it dropped from 71 percent to 45 percent. For freedom of religion, from 75 percent to 51 percent. For the right to trial by an impartial jury, from 67 percent to 44 percent. For the right to keep and bear arms, from 57 percent to 35 percent, and so on. In fact, for none of the rights about which people were polled have the numbers done anything but drop in terms of people's confidence about government protections.

Of course, given that everything is subject to partisan considerations, members of the political tribes don't necessarily see eye-to-eye on how well officials respect our rights.

"Democrats tend to see the government as doing a good job at protecting various rights and freedoms, while Republicans are more inclined to say the government is doing a poor job. However, there are no significant partisan differences regarding the right to vote, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, freedom from punishment without trial, equal protection under the law, or freedom from unreasonable search and seizure," AP-NORC adds. Independents, for their part, either split the difference between Republicans and Democrats (such as on freedom of speech and of the press) or are especially dubious about government protections (such as for freedom from punishment without trial and the right to vote).

Of particular interest after the 9/11 attacks and since the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden about the pervasive surveillance that followed is AP-NORC's separate report about plummeting support for such snooping. It seems that government eavesdropping has little in the way of a fan base.

"Twenty years after 9/11, less than 3 in 10 adults consider warrantless government analysis of internet activities and communications an acceptable means for monitoring threats against the U.S.," the poll finds.

Support for government monitoring of domestic phone calls was never high, but has fallen from 23 percent in 2011 to 14 percent in 2021. Support for monitoring phone calls outside the United States fell from 49 percent to 28 percent. Support for monitoring internet searches fell from 48 percent to 27 percent. And, for reading private emails, the numbers fell from 30 percent to 17 percent over those years. Some 60 percent of Americans do, however, continue to favor surveillance cameras in public places, though that's down by more than 10 percent.

It's as if years of intrusiveness, abusive politicians, and weaponization of the power of the state by officials against their political opponents have eroded the credibility of the U.S. government!

Unfortunately, officialdom's unreliability as a guardian of personal freedom doesn't come out of the bluethere's a constituency for that shakiness. For example, multiple polls in recent years have found that, while people voice support for free speech in the abstract, they're not so happy about protecting speech that upsets them.

"'The government should be able to take action against newspapers and TV stations that publish content that is biased, inflammatory, or false," agreed 57 percent of respondents to a 2019 Campaign for Free Speech poll. Never mind that "biased" and "inflammatory" are often in the eye of the beholder and core elements of expression, and "false" is a charge subject to new information and continued debate.

"College students broadly support free speech, yet increasingly favor restrictions on speech particularly speech that targets minority groups," a 2020 Knight Foundation poll found. Forget that minorities are among those most likely to be on the receiving end of speech curbs allegedly crafted for their safety.

Notably, the American Civil Liberties Union has grown extremely ambivalent about defending liberties at odds with its staff's preferred outcomes on issues ranging from speech to medical coercion.

"To the ACLU's critics, its support of vaccine mandates is another sign that an organization that was often willing to take unpopular stances in the name of liberty has abandoned its roots to fall in line with progressivism," The Atlantic's Russell Berman commented last week.

Much of the public has simply lost patience with checks and balances that, by design, shield liberties by placing limits on the power of their preferred officials.

"While fewer than one in 10 Americans consistently supports an authoritarian option, a third of Americans 'dabble' in authoritarianism," the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group observed last year of popular support for "a strong leader who doesn't have to bother with Congress or elections."

Many people rightly doubt the credibility of government as a protector of civil liberties, but the public is sending very mixed messages about the value it places on freedom and on restrained power. To defend civil liberties only when you approve of their use, and if they don't get in the way of your favorite political leaders, is to not defend civil liberties at all.

But, whether or not they understand the implications, growing numbers of Americans are unimpressed by the protections the U.S. government offers for civil liberties across the board. They want government officials to back off their surveillance efforts, at home and abroad, and they're less willing than in the past to trade their freedom for empty promises.

More here:
Government Is Lousy at Protecting Civil Liberties, Say Americans - Reason

Even when it doesnt improperly interfere in academic searches and tenure files, some kinds of donor funding routinely threaten academic freedom in a range of ways.

