Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Atlantic takes on post-secondary PC/coddling

The University of Chicago has taken a stand for free speech and thought:

Does the US have laws the limit free speech when it is likely to cause harm eg. Provoking racial hatred etc?

Telling people that they are perenially oppressed when they are not and that they have the right not to be offended can cause mental health problems, and it also makes them less prepared for life after college. What would the students do if asked to read something by Charles Murray or Heather MacDonald?

Yale’s Halloween Advice Stokes a Racially Charged Debate
By LIAM STACK
New York Times
November 8, 2015

The right to speak freely may be enshrined in some of our nation’s great universities, but the culture of listening needs repair. That is the lesson I learned a year ago, when I sent an email urging Yale University students to think critically about an official set of guidelines on costumes to avoid at Halloween.

I had hoped to generate a reflective conversation among students: What happens when one person’s offense is another person’s pride? Should a costume-wearer’s intent or context matter? Can we always tell the difference between a mocking costume and one that satirizes ignorance? In what circumstances should we allow — or punish — youthful transgression?

“I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation,” I wrote, in part. “I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.”

Is there any alternative to college? College is, for better or worse, one of the stops one has to make on the way to many cognitively rewarding professions.

For almost five years, Gregory Furlong worked 50-hour weeks as a shipping clerk at a Best Buy two miles from his childhood home in Wilmington, Delaware. It was a kind of employment purgatory for a computer obsessive who tinkers with motherboards in his free time.

So last year, Furlong, 30, enrolled in a three-month coding boot camp that uses HackerRank, a web platform that trains and grades people on writing computer code. After earning a top ranking for Java developers globally, Furlong was hired by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in December for its two-year technology training program.

This is Wall Street’s new tech meritocracy. Financial institutions traditionally coveted graduates from Stanford and other big-name schools and people already working in Silicon Valley. But that system tends to overlook good programmers from other schools or gifted dropouts, according to recruiters. And besides, banks need to fill so many programming jobs that elite schools can’t possibly pump out enough candidates.

So the industry is looking in places it never did, turning to outside firms to evaluate prospective programmers based on objective measurements, not their pedigree. The idea is that people lacking a computer science degree -- art majors, graphic designers and chemistry graduates from the University of Delaware like Furlong -- can still make the leap to well-paid careers in technology. By using algorithms to spot talented coders, HackerRank and competitors with names like Codility claim they’ve essentially increased the world’s supply of developers.

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university?

The most obvious answer is “truth” –- the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict?

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable. Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.

Is there any alternative to college? College is, for better or worse, one of the stops one has to make on the way to many cognitively rewarding professions. When I hear these stories my reaction is "ok - that place is off the list". Eventually there may not be much of a list left. Maybe there is less craziness in the hard sciences ...

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The Justice Department is entering the polarizing issue of free speech after a number of planned university appearances by conservative figures were derailed by protests and threats of violence, sparking a national debate on the issue.

Last year, student demonstrations at the University of California, Berkeley prompted the school to cancel an event with conservative speakers Ann Coulter and David Horowitz. And universities across the country are wrestling with protecting safety while allowing legitimate protests—a balance that can require costly security measures.

“There’s now this idea on college campuses that if you hear speech that is offensive to you, you can’t deal with it in any way other than by shutting it down,” said acting associate attorney general Jesse Panuccio. ”That’s not a very good lesson to be teaching. And it’s not the lesson of our First Amendment.”

The Justice Department in recent months began filing so-called statements of interest in lawsuits over campus disciplinary codes and “free speech zones” that limit where students can protest. The statements of interest carry no force of law, but are an important show of support from a powerful ally.

The latest, filed Monday, focuses on antibullying and -harassment policies at the University of Michigan, which the department says are so broad and vague they cause students to limit their speech.

A newly formed watchdog group, Speech First, sued the school in May on behalf of three anonymous students who say they’re afraid to espouse “unpopular” conservative views on topics like immigration, gun rights and race relations. Speech First is backed by anonymous donors and is working with the same law firm that sued Harvard University over its affirmative-action policy, which the Justice Department is also investigating.

The lawsuit targets a University of Michigan policy that encourages students to report “bothersome speech” and advises: “The most important indication of bias is your own feelings.” That “imposes a system of arbitrary censorship of, and punishment for, constitutionally protected speech,” the Justice Department said.