David T. Beito
The same process seems to be occurring with Stanley Fish, the author of the infamous There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing Too.
Over at the Torch, Alan Kors gives some historical background on the Stanley Fish makeover. .
Now, a dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Fish recently defended Ward Churchill's free speech outside the classroom. He commented that “Political persuasion is just not what is supposed to go on in the college classroom, even though it may be going on—and going on legitimately—at the noontime rally or in dormitory bull sessions.” He also said that “It is not the job of a senior administrator either to approve or disapprove of what a faculty member writes in a nonuniversity publication.”
Back in 1998, however, Fish wrote chillingly:
Kors concludes:
The correct response to a vision or a morality that you despise is not to try and cure it or to make its adherents sit down and read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, that’s not going to do the job. The only way to fight hate speech or racist speech is to recognize it as the speech of your enemy and what you do in response to the speech of your enemy is not prescribe a medication for it but attempt to stamp it out. [emphasis added] So long as Critical Race Theory and others fall into the liberal universalist assumption of regarding hate speech as some kind of anomaly which could be recognized as such by everyone, they’re going to lose the game. They will win the game only if they really try to win it, rather than falling in with Justice Brandeis’ pronouncement that ‘Sunshine is the best disinfectant.’”
Sad stuff. Once he became an administrator, the careerist Fish simply ended the embarrassment of defending partisan speech codes, fending off issues of principle with denials that the issue was relevant to current academic practice.....FIRE’s motto always has been the dictum of Justice Louis Brandeis, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant."....I, for one, prefer preserved Brandeis to rotting Fish. The University of Illinois at Chicago will have an annual Stanley Fish lecture in his honor. To do justice to Fish, it should shed darkness over moral issues, promote careerism and politics over substance and the search for knowledge, and be reserved for unprincipled chameleons.
Charles W. Nuckolls
After writing the column I assumed I would receive the usual mixed number of pro and con e-mail responses that accompany my weekly endeavors. Boy was I wrong.
On an average week I normally receive 10-12 e-mail messages, however this week I was bombarded with more than 50 responses from 13 states. The amazing aspect is that only two people opposed what I had written in defense of Professor Bean.
Based on the e-mail I've received in the past few days it appears I'm not alone in my disdain for the tolerance police. Last week I wrote a column about the attempted character assassination of SIU history professor Jonathan Bean currently being conducted on the Carbondale campus by a group of history department radicals.....
Charles W. Nuckolls
Here is the latest entry in the grovelfest from CR officials Amanda Zaluckyj and Karen Hall:
The College Republicans have a tradition of encouraging debate on issues of public interest. In that frame of mind, we discussed initiating a debate on the merits of affirmative action. The club did not support holding a bake sale with discounted prices as a parody of affirmative action, however without proper support, individuals went forward with such a bake sale. To those who were offended by the actions of the bake sale, it is unfortunate that you were offended. However, we respect and welcome your rights to hold and express your views, and ask that you grant others the right to hold and express their views as well. We also recognize there are proper ways to publicly express one’s views, and we apologize that individuals using our club’s name failed to adhere to university policies. [emphasis added] Continuing our tradition of encouraging debate, we look forward to future endeavors that encourage and respect an open dialog on the variety of opinions within the university community.
Jason Kuznicki
I will likely discuss other aspects of Restoring the Lost Constitution in the near future and will of course post links here when I do.
David T. Beito
Witness the paragraph on the Churchill case:
We argue endlessly over the academic freedom of a Ward Churchill -- plagiarist and faker -- as he becomes famous for calling the 3,000 murdered on September 11, 2001,"little Eichmanns." Few in the debate pause, if just for a moment, to think of the thousands of now anonymous Americans blown apart over Berlin or on Okinawa to ensure we can freely embarrass ourselves over this charlatan.
This is trademark Hansonese: glittering on the surface but offering few specifics on hot button issues.
For example, Hanson never says, or hints, whether he supports or opposes Churchill's academic freedom, whether he supports the Academic Bill of Rights, whether he believes tenure should be preserved and how far its protections should extend, whether academic freedom, broadly interpreted, is essential to the health of a good education. Most historians, of course, are equally silent on these issues but as a scholar who has chosen to throw himself into the public arena so forcefully, Hanson owes his readers some answers.
Hanson’s essay becomes more specific when he addresses the failure of historians to teach more about the founders and the great political issues of the past. I agree.