In his 1871 volume, The Conduct of Life, American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson pithily observed that money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap.

While Mr. Emerson intended his remarks more broadly, his words apply to universities and the sometimes deleterious effects of donations on academic freedom. These effects were vividly apparent in 2020 and 2021 in the cases of Nikole Hannah-Jones and Valentina Azarova.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is the Pulitzer and MacArthur-winning creator of the New York Timess The 1619 Project. In spring of this year, she was named as the new University of North Carolina (UNC) Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, but it soon emerged that, unlike previous Knight Chairs, Ms. Hannah-Jones would not be tenured. Ultimately, Ms. Hannah-Jones opted to join Howard University rather than UNC when it emerged that outside pressure interfered with her appointment. UNCs tenure committee had recommended tenure for Ms. Hannah-Jones, but the universitys board of trustees, under pressure from conservative donors in particular, UNC School of Journalism and Media namesake and major donor Walter Hussman did not implement the recommendation.

Here in Canada, similar issues arose when the University of Toronto law schools appointment of Valentina Azarova as director of its international human rights program came to an abrupt halt. This happened just as a major donor shared concerns about the appointment with a U of T assistant vice-president who handles donor relations. The university claims that the law school canceled the hire because of immigration and timeline challenges, but considerable evidence suggested that the underlying reason was donor pushback due to Ms. Azarovas published criticisms of Israel. An independent review endorsed the universitys position, but critics pointed out that the reviewer declined to judge the credibility of university officials claims or their consistency with other evidence. In April of this year, the Canadian Association of University Teachers issued a rare censure of U of T for failing to uphold academic freedom in the case.

Its clear that the UNC board caved to donors in the Ms. Hannah-Jones case. The immigration issues make the Azarova case a little murkier. However, the former dean who abruptly nixed Ms. Azarovas appointment over a Labour Day long weekend did so just after learning about the donors concerns. Further, a U of T administrator gave the concerned donor confidential information about the search process as this was all going down. It is crucial for academic freedom that universities avoid both donor influence on hires and the appearance of donor influence on hires. At a minimum, U of T failed to do the latter.

While breaches of academic freedom, collegial governance and institutional autonomy in cases like these are deeply troubling, I am even more worried by the ways in which donor funds can threaten academic freedom in the normal course of things that is, when there is no appearance of a scandalous breach.

The bankrolling of charitable foundations by petroleum billionaires Charles and (the late) David Koch provides the clearest example of how philanthropy can threaten academic freedom. This plays out in funding for advocacy, journalism and scholarship that is strategically calculated to (as the group UnKoch My Campus puts it) place private interests over the common good.

Free speech is an extremely broad notion, extending to unscholarly and even bad-faith speech, while academic freedom exists to support research and teaching in the pursuit of truth and understanding in the service of society. In the domain of advocacy, the Koch foundations fund a range of different initiatives calculated to conflate academic freedom and free speech, and indeed to heavily prioritize free speech over academic freedom within the context of universities.

Perhaps most concerning among these is the Koch-funded Goldwater Institutes campaign to introduce campus free speech legislation across the U.S. The model bill developed by the Goldwater Institute purports to strengthen free speech on campus, but its approach undercuts academic freedom and institutional autonomy in a range of ways, including dictating university policy and forcing universities to remain neutral on public policy controversies.

By way of illustration of a public policy controversy, the model bills authors offer fossil fuel divestment. They write that university divestment violates institutional neutrality, as does pressure to divest from university sustainability offices. And yes, it is pretty on-the-nose for a putative free speech bill funded by oil billionaires to explicitly rule out fossil fuel divestment. Lets be clear: silencing criticism about fossil fuel investments is a feature, not a bug. Further, the model bill is highly punitive, laying out disciplinary sanctions for students who protest speakers and legal payouts for colleges that dont toe the line. All of this is calculated to have a chilling effect on dissent.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reported in early 2018 that 16 states had either introduced or passed campus free speech legislation or had introduced campus free speech measures without legislation. Of these, half were based on the Goldwater model bill. The AAUP decries campus free speech laws as a false friend of academic freedom and as a political agenda masquerading behind free speech.

