New York City police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, is considered to be such a moral reprobate that he was literally booed off the stage at Brown University today, prompting a stern letter from university president Christina H. Paxson. Her point is the usual one. Universities are places for debate where all sides get a fair hearing, and booing Kelly off the stage not only denied him the right to speak, but also his detractors the right to confront him.
This is always an interesting conversation, including especially when Israel is involved. But there has to be a point of evil beyond which it is simply unacceptable to give someone a forum. And who gets to decide that? Do the students of Brown University get to decide that? Can a few loud protestors decide it, or should it be decided by a vote of the entire student body?
If someone thinks racial and sectarian profiling are gross violations of the law, the Constitution, and any decent moral code, why can’t they treat Raymond Kelly the same way they’d treat Orval Faubus?
In my opinion, it should always be in order for a member of the student body to ask for a vote if they think someone has been given a forum at their university who should more properly be facing a tribunal in the Hague. Maybe you think Ray Kelly doesn’t deserve to be treated so harshly, but what about Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney or George W. Bush?
Some ideas deserve to be debated, and others should be confronted with baseball bats.
Booing is speech.
Where Paxton is wrong, if you represent her correctly, is in suggesting that booing isn’t, in fact, a ‘fair hearing’ for some ‘sides.’
For some sides, it’s downright polite.
Right. But a small minority can destroy a public forum, regardless of the merits of their opinions. Normally, the right for someone to be heard and for people to ask questions is going to trump your right to be so disruptive that the event cannot be held at all.
How much are the students paying to attend Brown University?
How much is the President of Brown University making per annum?
Money talks, Bullshit walks.
Hopefully those kids booed that fuck right out of that lecture hall.
But you can ignore me – I’m a radical, and hence very, very unSeriousTM.
you forgot something – what’s the future monetary value of their Brown degree (considerable).
Future monetary value of their Brown degree?
Until it has earned them their tuition + interest from loans and the money they could have earned outside of school, nothing.
And that is still assuming that they graduate, and are able to find a job that hires them because of their degree.
Those kids are still paying, and they still have a voice. Is it rude to boo someone and not let them speak? Sure.
Does life suck and not always go the way I want it to go? All the f-ing time.
Shit in one hand, wish in the other, or whatever. Screw listening to fascists as if their viewpoint deserves a pulpit from which to spew it.
Baseball bats, indeed.
In general I agree. It upset me during the Vietnam era that speakers students disagreed with were harassed or prevented from speaking.
From what I’ve read, the students were not going to be allowed to question the speaker. And as one commenter suggested, if indeed questioning were allowed, it would be so tightly controlled as to be meaningless. So, it was a one-sided deal, with the speaker having all the advantages.
I’d go with your suggestion that the students organize a boycott or vote on the suitability of giving people like this a forum. Even if an informal vote, I think it’s worked on other campuses to prevent unwanted graduation and other speakers from appearing.
my question is – what precisely do they mean that the students disrupted it so that it could not be held. Obama gives a speech over catcalls and boos all the time. If Taubman rearranged the the format so that [say] a few students chosen by students could be on stage with RK and ask questions, for example, the event probably could have gone forward. Universities always know in advance when something of this nature is going to happen because students and faculty discuss it and work out how they want to approach it and who wants to participate. Maybe RK refused to take questions, for example. It should never have got to this point. that it did is the fault of the organizers of the event
The evangelicals have proclaimed that you confront evil you don’t bargain with it.
Yes but not everything they call evil do I agree is evil. That’s what the debate is about.
Then Ray Kelly can thank the protesting student’s grandmotherly kindness, for only booing him instead of dragging him off the stage and beating him to a bloody pulp.
And then there are protests against shills like David Petraeus at CUNY.
IMO, it is unacceptable to give Ray Kelly the respect of a university forum to legitimize his policies. I would say the same about Rahm Emanuel.
Because universities don’t typically pick random homeless person off the streets to have fair exchange of ideas.
And oppressive rules of decorum advantage the single speaker against the numerous audience. Someone who would want to pursue questioning embarrassing to Kelly would be silenced “in order to allow other members of the audience the chance to speak”. The confrontation of ideas that needed to happen never would occur. Oops, time’s up. Mr. Kelly has a busy schedule…la..da…da.
The idea is that some of these joker need to feel a bit of discomfort about what they have been doing.
Rahm Emanuel shouldn’t be allowed to speak?
I think you might want to recalibrate your cut-off point.
A mayor who has closed half of the mental health clinics in his city and a third of the schools and jailed the folks who have protested those actions in order to provide tax breaks to real estate developers and corporations–that guy does not deserve to speak after characterizing folks who wanted to see the President’s stated policy legislated as retarded and shut them up by labeling them the “professional left”.