But then he moves onto shakier ground. In trying to make a distinction between the" critical" and"trivial," he betrays his ultimate reverence for the history of the American state, as personified by politicians he admires, over the history of how ordinary individuals ultimately provided the basis for American prosperity:
The history of the pencil, girdle or cartoon offers us less wisdom about events, past and present, than does knowledge of U.S. Grant, the causes of the Great Depression or the miracle of Normandy Beach. A society that cannot distinguish between the critical and the trivial of history predictably will also believe a Scott Peterson merits as much attention as the simultaneous siege of Fallujah, or that a presidential press conference should be pre-empted for Paris Hilton or Donald Trump.
Hanson's disparagement of the"history of the pencil" betrays a worldview that is fundamentally at odds with the tradition of freedom represented by Thomas Jefferson (at his best), Rose Wilder Lane, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Ludwig Von Mises. Unfortunately it is worldview that is rubbing off on libertarians who embrace the Bushian dream of entrusting the American state to bring"liberty" to every corner of the planet.
The contrast with Leonard E. Read's famous essay, "I, Pencil," is especially telling. For Read, the"miracle" of spontaneous order that produced a single pencil was far more significant than a thousand"miracles" of statecraft:
Hat tip, Ralph Luker, who also has some perceptive comments on the Hanson piece.
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that's too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculous ness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Keith Halderman
Now, happily, sometimes efforts at censorship can backfire. Today I received an e-mail telling me that The Los Angles Times, Boston Globe, the Detroit News and Free Press and the San Francisco Chronicle, papers with a combined circulation of 2.9 million readers, have all printed the article in question by Eric Bailey.
The issue of medical cannabis is complicated one for classical liberals. It very well could, as Thomas Szasz and Jeff Schaler fear, contribute to the growth of the therapeutic state or it could, as I hope, make the demonization of marijuana users much more difficult, thereby enabling a policy changing discussion of the arbitrary nature of cannabis prohibition and the folly of treating vices as crimes.
Either way, Bailey’s piece makes two important points. First, there is real relief from pain to be had by smoking marijuana. Perhaps it is a placebo effect in some cases, but so what. If your pain is gone, it is gone, and the state has no right to interfere with whatever process works for the person suffering.
Secondly, he has a quotation from a patient, 94 year old Catherine Ballinger, which nicely illustrates one of the main reasons why government is not a positive good but rather a necessary evil and sometimes I am not really so sure about the necessary part. She says "If those guys in Washington had the pain I suffer they wouldn't put up all these legal barriers for patients to obtain medical marijuana." I ask you , how many additional examples of those in government pursuing policies that harm other people but do not affect themselves could we name?
Charles W. Nuckolls
Steven Horwitz
Hat tip to David Velleman at Left2Right.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
At Notablog, I've posted a few thoughts about how art appreciation is slowly being infected by various shades of"political correctness" coming from both the left and the right.
See"Taking the Ad Hominem Out of Art Appreciation." Comments welcome.
Mark Brady
2:00 AM (EDT) and 11:00 PM (PDT) polls open for the 2005 general election.
5:00 PM (EDT) and 2:00 PM (PDT): Polls close up and down the country. Not only are voters choosing their respective Members of Parliament but voters in England and Northern Ireland are also selecting three mayors and a host of councillors.
Just one minute later the BBC will broadcast the results of an exit poll based on a sample of 13,000 voters from 320 polling stations in marginal constituencies.
The first result of the night is expected by 6:30 PM (EDT) and 3:30 PM (PDT), and perhaps as early as 5:45 PM (EDT) and 2:45 PM (PDT). The race to be first is traditionally intense, with Houghton and Washington East, Sunderland North and Sunderland South likely to be among the contenders. Sunderland South won the race in 1992, 1997 and 2001. The fastest ever count took place at a by-election in 1928 in Ashton-under-Lyne, where the mayor arranged for coloured rockets to be fired from the town hall roof to declare the result. I think I’m correct in saying that the last time a parliamentary election was tied was also in Ashton-under-Lyne—in 1885.
7:00 PM (EDT) and 4:00 PM (PDT). The first trickle of results should turn into a torrent in the next hour, with more than 30 declarations expected at 7:30 PM/4:30 PM alone. First result from Scotland, in Na h-Eileanan an Iar (formerly the Western Isles), expected at 7:01 PM/4:01 PM, and first in Wales, in Islwyn, expected at 7:30 PM/4:30 PM.
