Guardian report on Cambridge University free speech vote

[tobee]

Reassuring landslide:-

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/09/cambridge-university-rejects-proposal-it-be-respectful-of-all-views

It's good sense. Very pleased to read about this today. Does anyone know if there's an update on Kevin Price, the Cambridge porter facing calls for him to be sacked? I'm hoping he's kept his job.

'Priyamvada Gopal, an academic at the university, tweeted: “There is no ‘free speech row’ at Cambridge. There is the university scrambling to follow government orders based on false moral panic, there are the poor students trying to make it less draconian, & there are the Freeze Peach brigade trying to stop the right to protest.”'

Why do they keep using this stupid 'freeze peach' phrase? If it's supposed to be an illustration of witty word play - it doesn't really work. And if their intent really is to mock the idea of 'free speech', they are playing with fire.

That is an excellent result. Cambridge really looked as though it was going the way of Goldsmiths with no dissent from woke ideology allowed. Pleased but surprised it was rejected by such a majority.

@ArabellaScott

'Priyamvada Gopal, an academic at the university, tweeted: “There is no ‘free speech row’ at Cambridge. There is the university scrambling to follow government orders based on false moral panic, there are the poor students trying to make it less draconian, & there are the Freeze Peach brigade trying to stop the right to protest.”'

Why do they keep using this stupid 'freeze peach' phrase? If it's supposed to be an illustration of witty word play - it doesn't really work. And if their intent really is to mock the idea of 'free speech', they are playing with fire.

Priyamvada Gopal is a Professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where she is a Fellow of Churchill College. Her main teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory, gender and feminism, Marxism, and critical race studies

From her twitter handle. Amusingly Jordan Peterson follows her. Gopal went to some length on Twitter to ridicule Dr Peterson after the Cambridge Fellowship was rescinded even to the point of saying he wasn't a real academic and hadn't published anything much in academia.

There's nothing I've read about or by Gopal where she hasn't come across as a colossal self- serving pain in the arse.

This is good.

Other universities won’t want to make dicks of themselves by going in the opposite direction to Cambridge, even if they are motivated more by their bottom line than their academic integrity.

Typically Guardian reporting style. Headline manages to makes this sound like an outrageous motion. And:

"Students at Cambridge University called earlier this year for a porter at Clare College to be suspended from his job after he resigned from his role on the city council in protest over a motion in support of transgender rights."

For "in support of transgender rights", read "against women's rights".

The Times - unsurprisingly - has a much better headline:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/victory-for-free-speech-as-cambridge-plan-defeated-gtnjn0zzw?shareToken=d9ab323701d9ea40f3392ecd2e0874ce

I'm not even slightly surprised by the overwhelming support for free speech by the academics, although robustly standing up to the illiberal minority is overdue.

www.spectator.co.uk/article/cambridge-academics-have-just-won-an-important-battle-for-free-speech

The Spectator too. The free speech debate matters very much to women'a rights but I wonder how indicative the split was. I am keen to know whether this split reflects much of what's going on. Noisy and aggressive always looks as though it has the bigger numbers but often when the votes come in the 'woke' brigade are usually a little shocked at the results.

This is good news. But there was a letter to the Times a couple of days ago that made an interesting point about the term "respect", which is that it has more than one meaning. When they said academics should "respect" other views, did they mean that they should show deference to those views, which is the old-fashioned sense of the word? Or simply that they should acknowledge that those views have a right to be aired - which is the way the term "respect" tends to be used these days, at least in some quarters. The Nick Cohen piece acknowledges the ambiguity.

If a term has become ambiguous but is then used to impose one meaning, it should be avoided.
In this case there's a huge difference between respecting an opinion and respecting the right to hold that opinion.

@ErrolTheDragon

If a term has become ambiguous but is then used to impose one meaning, it should be avoided. In this case there's a huge difference between respecting an opinion and respecting the right to hold that opinion.

"Tolerate" is clearly better than "respect" but that could still be misinterpreted.

Check out the South Park clip embedded at the bottom of this good piece:

teasmith.com.au/how-being-nice-will-destroy-us-all/

"Tolerant, but not stupid! Look, just because you have to tolerate something doesn't mean you have to approve of it."

(See also Magdalen Berns' "so open-minded your brains have fallen out").