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Common heckler’s can not violate anybody’s free speech rights. They are engaging in free speech themselves, even if doing so is rude or makes someone else choose to stop talking because of the noise.

On the contrary, having the government silence the hecklers would be a violation of their free speech rights.

Sometimes the speech of hecklers is silenced by government, but the only person’s free speech rights that may have been violated here are the free speech rights of the _hecklers_, not the person they were heckling.

The laws used to silence extreme heckling are “disorderly conduct”, and they have nothing to do with free speech or the 1st amendment, or any individual’s right to free speech.

They have to do with real or perceived rights to _order_ and decorum, and sometimes free speech rights are suppressed, or traded, for the sake of _order_.

So those who are suggesting that these students somehow violated Coulter’s free speech rights are seriously misguided.

What they are doing is making a _law and order_ argument, but confusing it with free speech. Others are just confusing their sense of etiquette and good manners with speech rights.

They in fact want free speech suppressed in favor of order. Maybe that’s a good or bad argument. Sometimes there needs to be a balance between freedom and order, but it’s purely Orwellian to claim that speech must be suppressed to defend free speech.

Posted on Sat, Nov. 12, 2005
Profs get warned of freedoms
By MENSAH M. DEAN
deanm@phillynews.com

Words such as “McCarthyism” and “chill” buzzed through a group of Temple University professors and students who gathered on campus yesterday to discuss a state legislative committee’s investigation of political diversity at state-run colleges.

The “teach-in,” sponsored by the Temple Association of University Professionals, drew an audience overwhelmingly convinced that the committee’s very existence is a threat to academic freedom.

“I think that there is a concern that people are going to start coming in and say, ‘You can do this, but you can’t do this.’ If we are teaching about the Holocaust, do we also have to give the same amount of time to Holocaust denier?” art history Professor Jane Evans asked during an interview.

“That’s the logical conclusion,” she added.

The Republican-backed state House of Representatives committee is probing, among other things, complaints by conservative students that they are routinely mistreated and unfairly graded by liberal college professors.

The resolution that created the investigative committee reads, in part: “Students and faculty should be protected from the imposition of ideological orthodoxy, and faculty members have the responsibility to not take advantage of their authority position to introduce inappropriate or irrelevant subject matter outside their field of study.” The committee held its first hearing Wednesday at the University of Pittsburgh.

According to Rep. Lawrence H. Curry, a committee member who addressed last night’s group, the committee discussed whether to allow lawmakers to monitor courses that advocate rather than educate.

Curry, a Democrat whose District includes parts of Montgomery County and Philadelphia, said the committee also discussed the creation of a means for bringing political balance to faculties.

“You better take that seriously. Administrations had better take that seriously,” Curry told the Temple group. He and every Democrat voted against the creation of the committee.

“Certainly, the growing campaign against the academic community is… a cause for concern,” Ellen Schrecker, Yeshiva University history professor, told the Temple group.

Just as in the 1950s, right-wing forces are threatening to impose political tests for the nation’s faculties, she said.

“The threat is more serious this time because unlike the McCarthy era, when professors came under fire for their extracurricular political activists, today it’s the core academic functions, their teaching and research that is at issue,” she said.

No, I would not deny Ann Coulter the right to freedom of speech. If your reread my original post, I was just expressing my amazement that she and her supporters are so quick to cry foul when they advocate the same censorship of people Ann Coulter doesn’t agree with.

I guess my biggest question question of all is, why are news outlets and blogs like this making such an issue of this? People far more respectful of the first amendment have their free speech rights violated everyday (ever notice how Chomsky doesn’t get on the radio or tv a tenth as much as David Horowitz, even though Chomsky’s books have outsold his exponentially?)

As for the person who compared Coulter to Noam Chomsky? I don’t seem to remember Chomsky advocating the bombing of the New York Times (as Coulter suggested, because she disagreed with their coverage of the war…pooey, the NYT has sucked up enough to the president on this war; what more does the lady want out of them)

One of my fellow students did a wonderful presentation on homeless women. She did interviews, etc… It was really great. She got a B+. That is an F in grad school. The student who followed did hers on Trauma in the Freddie Kruger Movies and got an A+. No bullshit.

This semester the same girl did a presentation on how the media reports on Homelessness and Poverty. Given Katrina, she had a lot of material. She got beheaded by her follow students for “generalizing interpretations.” The professor called her “arrogant” and “naive.” The next student did her presentation on ‘Women in ZZ Top Videos.” Again no bullshit. She got an A and praise from the Prof and fellow students.

Now, all of these people claim to be progressive, liberal, anti-bush, etc… The student association T shirt says “Rage Against The Machine is Not Just A Band.” They are radicals by interpreting cultural products I guess.

My fellow comrade was so bewildered by the hostility towards her for dealing with real issues that she dropped out of the program 2 weeks before the end of the semester and is moving on to USC’s social work school instead. She was bullied out of the program by professors and pet students who do not want to live in the material world.

