| >This means that violators must be officially sanctioned by administrators, who are often their peers. There is a bit of a paradox here, because you could argue that cancelling a professor for having an unfashionable opinion is itself an exercise of student free speech. The statement says "MIT does not protect direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment." It seems to me that certain forms of cancellation could be argued to constitute "harassment" and therefore violate the policy. Those are indeed some extreme policy proposals. Perhaps you could argue against them anonymously on the MIT subreddit or something like that? (Posting through Tor/VPN on a burner account) >If, though, I am wrong in my assessment and most academics and students, rather than a dominant minority, wholly believe that offensive utterances must be punished and unsavory research banned, I think there isn't much left to do. Any official action, let alone the posted public statement, will only galvanize people to seek out more aggressive policies and oust those that oppose them. This suggests an alternative measure: Instead of focusing on freedom of expression, focus on providing a means by which students/faculty/etc. can be polled on these proposals in a way that is robustly anonymous. Sounds like you believe that if the poll favors the extreme measures, there's nothing to be done anyways. >[1] For clarity, these two relate to first-hand examples of professors making statements solely out of fear of not being able to attract students their labs/departments. I'm surprised that professors at MIT of all places need to grovel this way to attract students? |
No, it's curbing the professors speech. If students allowed the professor to speak, but held their own counter speech or protest march then that would be an exercise of free speech. Preventing another person from speaking is disruption, not counter protest.