Another organization that receives substantial Koch funding is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). FIRE is sometimes hailed as a champion of academic freedom, and often provides supports to scholars whose academic freedom is violated, but thats not their stated purpose. The Mission page on FIREs website mentions freedom of speech/expression eight times and discusses it, along with religious freedom, due process and freedom of conscience, in some detail. But the webpage does not once mention academic freedom. Further, FIRE explicitly frames its purpose in terms of students and professors individual rights, whereas the AAUP arguably, the most important and longest-serving English-language champion of academic freedom focuses on academic freedom in support of the common good. Perhaps unsurprisingly, FIRE has supported several of the state-level campus free speech bills in a range of ways from endorsement to drafting assistance.

When Koch money isnt underwriting the false friendship between free speech and academic freedom through donations to advocacy groups like the Goldwater Institute or FIRE, it is whipping up free speech panic in the media. In particular, the Koch Foundation was one of three major funders for the Atlantics series The Speech Wars. The project ran from March 2018 to October 2019. Over that period, it published an astonishing 118 articles with the support of The Speech Wars funding. One hundred and eighteen! Did you even know that the Atlantic published 118 articles on any topic during that eighteen-month period, much less 118 articles on free speech? The Speech Wars made the Atlantic a leftish bastion of publishing respectability into the main PR firm for the alleged free speech crisis.

Only 20 (or about 17 per cent) of these articles were primarily about free speech on campus, but the others often touched on campus issues. Frankly, whatever the focus of the other articles, 20 articles over 18 months on campus free speech topics in a prestigious large-circulation magazine is a very large megaphone.

Those 20 campus free speech articles offered a broad range of perspectives, many of which defended campuses against the charge of being in the grip of a free speech crisis. It was clear throughout the project that the Koch funding did not oblige authors to take any particular perspective or draw Koch-friendly conclusions. So whats the harm?

The harm of The Speech Wars was in convincing the public that there is a speech war: a free speech crisis sufficiently grave as to warrant 118 articles in a single publication over the course of a year and a half. Why would a general interest magazine spend so much time on the free speech crisis if no such crisis exists? One pretty clear answer is that they were generously paid to do so. The effect however was increased public credulity in the idea of a free speech crisis, that credulity in turn reducing the publics trust in universities.

In the same way, Koch (and similar) funding for research grants, workshops and conferences produces credulity, interest and activity in related scholarly areas by university researchers and administrators. Lets face it. Funding is scarce for many universities and university researchers. Donor support for research is increasingly necessary to survive in the research landscape. Donors have the right to fund topics they are interested in, and university scholars have the right to pursue external funding opportunities to advance their research. As a dean, I am incredibly grateful for the donor support my faculty and its members receive. However, donor support can tug entire disciplines, departments and institutions in scholarly directions that they would not otherwise have pursued. This gives industry and wealthy philanthropists an outsized influence on the kind of scholarship that happens.

External funding for universities and university researchers also gives the donor the imprimatur of scholarly respectability. Since I started writing publicly about academic freedom, I have several times been invited to write or present something for Koch-funded projects. Typically, with these sorts of groups, the Koch funding is buried pretty deep. (The Koch-funded FIRE, for instance, doesnt list its funders on its website or publications. It received about $12 million in donations in 2020.) As a matter of principle, I wont knowingly work with Koch-funded organizations, so Ive gotten into the habit of researching the funding sources of any group that contacts me.

I do this even though every such invitation I have ever received has been very clear that I could argue for any position I like no strings attached. Alas, thats not where the strings are. For many years, a favourite strategy of young Earth creationist organizations was to foster the appearance of an academic controversy over evolutionary theory and the age of the Earth by sponsoring public debates with scientists, many of them held at universities. These donor-funded events didnt prevent scientist participants from saying what they pleased. The aim was simply to have the optics of a genuine debate: two equal parties on the same stage. Further, sponsoring a wide range of dissenting views makes Koch foundations seem innocuous even while they pay big bucks to fuel free speech panic and thereby undercut academic freedom and university autonomy.

