Tournament: University of Houston | Round: 1 | Opponent: ALL | Judge: ALL
The Role of the Ballot is to Mitigate Structural Violence through material conditions
Winter and Leighton 99:
Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgeable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice "Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century." Pg 4-5 SA-IB
Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be are so oblivious to it structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual/cognitive processes we divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We are do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall o0utside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it.
I’ll specify how to weigh under the rotb: anything not here just ask in cx: no way you can say it won’t solve
- Compare minimizations of oppression
2. The ROTB doesn’t come “before” or “after” theory: it depends on the nature of the abuse: I can’t make that determination until after the abuse is clarified/done
3. ROTB determined by the flow
4. Post fiat and pre fiat offense can link
Material conditions come first Matsuda
The multiple consciousness I urge lawyers to attain is not a random ability to see all points of view, but a deliberate choice to see the world from the standpoint of the oppressed. That world is accessible to all of us. We should know it in its concrete particulars. We should know of our sister carrying buckets of water up five flights of stairs in a welfare hotel, our sister trembling at 3 a.m. in a shelter for battered womxn, our sisters holding bloodied children in their arms in Cape Town, on the West Bank, and in Nicaragua. The jurisprudence of outsiders teaches that these details and the emotions they evoke are relevant and impor- tant as we set out on the road to justice. These details are accessible to all of us, of all genders and colors. We can choose to know the lives of others by reading, studying, listening, and venturing into different places. For lawyers, our pro bono work may be the most effective means of ac- quiring a broader consciousness of oppression. ¶ Abstraction is a and detachment are ways out of the discomfort of direct confrontation with the ugliness of oppression. Abstraction, criticized by both feminists and scholars of color, is the, method that allows theorists to discuss liberty, property, and rights in the aspirational mode of liberalism with no connection to what those concepts mean in real people's lives. Much in our mainstream intellectual training values abstraction and denigrates nitty-gritty detail. Holding on to a multiple consciousness will allow us to operate both within the abstractions of standard ju- risprudential discourse, and within the details of our own special knowledge.¶ Whisperings at Yale and elsewhere about how deconstructionist heroes were closet fascists remind me of how important it is to stay close to oppressed communities. High talk about language, meaning, sign, process, and law can mask racist and sexist ugliness if we never stop to ask: "Exactly what are you talking about and what is the implication of what you are saying for my sister who is carrying buckets of water up five flights of stairs in a welfare hotel? What do you propose to do for her today, not in some abstract future you are creating in your mind?" If you have been made to feel, as I have, that such inquiry is theoretically unsophisticated, and quaintly naive, resist! Read what Professor Williams, Professor Scales-Trent, and other feminists and people of color are writing.' The reality and detail of oppression are a starting point for these writers as they enter into mainstream debates about law and theory
Theories that can’t create material change in the real world are counter-productive and threaten actual solutions to oppression.
Curry 14. Tommy J. “The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century” (2014) Victory Briefs, p. 55-56 Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas AandM
Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, it is set against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm that insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual.,” so what we are seeking to resolve on the basis of “thought” is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our “theories” seek to address. Our attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenon—meaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an ideological frame. be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation (be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters.
The state is inevitable- speaking the language of power through policymaking is the only way to create social change in debate.
Coverstone 5 Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005
An important concern emerges when Mitchell describes reflexive fiat as a contest strategy capable of “eschewing the power to directly control external actors” (1998b, p. 20). Describing debates about what our government should do as attempts to control outside actors is debilitating and disempowering. Control of the US government is exactly what an active, participatory citizenry is supposed to be all about. After all, if democracy means anything, it means that citizens not only have the right, they also bear the obligation to discuss and debate what the government should be doing. Absent that discussion and debate, much of the motivation for personal political activism is also lost. Those who have co-opted Mitchell’s argument for individual advocacy often quickly respond that nothing we do in a debate round can actually change government policy, and unfortunately, an entire generation of debaters has now swallowed this assertion as an article of faith. The best most will muster is, “Of course not, but you don’t either!” The assertion that nothing we do in debate has any impact on government policy is one that carries the potential to undermine Mitchell’s entire project. If there is nothing we can do in a debate round to change government policy, then we are left with precious little in the way of pro-social options for addressing problems we face. At best, we can pursue some Pilot-like hand washing that can purify us as individuals through quixotic activism but offer little to society as a whole. It is very important to note that Mitchell (1998b) tries carefully to limit and bound his notion of reflexive fiat by maintaining that because it “views fiat as a concrete course of action, it is bounded by the limits of pragmatism” (p. 20). Pursued properly, the debates that Mitchell would like to see are those in which the relative efficacy of concrete political strategies for pro-social change is debated. In a few noteworthy examples, this approach has been employed successfully, and I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed judging and coaching those debates. The students in my program have learned to stretch their understanding of their role in the political process because of the experience. Therefore, those who say I am opposed to Mitchell’s goals here should take care at such a blanket assertion. However, contest debate teaches students to combine personal experience with the language of political power. Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point. There is a fallacy in arguing that movements represent a better political strategy than voting and person-to-person advocacy. Sure, a full-scale movement would be better than the limited voice I have as a participating citizen going from door to door in a campaign, but so would full-scale government action. Unfortunately, the gap between my individual decision to pursue movement politics and the emergence of a full-scale movement is at least as great as the gap between my vote and democratic change. They both represent utopian fiat. Invocation of Mitchell to support utopian movement fiat is simply not supported by his work, and too often, such invocation discourages the concrete actions he argues for in favor of the personal rejectionism that under girds the political cynicism that is a fundamental cause of voter and participatory abstention in America today.