The Sokal Hoax revealed that a cultural left did exist and that it had become very insulated and reflexisively reactionary. Any criticism of the reigning theoretical dogma is met with accusations of “anti-intellectualism” and “conservative capitulation.” They have abstruse theoretical constructions that only feed into the problem (Stanley Fish, Thomas Kuhn, and the rest of that loosely defined postmodernism). They also have a fetish for language (a post structuralism thing) and actually many DO NOT believe in the idea of free speech (Stanley Fish wrote a book horrifyingly called “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too”).

I actually do not think the “left wing bias” is actually really left wing. It is a mangled form of New Leftism and a whole lot of libertarian ideas. Mark Lilla calls this the politics of fusion (see his essay in Left Hooks, Right Crosses). They focus almost exclusively on subversive interpretations of cultural products and a whole lot of time theorizing. The fetish with theory is self gratification and the focus on cultural products is actually in line with good old fashioned capitalism. My point is, the leftness of these people is vague at best. It is a pose. Pure rhetorical.. No real substance. As Rorty has noted, they are not proposing any sort of piecemeal reform, rather they are playing radical to appeal to the students. It is leftism for show.

Stanford teaches classes on hip hop studies. As Rorty noted, very few school teach classes on Working Poor Studies, or Trailer Park Studies, etc… And as Rorty noted the average tenured professors spends more time flying around the country attending conferences than doing ethnographic or quantitative work on lives of the working poor.

The protest of Tookies execution had a contingent of Bay Area students. I listened to the broadcast on the radio. The speeches were pretty horrifying. Students thanking Tookie for his “Good works.” Some students said that Tookie saved a “150,000 lives.” This is what the cultural left is producing. Not thoughtful students who will fight for fairness in regards to migrant workers, but kids who where Che shirts and read Chomsky while shouting down hate speech. It is Weatherman leftism. These kids just want to shout and fuck shit up.

These kids will not stay on the left after graduation. They will quickly adapt the style they learned in college to Limbaugh style politics. It is a match made in heaven. But the working poor will still be invisible and the tenured radicals will still have high paying jobs. Notice none of the tenured radicals are fighting to reform the sorry state of academic labor!!!

I could talk about left wing attacks on science for another couple of pages…

The HUAC line is straight bullshit. By the sixites all was forgotten.

The so-called “left-wing-bias” of academia is a myth. Certain right-wing ideologues funded by right-wing think tanks have been busily going around the country for some years now promoting that myth in state legislature hearings and on such broadcast media as Fox. They use three kinds of evidence to show “left-wing bias” all of which are inaccurate.

First, you mention people like yourself and Samuel Stott having bad experiences with left-wing faculty to prove that there is left-wing bias. I went to UC Berkeley and was told that UC Berkeley didn’t hire women at the time. The sociology professor who was the most famous named Seymour Martin Lipset wrote in a book that owing TV sets is a mark of civilization–but my family hadn’t owned a TV set for years. Can I concluded from my experience that UC faculty were sexist at the time. No. Can I conclude that sociology faculty agree with Lipset. No. I can’t argue from my 1 or 2 bad experiences to the larger faculty because I would be making hasty generalization.

Also, I am can sympathize with you and Stott, but I think neither you nor Stott nor anybody else can take a few bad experiences and then generalize back to all faculty at X college or all faculty in the U.S. Not logical.

Second, you argue that conservative grad students are told not to get a Ph.D. and have a hard time getting a full-time job. Well, liberal and left-wing grad students are told exactly the same thing. Mr. Moore, in your 2nd post you ask what tenure has to do with it. Jobs on tenure track are full-time, higher pay, with benefits. There are less and less such jobs, so getting a tenure-track job has everyting to do with it. I know somene who worked over 20 years part-time before he was finally (!) hired full-time, and he was the only 1 hired in his departent. If conservative grad students want more tenured fullt-time jjobs, I suggest they work with liberals & leftists to increase the number of such jobs. 0 full-time jobs means 0 jobs for everybody. During the 1960s there were about 5% or less part-time teaching jobs in acedmia but 2005 there are over 50% non-tenure track jobs. If someone isn’t telling you about the declining number of full-time jobs teaching in academica, they are manipulating the evidence.

Third, certain right-wing idelogues “prove” left bias in academic by saying they did surveys of faculty voting records and found many more Democrats than Republicans. Well, if you look at all their surveys, they went and surveyed only Humanities, and only Women’s Studies, but never did random samples of the whole faculty. If you went and surveyed only the business department or only the engineering department, you’d probably find a lot more Republican faculty, but still that’s a biased samples. Thus the samples used to prove left-wing bias are inaccurate and don’t represent the larger faculty. Thus the surveys prove absolutely nothing. By the way, a long time ago I used to teach statistics. One can lie very easily with statistics.

By the way, I didn’t say in my previous post that HUAC has influence. I said HUAC got public school teachers fired by broadcasting their names in the newspaper. I said that since HUAC was abandoned about 40 years ago, we now have for the first time in Pennyslvania state legislators wanting to hold hearings on so-called “left-wing bias” in higher education in that state. So since Pennyslvania legislators want to revive investigations into socalled left-wing bias, it’s entirely appropriate to look at how HUAC disasterously effected American education.

