Campus Speech Restrictions Come Back To Bite Universities

Plus: A listener asks if there is any place libertarians can go to start their own country or city state.

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Campus Speech Restrictions Come Back To Bite Universities

In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman debate free speech on campus amid the fallout from a tense congressional questioning of elite university presidents last week.

02:35—University presidents face free speech questions during contentious congressional hearing

31:02—Weekly Listener Question

39:50—Another GOP debate

51:13—This week's cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

"Don't Excuse the Hypocrisy of University Presidents When It Comes to Free Speech," by Robby Soave

"Congress Shouldn't Encourage College Presidents To Censor Even More Speech," by Robby Soave

"Fight Hate Speech with More Speech, Not Censorship: ACLU's Nadine Strossen," by Nick Gillespie

"The Most Obnoxious Blowhard in America," by Liz Wolfe

"DeSantis Returns To 'Too Online' Roots With Debate Comments About Trans Kids," by Emma Camp

"Chris Christie Is Right, Trump's Trade War Accomplished Nothing," by Eric Boehm

"Vivek Ramasway's Crusade Against 'Woke, Inc.,'" by Zach Weissmueller and Nick Gillespie

"Nikki Haley's Crazy Plan to Require Verification on Social Media," by Robby Soave

"Why Pols from New Jersey Aren't Born to Run," by Nick Gillespie

"Nikki Haley Opposed Boeing Subsidies at Tonight's GOP Debate. As Governor, She Gave Boeing Millions." by Christian Britschgi

"A Private Libertarian City in Honduras," by Zach Weissmueller

"Honduras Ends Its Experiment With Charter Cities," by Brian Doherty

"The Croatian Invasion of the Micronation of Liberland," by Brian Doherty

"Thank You, Reason Donors, for a Huge Webathon Success," by Katherine Mangu-Ward

"San Francisco's Can-Kicking on Zoning Reform Could See It Lose All Zoning Powers," by Christian Britschgi

"Dave Smith: What Is a Libertarian?" by Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe

"Hardcore History's Dan Carlin on Why The End Is Always Near," by Nick Gillespie

"Ken Burns, Lynn Novick: How Closed Borders Helped Facilitate the Holocaust," by Nick Gillespie

Send your questions to [e-mail]. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today's sponsors:

• LibertyCon International 2024
• Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller have been hosting a weekly show on Reason's YouTube channel that they're rebranding and launching as a separate podcast called Just Asking Questions. Each week they'll bring you long-form conversations diving deep into a single topic for an hour or more at a time with data, media clips, and guests who can teach, challenge, and just have some fun. It will air every Thursday at 1 p.m. ET on YouTube and appear shortly thereafter on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed. The first episode is out now; it's a conversation with podcaster Dave Smith, where the title question of the show is: What is a libertarian?

Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.

Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve

What are we consuming this week?

Nick Gillespie

• The Book of Ayn: A Novel by Lexi Freeman

Peter Suderman

• Godzilla Minus One

Katherine Mangu-Ward

• Twilight of the Aesir II: Hardcore History with Dan Carlin

Matt Welch

• The American Buffalo by Ken Burns

---

Comments

[Chumby]

We support free speech but…

- collectivist

[HALTheLibertarian]

Holy crap, unreleased interview audio from All Things Considered featuring the Reason crew!

[Gaear Grimsrud]

Just stopped by to say Fuck Nikki Haley. Now carry on.

[R Mac]

Yeah but what about Trump!?!?!?

— Lying Jeffy

[prfd1]

Democrats have always run around calling everybody else Nazis…. Everybody knows that they do this. They have done that basically ever since Lincoln took the slaves away from them down south. Now we find out the democrats are actually, literally, Nazis. All screaming for the slaughter of all Jews. “From the river to the sea”. And they do it right out in the open on city streets and in ivy league college campuses. And the media is silent.

[Mother's Lament]

"Now we find out the democrats are actually, literally, Nazis."

Chemjeff's been shitting his pants because I've been saying this all week. He holds Nazi policies and ideas but doesn't like us noticing.

[TheReEncogitationer]

Ackshuyally, Nazis did not exist at the time of the Lincoln and The Civil War, M'Lady, though Racist Anthropology such as that of Comte Arthur de Gobineau did.

*Tips Union cap.*

But other than that, yes, you are right about Democratic Party racism.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

Hey look, it's my creepy stalker.