In sum, then, even when donors dont improperly interfere in academic searches and tenure files, some kinds of donor funding routinely threaten academic freedom in a range of ways. Things are a bit better in Canada, thanks to public funding, strong faculty unions, good university policies and frankly less attention from the big U.S. funders. But what happens in the U.S. always has ripple effects here. Consider, for instance, the campus free speech interventions by the Ontario, Alberta and Qubec governments.

Ill devote my next column to some proposed solutions to the challenge that I have described here. In the meantime, what is the real cost of donations when it comes to academic freedom? In the marketplace of ideas, if you have to ask, you cant afford it.

See the rest here:
The high price of donations - University Affairs

Students of all persuasions are afraid to speak up in the classroom (Pic: Getty Creative)

More than half of college students regularly hold back on expressing their views on campus for fear of the potential consequences.

But, contrary to the stereotype of universities as hotbeds of militant liberalism, it is not just conservatives who are scared to speak out: students across the political spectrum worry about what will happen if they share their views.

As well as losing the respect of professors and classmates and jeopardizing their grades, students also fear being confronted if their political and social views become widely-known.

Issues around free speech in universities have become increasingly heated in recent years, despite the relatively small number of incidents.

Fuelled by high-profile incidents of speakers being disinvited or cancelled, conventional wisdom has it that university campuses are not just overwhelmingly left-wing, but are actively hostile to conservative points of view.

Concerns about students and academics becoming fearful of speaking out have prompted both the creation of organizations set up to defend free speech on campus and proposals in the U.K. to give universities a legal duty to protect freedom of speech.

But anxiety over expressing political views cuts across the spectrum, according to a new survey.

While 55% of conservative-leaning students say they always or often refrain from speaking out on political or social issues in the classroom, this is only slightly more than the 49% of liberal-leaning students who did likewise.

Perhaps most surprisingly, even students who classed themselves as moderate were afraid to express an opinion, with 52% saying they stopped themselves from speaking out.

Rather than suggesting a liberal bias on campus, the findings indicate that many students are uncomfortable with the idea of disagreeing, according to James L. Patterson, associate professor of politics at Ava Maria University in Florida, who has also taught in liberal-leaning institutions.

I find that many students simply have no idea how to disagree constructively, or even if constructive disagreement is possible, he said. Students seem to believe that disagreement is taking sides.

Hence, they can only imagine that the potential consequences will be, at minimum, to alienate some of their fellow students. At worst, they might end up fodder for some kind of social media-driven ostracization.

Students need to be taught to understand that there are different opinions on how to tackle a particular issue, he added.

Conservative students were the most likely to be concerned about their physical safety if they expressed their views openly, but only slightly more so than liberal students. Even among moderates a third said this was a concern.

More important for all three groups was the risk of losing their classmates respect. Conservative students were also more likely to fear losing their professors respect, while liberal and moderate students were more worried about being ridiculed or confronted over their views.

John J. Lupinacci, associated professor of cultural studies and social thought in education at Washington State university, it is up to the professor to make students of all persuasions feel comfortable about speaking out in the classroom.

I think the more educators allow for spaces that welcome a diversity of perspectives and then provide tools for how to consider and value multiple perspectives as part of our education, the more our students will more openly share their questions, ideas, and beliefs, he said.

Students should have the space to learn through making mistakes or talking through their beliefs and assumptions, he added.

While the campaign against campus culture is often led from the right, it is conservative students who are most open-minded about listening to opposing views.

Almost seven in 10 (68%) of conservative students said they would definitely or probably take a class taught by a professor who had different political or social beliefs, compared with six in 10 (59%) of both liberal and moderate students, according to the survey of 1,500 students carried out for student advice and information site Intelligent.com.

Conservative students were also more likely (64% to 60%) than liberal students to be willing to attend an on-campus event with a speaker who had different beliefs.

But the fact these differences are small suggests that while the issue of free speech on campus is a live one, it is does not necessarily cut across the ideological divide in the way it is sometimes portrayed.

See the article here:
Its Not Just Conservative Students Who Are Scared To Speak Out On Campus - Forbes