What Emanuel has done in Chicago is every bit as egregious as what Kelly has done in New York and is motivated by the same racist elite perspective.
These students are passionate… unlike many people who are more or less dead to the issues confronting us.
I applaud them.
It’s chilling to see this quote here. No, ideas on their own should not be confronted with baseball bats. This is, as much as anything, the prime directive we got from the founders.
The piece starts by suggesting that Kelly is such a “moral reprobate” that he deserves to be blocked from speech. Far as I know, moral reprobates are judged by their history and behavior, not their “ideas”. Some serial killer has no particular right to speak at some particular place. So far so good.
But suddenly the argument shifts to Kelly’s “ideas” — which are no doubt stupid and ugly, but protected by the spirit, if not much mangled practice of some out our deepest principles. If the U thought his “ideas” had some debatable content, perhaps the debate is needed — not that a speech is a reasonable venue to expect such and outcome. I fail to see how the spectacle of yet another bunch of screaming students did anything but harden Kelly’s supporters. This is the eternal disease of liberals. Score: Kelly 0, students 0, Brown 0, BT 0.
You can debate certain ideas. You can debate almost all ideas. But, whatever the law might state, you are under no obligation to debate people who are trying to kill you. I don’t think Brown should have had a debate between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. At some point, you should be willing to say that maybe people can spew their hate in the public square, but you are not going to give them a forum. And, at another point, you might be willing to accept the legal consequences for confronting hate-spewers even in the public square. There are legal and moral choices, that can be distinct. It is legally justifiable to defend the right of neo-Nazis to hold a public rally. It’s morally justifiable to beat them down if you are willing to face the legal consequences without complaint.
Civil disobedience does extend to defying the laws in favor of free speech. It is a crime. It is not necessarily a moral failing.
People who advocate mass killing should expect to meet muscular resistance, regardless of what the law is and should be. In general, I am favor of peaceful civil disobedience because I think it is the most effective form of protest. But, morally, I have no problem with taking bats to Nazis.
Thanks for this. My more immediate and particular objection to the introduction of baseball bats into the discussion is that (in my view) it clouds the issue more than it clarifies. The Brown students seem to have used only their voices and their bodies.
There’s a story from the Prague Spring of university students being forced to attend a speech by a general in a hall on campus. The general walked onto the stage. The students stood and applauded…for 45 minutes without stop, until the general finally left without speaking. [What? You’re going to criticize us—or arrest us—for giving the general a standing ovation? :-)]
I’m remembering that tactic. That’s brilliant!
By your standards, it is then morally justifiable for neo-nazis to beat up people whose speech offends them. You’re cleverly conflating standing up against ACTS of violence with talking in ways that might encourage them. Since you’re bringing Hitler in, I’ll delve into the extreaes, too: The ideology you’ve expressed essentially tells us that the only solution to the conflict of ideas is mob violence or war. It’s justified because I just know they are speaking evil.
Like I said, Brown 0 for setting up an inappropriate forum for this person. A speech doesn’t give the audience much time or space to debate effectively. So if the protest was against Brown, it makes some sense because it might wake up the administration a little. If it was ll about Kelly, nothing of significance was accomplished: the students found a safe and lazy way of feeling good about themselves, no minds were chanded re Kelly, nothing was learned. Is that what education is now all about?
I think booing is a pretty mindless response to a speaker you disagree with. You want to embarrass them? Defeat their argument. Line up the question cue with your best, most cogent debaters with their best arguments.
Booing isn’t debate. It makes THEM look childish. The point should be to expose Kelly, not change the subject to whether or not Kelly should be speaking.
It’s Brown. You’d think they could find a few kids smarter than Ray Kelly.
How do you know he would have taken questions? And even if that were the case, how do you know they wouldn’t be planted questions? Your theory works great in Utopia, not so much in the real world. Kelly got what he deserved. He is a modern-day “Bull” Connor.
Paxson said they students lost their right to confront him and his ideas by shutting down the forum. Since booing is obviously a form of confrontation, I am presuming that she meant a Q&A session.
And you plant YOUR questioners.
And if he elides or talks around the question, you mock him and confront him for that.
You win the debate, you don’t shut it down. And that includes a debate with Bull Connor. The reason the SCLC won the debate with Connor, is because he was the one “booing” and they were the ones debating.
No he isn’t, actually. Bull Connor passionately believed in white supremacy.
Kelly is not a racist, be is a classist.
Big difference.
He’d set the dogs on anybody who challenges Big Money.
AG
I usually agree with the majority of your posts but here’s where I differ. I favor equal time for both or multiple sides of an issue. Like Ray Kelly or not it’s true that there are people who agree with his methods. Giving him a platform to defend or justify his views allows the public to make a fair determination and hopefully hear from opposing views.
