E-Pluribus | March 18, 2024
The intellectual danger zone; authenticity for sale; and the limits of academic freedom.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Nathan Goetting: A College Free Speech Crisis: Highway to the (Intellectual) Danger Zone
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt coined the term “safetyism” to describe the trend of sheltering students from upsetting and disturbing realities. Nathan Goetting writes at Discourse Magazine that college instructors actually have a duty to zero in on such matters to prepare their young charges for a difficult and dangerous world.
Safetyism rejects the core First Amendment presumption that the benefits of free expression ultimately redeem whatever short-term discomforts come when erroneous, or even hostile, people have the right to speak their minds. It is also the animating spirit behind much of the illiberal repression that has spread throughout higher education over the past decade.
[. . .]
Safetyism’s proponents contend that students can't learn if stressed. They have it precisely backwards: Students can’t learn unless stressed—so long as it’s the right kind of stress and is administered in the right doses.
The “Safe Space” signs decorating faculty office doors and email signatures teach the wrong lesson. They inculcate young minds with the presumption that other spaces on campus, including classrooms, are dangerous. They aren’t. They’re nothing compared to the cruel world that awaits them after they graduate, anyway. Nothing dispels fear of something faster than understanding how it works, as I learned as a young driver when I figured out how to change a tire. By welcoming onto campus the loathsome figure of the censor, safetyism reinforces anxiety and impedes the kind of understanding that makes the world around us less scary.
We can treat students with respect and dignity, and show them how to demand that from others—without censorship. Traditional college and university rules, mirroring the Supreme Court’s First Amendment teachings on harassment, threats, incitement to violence and other forms of speech that distract from learning, if properly enforced, are perfectly adequate.
Safetyism’s excesses may be causing the fever of the past several years to break. Yale Law School, notoriously hostile to free speech of late, has just hired Professor Keith Whittington, a leader of the Academic Freedom Alliance, a national organization of professors founded in response to the present crisis. (Full disclosure: I’m a member.) Faculty free speech groups have recently emerged at other schools that have been at the fore of free speech crackdowns, including Harvard University and Columbia University.
Professors nationwide should continue this momentum by turning their offices and classrooms into intellectual danger zones. Embracing this danger is really the only way to prepare students for the difficult situations and questions that the real world will pose.
Read it all here.
Freya India: You Can’t Buy an Authentic Self
Even the most naive customer has some level of awareness that advertising tends to overpromise. At Quillette, Freya India writes that the marketing industry has apparently decided that trans people are particularly susceptible to claims that certain products can help them discover or reveal their true selves. India argues that authenticity comes from within and is revealed by how we live out our values, not by our facades.
Everywhere I look, it seems that someone is selling me my authentic self. Through cosmetic surgeries, through therapy, after downloading an app, I can discover who I really am. Coming of age isn’t about fulfilling duties, assuming responsibilities, or achieving milestones anymore. Instead, it’s about finding your true self—or rather, buying it.
The beauty industry is at the forefront of this trend.
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[T]he worst examples of this marketing always seem to target trans people. I know this is a sensitive subject for many of us Zoomers, but if you find the messaging of the beauty and pharmaceutical industries objectionable, please hear me out—because the same industries are telling trans people the same message: that you need clothes, cosmetics, and surgeries to discover who you really are. Beauty brands like Dove are relating how “hair and beauty routines” help form trans people’s identities. Surgeons are urging trans people to embrace their true selves with gender reassignment surgery. Maybelline is teaching trans people how to “find their true selves” through make-up. Even FaceTune, the editing app used to distort your face and body, has become a way for trans women “to see their true selves.”
