The University of Sydney, as did many Western universities, found itself entangled in the Israel-Gaza protests. More than most, USyd permitted antisemitic assholes to be antisemitic assholes, and then USyd got walloped for it. In response, USyd commissioned a review of its policies on speech and protest. As reported by The Guardian, the University of Sydney has recently received the report of that review, and the USyd Senate has resolved to accept “in principle” the fifteen recommendations of the report. As The Guardian also suggested, some of these recommendations are nuts:
9. The University should amend its policies and procedures to make clear that each person utilising a word or phrase is responsible at the time the word or phrase is used to identify to the audience the context in which it is used. (New Civility Rule)
10. A failure to conduct a lecture, seminar, tutorial or a meeting which takes place within any of the University’s facilities in accordance with the New Civility Rule should be recognised as misconduct and treated accordingly.
To help the University, we’ll get the ball rolling by providing the “context” for the key word underlying all this nonsense:
Safe: Protected from having to listen to the loud and nasty idiocy of people with whom one disagrees. See also, precious little petals.
#9 – Ridiculous. Not even practical.
#10 – Even more ridiculous. If followed there would never be any time in lectures for any content,
PC gone way overboard.
Thanks, Peter. I’m not sure it’s quite “PC”, or at least I’m not sure that’s the motivation. But it is nuts.
A small example of the problem might be an ordinary classroom. Most teachers can maintain a suitable level of discipline, but occasionally a teacher (perhaps a hapless substitute) can lose the classroom and kids who are usually well-behaved can make life hell. It is difficult to “legislate” this sort of thing and in a situation where the social mores are more stable and accepted, shame can be an effective way for turning things around. In former days, there was lots of racism and anti-semitism (which revealed itself in real consequences for such things as housing and opportunity) but overt acts were kept under wraps by an accepted level of public discourse that condemned it and denigrated the perpetrators — a public discourse that was generally reflected in the actions of politicians and other authority figures, and taught in the schools. Some of our current politicians have let us down badly these days.
At the school and university level, the answer it seems to me is not to make up all sorts or rules (which apart from anything else uses up a lot of time and money better employed elsewhere and makes intelligent people look stupid), but for the administrators to call it out robustly when intemperate behaviour occurs and to come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who allows his incivility to cross the line into damage, threatening behaviour, or anything else that is a civil offense. For example, disrupting a classroom or preventing access on campus are simply defined and easily determined transgressions that can be embodied in codes of acceptable behaviour already existing. (One property that rules have is that it is hard to avoid loopholes, so you are inviting people to go down all sorts of legal rabbit holes before anything has a hope of being solved — good source of revenue for the lawyers.)
Thanks, Ed. The less one has culture the more one requires rules. Even given that, however, these rules are monumental in their stupidity.
I think one of the complicating factors in this case is that a decent majority of academia is squarely on the side of the antisemitic assholes. So, for example, they’re happy to pretend “from the river to the sea …” is a cry for peace rather than a nasty antisemitic slogan. Now, the same people will be happy to pretend that accompanying the slogan with a faux explanation will magically do away with the antisemitism.
It is always astonishing how such intelligent people can be so stupid.