Where do we draw the line at making value judgements about who should be allowed to speak? Everyone hates white supremacists. What about pro-lifers or anti-gay marriage zealots? Some people consider their views evil. I imagine Dan Savage or Cecile Richards would get some protests at Baylor or TCU or the University of Oklahoma.
How do you feel about the Code Pink folks who have protested Obama? There are people who think he is on the same level of war criminal as GWB.
I do agree that these forms of protest are free speech but its also a form of intimidation that I don’t support.
A bunch of us once occupied a university president’s office to get the university to stop allowing a Klan leader from taping his public access show on campus facilities. That was after weeks of loud protests. There is something to be said from making noise and stopping traffic, as it were. Kudos to these young men and women for at least taking a stand. Israel is an apartheid-style nation from the perspective of many a leftist (not all of us agree with each other on this point, but I’d wager the vast majority do).
And in the case of Kelly, let’s say that it’s no surprise that at least a subset of students might take offense to his concept of “proactive policing”. I’d be worried if he weren’t a controversial figure (at which point, it would be obvious that our youth were truly asleep).
I guess my problem is with this culture of offendedness. It’s used to excuse every breach of civility, openness, and learning something.
The talk could have started with a walk of shame onto the stage and podium and all protestors in the audience standing up en masse and turning their backs to the speaker. Speaking to the backs of a shunning audience is a collegiate expression.
Still the best organized and classiest university student protest — Andy Card at UMass-Amherst
video link
Baseball bats? Ah, you are finally coming around.
baseball bat idea…
Ray Kelly’s tenure as head of the NYC police department has coincided exactly and precisely with the ongoing alliance between that police department and the CIA/NSA/Homeland Security surveillance system that your hero Barack Obama has unleashed on the people of the world. Ergo…if you wish to use a baseball bat on someone’s hireling, why not take it to the source?
Ohhhhhh….that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms, eh?
You have hustled yourself into yet another untenable position, Booman. You’d better get used to it. Ally yourself w/a lie system, eventually you have to start lying yourself.
You really want to be a satrap of a PermaGov control system?
Get used to the contradictions.
WTFU.
Morality above all.
And Gandhi’s Experiments With Truth continue for us all.
On which side of the experiment do you want to end?
This is a valid question. Consider it well.
AG
Actually Bush unleashed it, Obama just fed it nitro.
Yup.
My mistake.
AG
“Let the students decide”?!?!?
You’ve got to be kidding, Boo.
A modern research university depends, for its grants and endowments, on courting the rich and powerful. Those grants and endowments are the core purpose of the modern corporate university. The students are just an increasingly irrelevant sideshow, especially undergrads. At least you can get the grad students to be research assistants dirt cheap, and the less competent ones can be peeled off to teach the contemptible undergrads.
These speaking gigs aren’t about the “free exchange of ideas” in the least – they’re about impressing current and potential patrons. Who will do a good job of that this week is far too critical a decision to be left in the hands of mere students.
You pinned it, Geov.
Pinned it.
AG
There are about 6000 undergrads at Brown, paying an average of about $43,000 a year in tuition. I’m sure the school doesn’t give a damn about that $250 million* a year they’re raking in.
Yes, it’s significantly less than the school’s annual endowments ($2.4 billion) but no organization or institution is going to consider 10% of its revenue stream “an irrelevant sideshow”.
* – Doesn’t include revenue generated from grad students, the medical school, the athletics department, housing, textbooxs etc
No, the money’s not a sideshow – it is, after all, ten percent – but like any company selling a product, their interest is in getting that revenue by minimizing production costs, i.e. the money and attention needed to actually teach them.
In Seattle, the Univ. of Washington – the state’s largest land-grant public university – has become so research-driven, and so starved for funds by the state legislature (not unrelated to becoming grant- nd aresearch-driven, especially in medical, bioengineering, and defense-related fields) that at least half the undergrad population of 45,000 or so is international students, mostly from China and Japan, who of course pay much higher tuition. In-state kids used to be to be guaranteed admission if their grades were up to snuff; now the slots are limited and most are sloughed off to non-research schools like Western, Central, and Eastern Washington Univs. The only undergrads who are truly valued start for the football team, and that, too, is all about marketing and alumni gifts.
And that’s a public school. An Ivy League private school? As AG would say, puhleeeze.
no,, Erik S is correct about this. Students are not only a % of the current revenue stream, they are the future revenue stream. Also, re: your example of Univ WA, private and public universities differ. alumni are the revenue stream of private liberal arts universities
universities are not like companies selling products and when they are approached that way things get very messed up. There are multiple “interests” that must be balanced, – on campus: faculty [the most permanent group present on campus], students and admin / all of which have strong ties outside the university – faculty to their disciplines, students to their parents/ admin to their funders and also alumni who have multiple connections to the university play an important role although they are not on campus except for special events [ the alumni association office is on campus]
LOL Booing him off the stage WAS his detractors confronting him.