[R Mac]

You know you wanted to.

https://reason.com/2023/12/11/struggling-artist/?comments=true#comment-10351378

[prfd1]

I'd like to give you a thumbs up before I carry on...
Now I carry on.

[Rubbish!]

I always wondered what Raj from What's Happening did after his acting gig. So it was higher education? Nice pic, Raj. Rerun says Hey Hey Hey!

[Chumby]

Dee's knocked up and Rog on crack again

[Dillinger]

+1 Shirley's Revenge!

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Republicans pounce on former basketball player and “disinformation researcher”.

Hard scientismising:

Starbird and her colleagues are also thinking about how to adapt to the loss of X social media data once freely available to them. Called API data, it allowed researchers to find all posts related to certain words — like “ballots,” for instance — and easily gather detailed information, such as who posted them, when, and how many followers they have.

Even with limited data, though, researchers will have one advantage in 2024: a huge store of posts and analyses collected from past elections. If a new conspiracy theory comes up, Starbird said they can point to similar theories in the past that were unsubstantiated or proven false.

Using information gleaned from fact-checking organizations or election officials, they might say: “This is what we know to be true. This is what we know to be false. This is what we know to be unsubstantiated. And this is what we know about similar rumors like this in the past.”

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Some statements you can prove true or false, such as: It rained today in Seattle. Far squishier are statements that are true but misleading. West’s hypothetical: It only rained in Seattle five days out of the last couple months, implying the city never gets much rain.

Is that misinformation? “We might need different language for it,” he said, becoming more convinced as he talked it through.

Confusing herself as "she works through her own expertise".

Jesus fucking Christ, the American media landscape is a picked flower.

[NOYB2]

(1) The Twitter API seems to be still available; I keep seeing ads for it. Of course, radical left wing academics may actually have to pay for it.

(2) I see zero relevance to her “research” that Kate Starbird was a “former basketball player”.

(3) Starbird works in what I would call a bogus academic field (“technology, media, and society”) whose primary objective seems to be to spread misinformation and manipulate the public in the guise of academic research.

I think Starbird and her "Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation (emCOMP) lab" are representative of the decline of academia, driven by cronyism, nepotism, stardom, and incompetence.

[R Mac]

Are you trying to give Lying Jeffy a boner, because this is how you give Lying Jeffy a boner.

[Elmer Fudd the CHUD 2: Steampunk Boogaloo]

He likely couldn’t find I in his voluminous folds of fat.

Am I the only one who envisions him as an extremely weak, effeminate, morbidly obese douchebag?

[R Mac]

Nope.

[Mickey Rat]

And who watches the watchers?

[Agammamon]

"Campus Speech Restrictions Come Back To Bite Universities"

How can there be campus speech restrictions? Sullum was very clear that colleges are sooooooooo pro-free speech!

[Mickey Rat]

Hey, it may have repressive tolerance, but at least there was some tolerance. Now leftists may get in trouble!

[PJGarcia]

Free speech is only ok with liberals and government bureaucrats only if you agree with them

[IceTrey]

The left used to fight The Man, now they are The Man.

[Ed Grinberg]

The only free speech university presidents are OK with is the kind that calls for genocide.*
* caveat: The proposed genocide must be against "oppressors."

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Plus: A listener asks if there is any place libertarians can go to start their own country or city state.

We had one. It was called America.

[VULGAR MADMAN]

The problem is, America invented slavery a few centuries ago.

[prfd1]

America did not invent traditional slavery. It was invented thousands of years before America happened.
Instead, America invented the relatively new "welfare slavery".

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

I think you missed the sarcasm. Don't get me killed, new guy.

[prfd1]

New guy?

[prfd1]

Sorry.
I definitely missed the sarcasm.
But finding out it was sarcasm was similar to hitting a rest stop after 668 uninterrupted interstate miles....

[Vernon Depner]

There should be a lot cheap, uninhabited land available in the Middle East after the nuclear war.

[prfd1]

And downstate ny.

[dresden]

LOL, these college presidents did exactly what Reason's been screaming for them to do and defend free and controversial speech but since they got canceled by the right doing just that, that's somehow now something to celebrate and not an immediate call out to the hypocrisy of both the university presidents and those in charge of the congressional hearings.