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I think this is why more and more trans people are being sponsored by beauty brands and featured on the covers of fashion magazines. These companies aren’t doing this because they care about inclusivity, but because it expands their customer base when someone like Dylan Mulvaney says “I'm embracing my true self using these incredible Mac products!” I’m sure it’s painful to feel misaligned with who you truly are. But that doesn’t mean that companies should be able to get away with the kind of marketing that portrays transgender breast augmentation as “one step closer to living as your most authentic self.” These companies are manipulating vulnerable people: trying to convince them that it will cost them a great deal—both emotionally and financially—to become their true selves. We should be wary of teaching the next generation that identity is something that can be bought—as, for example, yet this is what media like in this “30 second trailer to becoming your true self” on TikTok, which k does—essentially , it shows a dad giving his trans child new clothes, a wig, and some make-up.
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It is those on the left who have fallen hardest for this marketing strategy. I’m not the first person to have noticed the irony of so many self-proclaimed anticapitalists becoming convinced that they can buy an authentic self. Some of the people who express most scepticism about billionaires and big corporations seem to believe that Maybelline and Pfizer actually care. And sometimes they derive their entire identity and sense of self from the products and services that these industries are selling them.
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I’m not convinced there even is such thing as a self in complete isolation from other people—let alone an authentic one. We are our relationships with others. If you were left alone with all your products and clothes and aesthetic enhancements and never spoke to another person, you would not be your true self: you’d be nothing. When people make finding themselves their ultimate goal—especially when it comes at the expense of others—they often end up losing touch with reality: derailing their lives or becoming more confused than before. The belief that life is a constant search to find yourself is corrupting.
If a true self exists, it is the version of you that is independent of any retail marketplace. It is you stripped of all your products and procedures. Of course, we all rely on what we buy to express ourselves to some extent, but you shouldn’t let your identity completely depend on your purchases. Your authentic self surely has nothing to do with anything that can be bought.
Read it all.
Matthew G. Andersson: Academic Freedom is Not an Academic License
Just as there is a difference between liberty and libertine, Matthew Andersson writes at Minding the Campus that academic freedom is not the same as academic license; as Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, with great power comes great responsibility. Andersson says academic freedom requires maturity and judgment to work as intended. [citations omitted in excerpts below]
Academic freedom is constantly referred to by faculty and administration. It is often used as a proxy for free speech, and a free speech absolutism where “anything goes.” It serves as an academic totem; as an indulgence, that faculty seem to consider beyond any boundaries of definition or responsibility. Limiting academic freedom would delimit faculty expression, and such restraint is thought to infringe on the intellectual idealism of the academic realm.
In some respects, I can appreciate this idealism, especially when it pertains to genuine intellectual and behavioral pluralism. However, it’s disheartening to see how it can sometimes devolve into the imposition of coercive ideological preferences, essentially turning academic freedom into a tool for promoting specific ideologies
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[O]ne might ask whether the construction and dissemination of certain ideas that are tied to student rewards, actually change the nature of academic freedom into one of license tied to authority; and if freedom is considered to be license, then license must stem from an authority or law that is somehow deemed credible, defensible and durable. What credible license does a professor have? I would argue none, unless that is tied to something else. That something else is a professional duty, but more, it is centered on ethical intuitionism.
With such professional freedom comes professional responsibility. What does responsibility mean in an academic setting? The concept of in loco parentis is now discredited; on the other hand, perhaps it has been translated into another form of authority that adults in the academy create and influence minors in college. If that is the case, the academy has a profound set of higher responsibilities related to maintaining ideological neutrality. However, asking what a great teacher is also exposes the problem: it is not instruction, it is the promotion of self-discovery.
This means that academic freedom is also a prima facia responsibility. What does this mean as far as student enculturation goes? What professors do not say or engage in is equally important. Moreover, their judgment must be subject to mature self-control.
In the modern university, academic freedom has become a kind of faculty property, with students admitted as visitors, by an implied contract. But academic freedom is not faculty private property with ownership rights—it is more public property. Academic freedom is as much a student claim as it is a faculty one: it flows in all directions.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
Here’s Glenn Greenwald with the most under-reported story of 2023:
Brandon Warmke says if you don’t think DEI loyalty oaths in academia are really a thing, you’re just burying your head in the sand:
And finally, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might be "gender-affirming care":