8:00 PM (EDT) and 5:00 PM (PDT): By now nearly 150 results should be in, and the likely shape of the next parliament should be clear.
9:00 PM (EDT) and 6:00 PM (PDT): Following a frenetic 60 minutes or so, results should now be in from more than half of the 659 seats being contested.
11:00 PM (EDT) and 8:00 PM (PDT): A surge of late results expected. Carmarthen West and Pembrokeshire South due to be last result declared in Wales.
12:00 AM (EDT) and 9:00 PM (PDT): By now all but a handful of results from the mainland should be in.
8:00 AM (EDT) and 5:00 AM (PDT): Last result in England, the sprawling rural Yorkshire seat of Skipton and Ripon, due.
9:00 AM (EDT) and 6:00 AM (PDT): Last of the mainland constituencies, Argyll and Bute in Scotland, due to declare.
11:00 AM (EDT) and 8:00 AM (PDT): The first of the 18 Northern Ireland constituencies expected to declare. Expect Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party to do well.
4:00 PM (EDT) and 1:00 PM (PDT): The last of the 646 seats, Newry and Armagh, expected to declare.
Strictly speaking, only 645 constituencies will declare tonight and tomorrow. Last Saturday the Liberal Democrat candidate for South Staffordshire died so there will be no election today but a by-election next month.
Sudha Shenoy
To paraphrase Walter Bagehot’s penetrating observations: Government officials now constitute “the _efficient_ parts [of the English constitution] - those by which it, in fact, works & rules.” Elections & Parliament “act as a _disguise._ [They] enable our real rulers to change without heedless people knowing it."
% of electorate (% of Parliamentary seats)
Labour 21.6 (55.1)
Tories 19.8 (30.6)
Liberal Democrats 13.6 (9.6)
All other parties 6.4 (4.7)
Total voting 61.3% (644 seats declared)
Total not voting 38.7%
David T. Beito
I was interviewed by several papers yesterday on the FBI's decision to exhume the body of Emmett Till. Ralph
Luker and others have kindly noted that my wife, Linda Royster Beito, and I have written several articles on the question of whether others were involved in the crime, here and here.
One of the most extended set of quotations appeared in a story that appeared in The Chicago Tribune.
The story was generally fair and accurate and noted our role in finding new information as well as our belief that more than two people took part in the crime. But other parts were disappointing to say the least. Some of my comments were badly managled to give a meaning that was quite different from the one I had intended to convey.
When we spoke yesterday, the reporter raised the issue that one of the FBI's stated reasons for the exhumation was to confirm that it was, in fact, the body of Till. I responded that I dismissed the possibility that it was someone other than Till as"laughable" and wondered why the FBI felt compelled to"prove" an obvious fact.
I stressed that no person of any credibility believes the ludicrous claims of the defense and sheriff at the time that the body was someone other than Till. I noted that even members of the jury, when interviewed a few years after the crime, confided to an investigator they did not believe the defense or sheriff. In fact, they more or less admitted to the investigator that they were not going to convict any white men for such a crime, regardless of whether they were guilty.
The reporter then asked what result could come from an autopsy that would"most surprise" me. I answered that it would be most surprising if it produced evidence leading to a prosecution.
At this point, he volunteered that the greatest surprise would be if the body was not Till's. Such a possibility had not even entered my head! Since he brought it up, however, I said that if the body was someone other than Till, that would be the"ultimate surprise."
Here is how that conversation finally appeared in the story. For the record, I am not (contrary to the implication of the story) against exhuming the body but am skeptical that anything of substance will be discovered:
But, David Beito, a University of Alabama historian who has closely studied the Till case, said he doubts there will ever be new criminal charges and said he doesn't see much point in the exhumation beyond"adding to the historical record." "What if it's not him?" Beito asked."That would be the ultimate surprise." UPDATE: I had a fruitful correspondence with the reporter. It is clear that he did not mean any harm and, in fact, meant to accurately communicate my views on this matter.
Mark Brady
Yes, the Liberal Democrats did vote against committing British troops to fight alongside the U.S. in Iraq—but this was not based on a principled objection to the invasion of a foreign state, rather it arose from their argument that the war was not legal and would need another vote of the UN Security Council to make it legal. The Liberal Democrats also supported the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and every other overseas military intervention of the Blair government, and they've never expressed regrets about any such action.