[VULGAR MADMAN]

Those evil Jews even control the right!
LOL

[SRG2]

We changed the polarity of our space lasers

[John C. Randolph]

I've seen lefturds claiming that Jews were making up the October 7 atrocities, ignoring the fact that Hamas not only live-streamed their crimes, they're still bragging about it and swearing they'll do it again.

-jcr

[Social Justice is neither]

So their continued one sided support of all things in the left is to be ignored? Fuck that noise you ignorant shit.

That these administrators only defend free speech when their marxist thugs say something odious but crack down on any expression, even factilual information, if it hurts their feefees or contradicts their worldview is what they're being dragged for.

[VULGAR MADMAN]

Anyone can learn given enough stimuli.

[NOYB2]

Campus Speech Restrictions Come Back To Bite Universities

You got it wrong: it is lack of campus speech restrictions that has come back to bite universities.

Universities should hold student, staff, and faculty to a high academic and professional standard. A classroom is no more appropriate for political advocacy than a government office, a police station, a sports arena, a ballet performance, or a court of law.

Anybody who uses a university campus for political rallies or activism should be kicked out of the university. Ditto for professors who abuse their teaching positions for political advocacy or indoctrination.

If Harvard, U Penn, and MIT had stuck to their function as academic institutions, as opposed to viewing themselves as activists for social change, they wouldn’t be in this predicament.

[AT]

Also, when picking a side to defend, don't go with the well known highly established gang of muslim terrorists who openly delight in rape and murder.

(That said, I love the pretzels Clown World has twisted into trying to rationalize how the rapists and killers are the "oppressed" ones in their infantile leftist worldview.)

[Quixote]

Clearly, the real problem here is that each of the university presidents missed an extremely important opportunity to link the public to the documentation of America's leading criminal "satire" case--a case that itself, just like calls for genocide, depended entirely on the circumstances. See the documentation at:

https://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/

Why was this link not read into the congressional record? That is the real scandal here, one far more serious than a minor quarrel over genocide and student protests.

[John C. Randolph]

I'm boggled by the level of suicidal idiocy of the "queers for palestine".

-jcr

[Beezard]

It all makes sense once you understand it’s just about the commie revolution. That and they have zero intention of being anywhere near an Islamic country dealing with the consequences.

If they have their way, later on down the line the dialectic will smooth out that Islam contradiction on it’s why towards the utopian end of history. Like what Stalin and Xi have done with their Muslims.

[Agammamon]

“Plus: A listener asks if there is any place libertarians can go to start their own country or city state.”

You can, literally, do it anywhere.

You just need lots of guns (ideally nukes too) and a willingness to use them. Its the traditional way nations are created.

[AT]

And the way nations continue existing.

Why we haven't quietly backpacked nukes into Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey is beyond me. Honestly.

(Yea yea, the civilians. Who they hide behind. The coward bastards.)

[rekefak227]

I’m boggled by the level of suicidal idiocy of the “queers for palestine”.

[Vernon Depner]

That applies to all Useful Idiots.

[Peterparker]

hey

[Edmund Burke's Hastings spy]

With the approaching demographic crash (15% less students, on top of post-Covid losses 7-8%) the real cause is that accreditation stops new colleges or greatly slows them down.
"Accreditors have immense power. Essentially, they can destroy any college by cutting off access to federal financial aid. And with that great power comes surprisingly little responsibility. "
From an NAS article

[Zipcreature]

Gay should be fired immediately. The fact that she isn’t shows that the left is willing to tolerate what they claim to be intolerant of as long as it fits their agenda.

This shows the hypocrisy of the left.

This shows why they should not be trusted, or believed, when they scream about some offense.

It’s usually lies and hyperbole.

[I woke up when Hillary talked about Reconstruction]

Gay is obviously to children off,and that is interesting. Kids can tell she's not right. Same with Dylan Mulvaney, and often Pete Buttigieg

[Peter Kreeft taught me LOGIC, BEWARE !!!!!!!]

Show the picture of that woman to a group of 6-10 year olds and they'll say something is wrong with her. Yes, there is something wrong. Harvard's Gay would not last a week in a real job. Plagairism, anti-semitism...her co-workers would hate her. She would shriek that she is superior and that would be the end of it (end of her)

The Atlantic magazine only defended her so they could attack someone else

"Claudine Gay engaged in academic misconduct. Everything else about her case is irrelevant, including the silly claims of her right-wing opponents."