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Unsafe On-Line “Streets” and Intellectual Gated Communities

The real villain in the John McAdams story is the on-line mob.
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My latest column for The Week is up. It’s about the Marquette brouhaha that Rod Dreher, among others, has been blogging about. In it, I bravely blame the mob of on-line harassers for everything that’s wrong in the world.

Absent the mob, the initial recording by the student would likely have been of interest only to the philosophy department’s faculty. “My teacher wouldn’t let me make a valid argument” is hardly a page-one news story. Absent the mob, the professor’s blog post would similarly have raised few hackles; it would have been no worse a breach of etiquette than saying the same things out loud in the faculty lounge.

That mob is what transformed this situation from a routine and largely uninteresting ivory tower spat into a dark precedent for academic freedom. Which is what this is. It has become all too difficult to draw clear contours around the new implicit restrictions on academic speech, which would appear to put professors in the distinctly odd position of being less free to criticize one another in print than civilians not crowned with the blessing of tenure.

And, ironically, the original complaint of the student — that he wasn’t allowed to discuss a particular topic because the teacher feared he would offend other students — is likely in part a consequence of the toxic debate environment the online mob has helped create. It is probably not an accident that demands for “safe spaces” and ever-expanding definitions of harassment are features of the same landscape as 4chan and Reddit.

Check it out there.

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