Sincerely,

Julia Stein

The Ali G reference is this: the performer puts on a performance that challenges his audience through playful contrivances and charades, particularly to the point of fooling his guests. Kaufman did the same, but fooled his audience directly. The effects were unpredictable, sometimes causing commotion.

And here’s the rub: this isn’t about some disturbing student trends inspired by corrupting universities. Marc, you echo my Springer example: in a Springer-style event, the audience will behave Springer-style. That is my sole point. 99.9% of the time the style of event is clear from the outset: every heated debate I’ve ever attended as an undergrad, grad student, and postgrad has, despite all sorts of tensions, nevertheless proceeded to a successful conclusion because the rules were CLEAR from the outset. The .1% of the time when they did not were in cases when the type of event (i.e. relationship between speaker and audience) was ill-defined. Is it a radio talk show format? Is it one speaker speaks followed by Q&A? Is it call-and-response? But, the interpretation that students are being systemically taught to jeer I find silly and extreme. Let me put it like this: i can say with all honesty that had I gone into a Coulter event without foreknowledge of the UConn news item, I wouldn’t have known if shouting back and forth wasn’t part of the Coulter schtick (again, given my limited knowledge of performers like her, who I–perhaps unfairly, out of ignorance–lump in a Savage/Springer classification). Of course, I probably would have put it together after a couple of minutes of the crowds’ uninterrupted jeering that this was not planned. Then I and others would have learned that the event was not progressing as Coulter had planned/desired (though are we sure of this…? Another question.). Point being, this is an exceptional case–I mean, Jeebus Cristo, it’s Ann Coulter! How the hell would I know that it was just a normal talk and not a media event?

I’m probably repeating myself a lot, likely talking in circles or ellipses (thereby invoking semi-justifiable jeering from my patience-losing audience…) so I’ll just conclude by saying, “what Roger said.”

Really, if you invite Coulter and make it a public meeting, then the inviters ought to be prepared by having some type of plan for intervening to quiet a jeering crowd. If Michael Moore was invited to George Mason University, he’d probably be jeered at — given the political slant of the University — but sensible meeting rules would allow him to make his speech. The glow of martyrdom is, of course, not a bad moneymaker for Coulter, but no constitutional crisis is happening in Connecticut. Or rather, at UConn — from what I have read about the law that makes it impossible to challenge incumbents like Lieberman in party primaries, there, there we have a free speech crisis.

We indeed do live in a society in which, say, political events and campaign get conflated with some chair-throwing on Jerry Springer (who I might add with some disdain in a now a drive time host on Air America radio). I, for one, dont like this trend. Nor do I enjoy the thought that college students — especially those who are the supposed progressives– demonstrate such intolerant and offensive beahvior. Bad for us. And Bad for them.

As to whether the Left controls the universities? Well, those sort od sweeping generalizations are off base– just as off base as writing off all media as “corporate media.” But only at one’s peril do you ignore the intersection of tenure with dogma.

In that regard… I am grateful that my daughter was already a union organizer, that her mother was a Chilean exile and her father a grumpy leftist when she entered UCLA as a history junior this fall. if those elements had not been in place, she would have undoubtedly been converted into a Republican. But by right wing prosletyzing.. but rather into the shower of foolish PC rigidity she was subjected to during the semester.

Fortunately, she’s smart enough to see thru it and retain some progressive principles. But holy christ… one of her California History essay questions on this week’s final was: Describe the course of Manifest Destiny in California from 1900 thru to the rise of the Orange County conservative movement? Can u fucking imagine that? A tenured professor trying to pass off the Goldwater and Reagan revolutions as something with a throughline to Manifest Destiny? My daughter, who is on the left, was outraged and quite disillusioned by such intellectual fakery. Uggh.

Nobody is claiming that the Coulter event has major ramifications. But the way students are being taught to listen is indeed a problem.

This is not even really a Left wing bias necessarily. If it exists, it has NO real influence given the fact that the Republican Party has been winning elections for 30 years.

It is more than anything an abuse of power. The average 20 year tenured Prof is not very dedicated to anything other than making sure they do not lose tenure and their corner of the world is secure. It is about arrogance and narcissism. Most of these teachers are so obsessed with themselves; they simply abuse the captive audience because they are obsessed with their own perceived wisdom. It is about a LACK of dedication to principals (to educate students) and not really about ideology. They just happen to have vague left wing ideals and are dedicated to them in the classroom only. After class they go home to a nice upper middle class life and are not plotting the revolution. They could easily be on the right.

The academy is these peoples little corner in the world. The Humanities and Social Sciences basically do not matter in the modern world, and they know that. They just want to protect their interests by keeping the squad pure. No dissent, no threat to job.

These kids shouting about Coulter today will be shouting about the regulation of corporations tomorrow. The right has real political power and the abuses of that side lead to things like torture and unjust wars.

In the end it just creates bad habbits in young people.