Booman Tribune ~ Let the Students Decide
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi
I think you make a huge epistemological error here Boo.
When you debate ideas with people, there is always a good chance that the people with the better ideas and better evidence will win.
When you resort to violence, it is almost certain that the people with the bigger and better weapons will win.
The first rule of community organising, of passive resistance, of fighting on behalf of the oppressed is that you try to set the terms of the struggle. If it is ideas and law and justice, you have a chance. If t is violence it is the bad guys who win.
I know that the USA has been militarized to the degree that many people think that violence is the only solution and that it actually fixes things. It does no such thing. It sets the stage for even greater injustice and violence.
It doesn’t matter or ignorant or racist Mr. Kelly’s ideas and policies are, and how irritating it is to have to listen to him. The correct responses are silent protests, turning backs, non stop applause so he can’t be speak – or actually confronting his ideas where possible.
You reduce yourselves the the gangsters if you adopt their methods. You have lost the argument if he is the one who has behaved more civilly, or has been attacked with a baseball bat.
The first rule of fighting for the oppressed is that you don’t allow their oppressors to dictate the terms of the confrontation. That is why police forces so often attack peaceful protests – it is because once they can provoke violence they always win.
Well, I don’t think Ray Kelly is a war criminal or a Nazi, but he does need a new job soon and it would be nice if it wasn’t as a police commissioner in Philly or some other large metropolis. So, making him toxic is not a pointless exercise.
As to your other points, I don’t disagree. I just think there is a difference between what works and what is legal or moral. Sometimes you have to break good laws to change bad ones. And sometimes, you really do have to give up on talking and defend yourself.
That’s all.
I would never advise someone to attack a peaceful neo-nazi rally. But I wouldn’t think they were immoral if they did. Just unwise.
Very seldom does initiating violence work out as planned.
As to university policy, they would be wise to provide for a process with clearly defined rules so that students don’t have to resort to disruption to register their disgust with guest speakers.
Your last suggestion is excellent.
Yeah. Right.
What? And put their connection with Big Academe/Big Money/Big Gov at risk!!!???
Remember what happened when that Hero Of Vietnam John Kerry was speaking at the University of Florida?
The students understand what is up. The “discourse” part of such an event is closed tight as Kelly’s asshole and it is not going to be opened up anytime soon. Not as long as Big Academe is a good earner for Big Gov.
Bet on it.
AG
I wonder what this country would be like today if President Lincoln had tried that strategy…
If you have the superior military, you have the option of violence. If you don’t, and you start the violence, don’t start whingeing if you get absolutely trounced. Fight your battles on the terms which give you the best chance of winning.
I wonder what Vietnam would be like today if Vo Nguyen Giap would have followed this strategy…
Or Tito in Yugoslovia during the Nazi reign of terror;
Or A certain group of revolutionaries in the new world continent when faced with the most powerful military on the planet at that time …………..
They invented guerrilla was tactics so they could fight their battles on their own terms. They didn’t have equivalent air power, and could not have defeated a conventional army by conventional means.
Some of those folks who invented guerilla tactics in the American backcountry were from places with names like Donegal, Cavan, Monaghan, Antrim, Down, Derry, Tyrone. And names like Colhoun, Pickens, Shelby, Morgan.
Actually they were working on the ORIGINAL developers of said tactic John Gorham, Joseph Gorham and Robert Rogers pre revolutionary period, and taught by the US Army ever since.
Seems to me that Commissioner Kelly’s “character and culture” would be the one calling for baseball bats, billy clubs and tasers, getting paid to make an appearance, rather than a civil exchange of ideas.
I am less than horrified that poor Ms. Paxson was embarrassed by her young charges.
This was no “debate”.
But this lecture is not about creating a space for dialogue, nor has it ever been. Even Marion Orr, director of the Taubman Center, said in a phone conversation with students the event was “not designed for debate.” The center decided to showcase Kelly’s policies alone, effectively excluding other opinions on this issue.
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/10/29/freedom-speech-freedom-silence/
The students were correct to engage in a civil disobedience(IMO), there was not going to be any debate, Paxon is full of shit.
“Some ideas deserve to be debated, and others should be confronted with baseball bats.”
– Benito Mussolini, 1923.
oh, wait.
A liberal said that.
Benito was a liberal? 😉
it needs to be understood that historically, confrontation using baseball bats has been viewed as a form of debate also.
the Brown students did the right thing, and the administration should have simply demurred to Kelley and moved on….
Celebrity speakers demand to be treated with privilege, which means they expect their statements to be unquestioned because and only because they are celebrities. Exactly what was the intellectual rationale for having Ray Kelly speak in the university at all. Same goes for David Petraeus.
As these appearances are paid appearances, it is just another form of elite welfare.