First the Oberlin verdict and now the Texas "free speech" statute. Soon our campuses will be free again.
Link: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/crenshaw-applauds-texas-free-speech-law-blasts-coddled-students
support alleged free speech, while the Texas law is against banning almost any type of speech.
Both positions can be rife for abuse.
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It may be something better or something much worse.
If Oberlin engaged in defamation, they should pay the bakery. If they did nothing but encourage students to exercise THEIR speech and purchasing choices, it may be protected. The Texas statute is fine but it works both ways, like when antifa and the klan come to town.
In other words on speech consistency is the key. You need to treat the speech you despise the most the same as that which you love the most.
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That's a bold strategy, Cotton.
And I would tolerate everything.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that your basis for saying that university should probably not be held responsible merely for encouraging certain behaviors because their students are adults, or, at least, young adults, who are capable of making their own moral decisions. The problem is that universities do not see and do not treat their undergraduates as adults nor young adults. They treat like them like children. In fact, parents and universities have done such a good job in this regard that you will find that the students don't regard themselves as adults. If high school officials smeared some local business owner and encouraged students to do the same and to pass around pamphlets defaming the owner, do you think the high school would also be on the hook? That's important because what you and your peers were like in terms of maturity and life experiences at age 15 is probably comparable to where 20 year-old college students are at today. Certainly at a place like Oberlin.
And I'm not just talking about the usual "PC" madness, though that's a big part of this. Your local universities probably feature things like this, which you can find all over: "adulting" advice for all students. "Adulting" is baby talk for behaving like an adult. Think about some of the most mundane things that you learned how to do without an adult telling you how to do it. We now have adults instructing 18-22 year-olds how to do all these things, based upon the erroneous notion that it's better to have an adult telling you how to do these things rather than learning to do them on your own. I can forward emails sent to the entire student body offering advice on when to go to bed and what to eat. Advice on "healthy relationships" is everywhere. How would you and your friends have reacted if the dean at your college told you when you should go to sleep, what you should eat, how to address your professors, and what constitutes good touch or bad touch in your relationships? Another ubiquitous one are therapy dogs, particularly during final exams because, you know, tests are traumatic. Hold me.
No one bats an eye on all this infantilization. I'm struggling to see how colleges like Oberlin can on one hand create a system rooted in the premise that students are not adults and thus need all these supports, but then on the other hand can argue that just because the dean of students tells these children to do something does not make them liable in any way because, after all, these are young adults capable of making moral decisions. There some incongruence there.
Parents are nervous about security, so every freaking tour guide points out the 10,000 blue phones where officers respond in 3 seconds, blah blah.
Parents are nervous about student suicides, so colleges bring in the puppies and "care packages" and cookies every semester during finals. They could point out that suicides among college students are much lower than the suicide rate of the general public in that age range. But parents don't want statistics. They want puppies.
Parents are the root cause of millennials being immature, not colleges. JMO.
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In part, that is a problem that I have with the legal theory. Normally, unless it rises to conspiracy under the law, mere encouragement isn’t enough for liability. It’s akin to the statement that collusion isn’t a crime.
Now, turning from a legal analysis to a policy one, we have no disagreement on the issue of indoctrination and infantalization (is that a word?) of students at colleges and universities. I just saw it in action in fact. My son’s undergrad thesis presentation was on the ordinary German lawyer and judge and the Holocaust. An interesting topic and it got a good audience. One of the faculty tried to turn it into an anti trump diatribe. Now you know how I feel about Orange, but that was completely not the topic at hand. I would have said something but didn’t want his grade to be impacted.
My point though is a legal one. When does encouragement in the speech realm produce liability? It’s an interesting and difficult subject.
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