Thursday, November 18, 2021

Academic Diversity and Free Speech

 An interesting discussion, but no clear answers, not even clear questions.

https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-viewpoint-diversity-not?r=87eex&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=

I think there is a contingency here.  Things we might otherwise not need to discuss, we may need to have a dialog about because they actually exist, and their supporters see them in different terms.

As another new person I follow says, we do not need to consider many things on an equal basis.  We can dismiss discussion about whether racism or racial supremacism should exist.  Racism and racial supremacism are clearly bad things.  Do we need to discuss whether white nationalism is racial supremacism?  I don't think so, I think it clearly is.  But that may be where the dialog would start, because white nationalism clearly exists--people self-identify as that label.  A lot of people.

I think that if Israel did not exist, we could dismiss discussions about whether a settler colonial apartheid state should be created in Palestine.  Settler colonial apartheid states are a bad idea.  But Israel does exist, and since some do not see it in those terms, perhaps some of us need to have a dialog about it, sometimes.

"Dialog" should not include threats, tiki torches, smashing windows, or violence, though sometimes it does.  It is not beyond the pale for dialog to include racist speech as well as false accusations of racism--because dialog is the place to argue about such things.  (That means, dialog may include both what some regard as antisemitism and what others regard as false accusations of anti-semitism.)

Dialog may include non-violent protest and heckling.

Dialog may include boycotts and divestment.

Dialog (even without threats, etc) isn't always appropriate, and some dialogs should indeed be beyond the pale in education and media.  But that is not applicable to the 12 versions of pro- and anti- Zionism that Timothy Burke identifies.  These are all taken seriously by some serious scholars.

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