Yes, the Liberal Democrats have moved away from some of the more interventionist economic policies they advocated in recent years. But a pledge to get the British government"off the back of businesses," an assurance that they"want to cut the red tape that stops businesses from growing," and a promise that"Liberal Democrats will set business free" do not add up to what LaBeaume calls"the most explicitly liberal economic policy in a century."
And, yes, the Liberal Democrats are generally speaking better on civil liberties issues than either New Labour or the most recent reincarnation of the Conservatives under Michael Howard. But this has to be placed in the context of the Liberal Democrat infatuation with the European Union and international human rights law—an altogether less attractive aspect of our modern day Liberals.
In fact the Liberal Democrats have a long way to go before they could plausibly be seen as the true heirs of Cobden and Bright.
Aeon J. Skoble
Aeon J. Skoble
David T. Beito
We are unrelenting in our criticism of the OAH's Committee on Academic Freedom (chaired by David Montgomery) and its failure to address speech codes as a threat to academic freedom and just as unrelenting in our praise for the good work of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
Robert L. Campbell
This will be the last meeting that Roy Klumb gets to preside over before Virginia Shanteau Newton gets control of the agenda. It's pretty clear that Klumb, despite a significant reduction in his public cheerleading for Thames, is using it in one last effort to reaffirm his guy's reign and prepare the way for a 4-year contract extension.
Note how Klumb signals his debts to people he pretends to be independent of. (The State Legislature passed a resolution commending Shelby Thames just in time for the last Board meeting two weeks ago. The resolution sagely avoided mentioning his accomplishments as President of USM.)
"At some point, we're going to come to some sort of consensus, if we feel like we're on the the right track at the University of Southern Mississippi, despite the issues that are being played in the public forum down there pro or con for the president," Klumb said."Ultimately, this decision rests with us — not the Legislature, the faculty or the business community."
There is, of course, no assurance that Klumb will get what he wants, but the fatuous comments by Board member Stacy Davidson suggest that Thames still commands a significant faction on the Board, despite the lousy publicity he keeps bringing them and the executive sessions (roughly one every 2 months) that they keep having to hold on account of his latest bit of boneheadedness.
Dr. Stacy Davidson Jr., a College Board member from Cleveland, said he has not made up his mind about Thames, but he thinks"things are going satisfactory" at USM.
"I'm going to look at it with an open mind ... the main thing I want to do is get the accreditation reinstated as quickly and as positively as possible," Davidson said."None of us are perfect, including Dr. Thames and presidents of other universities, too."
It may well come down to a 7-5 Board vote for Thames (reportedly what got him put on the throne back in 2002) or a 7-5 vote that upholds the new strong-commissioner model by going against him. Very little now separates a Board that begins to correct itself from a body that solidifies its status as the worst system board of trustees in the history of state university systems. If it keeps sponsoring Thames, the IHL Board will have placed its bid to join Governor Theodore Bilbo in higher education history. In 1930, Bilbo fired over 100 faculty and administrators at universities in the Mississippi state system so he could make patronage appointments.
Meanwhile, the USM Faculty Senate meets tomorrow, in what promises to be an eventful gathering; official statistics show how under Thames USM's School of Nursing has dropped from first to worst in the state; and the next full Board meeting is just under two weeks away.
Stay tuned.
David T. Beito
Academia is about the free exchange of ideas, and a faith that razor-sharp intellectual critique can cause the truth to win out over time. If that is true, then we need not fear academic speech by anyone, whether they be Israeli, Palestinian, Iranian, or American.
Cole also has another piece that is well worth reading. Deploying a battery of pro-religious liberty quotations from Locke, Jefferson, and Washington, he demolishes Pat Robertson's novel theory that Muslims should be excluded from cabinet positions. UPDATE: David E. Bernstein, over at Volokh, has some specific suggestions for opponents of the boycott.
David T. Beito
Maybe this time the College Republicans won't apologize. Let's hope that they have a faculty advisor who is made of sterner stuff than Paul Leidig.College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate “V-Day” (short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. Two participating students, Monique Stuart and Andy Mainiero, have just received sharp letters of reprimand and have been placed on probation by the Office of Judicial Affairs. The costume of the P-Day “mascot” — a friendly looking “penis” named Testaclese, has been confiscated and is under lock and key in the office of the assistant dean of student affairs, John King.
David T. Beito
As soon as the humorless and befuddled Kavanagh realized what was happening he acted like a true administrator and punished the students!
As Rex Reed might say,"love it!"
Hat Tip, King Banaian at SCSU Scholars.