Inherency
Colleges restrict constitutionally protected speech in the status quo. Moore ‘16
Social Studies Research and Practice www.socstrp.org Volume 11 Number 1 112 Spring 2016 You Cannot Say That in American Schools: Attacks on the First Amendment James R. Moore Cleveland State University
The first amendment, a crucial component of American constitutional law, is under attack from various groups advocating for censorship in universities and public schools. The censors assert that restrictive speech codes preventing anyone from engaging in any expression deemed hateful, offensive, defamatory, insulting, or critical of sacred religious or political beliefs and values are necessary in a multicultural society. These speech codes restrict critical comments about race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical characteristics, and other traits in the name of tolerance, sensitivity, and respect. Many hate speech codes are a violation of the first amendment and have been struck down by federal and state courts. They persist in jurisdictions where they have been ruled unconstitutional; most universities and public schools have speech codes. This assault on the first amendment might be a concern to all citizens, especially university professors and social studies educators responsible for teaching students about the democratic ideals enshrined in our constitution. Teachers should resist unconstitutional speech codes and teach their students that the purpose of the first amendment is to protect radical, offensive, critical, and controversial speech. Key words: first amendment, hate speech codes, academic freedom, censorship, tolerance, social studies teachers Introduction The first amendment in the Bill of Rights, the foundation of individual freedom in the United States, protecting the freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. These basic freedoms, derived from Enlightenment philosophy and codified in the world’s oldest written constitution, have been an essential characteristic of American democracy and law since 1791. This is continuity considering “between 1971 and 1990, 110 of the world’s 162 national constitutions were either written or extensively rewritten” (Haynes, Chaltain, Ferguson, Hudson, and Thomas, 2003, p. 9). The first amendment has been the conduit employed by U.S. citizens to create an increasingly free and just society based on the constitutional ideals of equality before the law, popular sovereignty, limited government, checks and balances, federalism, and individual liberties (Center for Civic Education, 2009). Advocates for the abolition of slavery and the expansion of civil rights were able, after long struggles, to achieve their goals of expanding freedom and social justice by using their natural rights to free expression and religious liberty (Dye, 2011). Since no constitutional liberty or right is absolute, American institutions continuously debate the definitions, limitations, and exceptions to these fundamental rights based on social, political, and technological changes. This task has been exacerbated by increasing cultural diversity and technological changes (the Internet and social media) that expand communication. In addition, efforts by some people to censor language in the name of tolerance and respect for diversity have increased in recent years (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 2013, p.4). The first amendment is the world’s oldest written safeguard for freedom of expression— this includes allowing blasphemy and expression that may be radical, offensive, controversial, ignorant, and militantly bigoted—and is the cornerstone of participatory democracy (Haynes et al., 2003). The first amendment is under constant attack from some religious organizations, political action groups, ethnically-based activist groups, and, most alarmingly, from American public universities that severely restrict freedom of expression and public debate (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 2013; Haynes, 2013; Hudson, 2011). The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (2013) found “62 of universities (254 out of 409 universities in the survey) maintain severely restrictive red-light speech codes – policies that clearly and substantially prohibit protected speech” (p. 4). Many Americans do not understand, or do not accept, that the first amendment protects unpopular, offensive, controversial, and radical speech; this includes making hateful statements about race, gender, religion, and any other topic the speaker wishes to address (Haynes et al., 2003; Marshall and Shea, 2011; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2010). Many hate speech codes, thus, often are defined “as hostile or prejudicial attitudes expressed toward another person’s or group’s characteristics, notably sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation” (Dye 2011, p. 508). The hate speech instituted in American universities and Kindergarten-12 schools are often, albeit well-intended, violations of the First Amendment (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; Haynes, 2013; Saxe V. State College Area School District, 2001).
Especially unique for teachers - Teachers are dissuaded from teaching rape law due to a culture of fear surrounding political correctness
Fisher 16 (Anthony L. Fisher, Dec 13, 2016, “Opposition to “offensive” speech on campuses will ultimately burn dissidents”, http:www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship)
PEN America, the literary and human rights association that lists as one of its core principles a commitment to "protect open expression in the United States and worldwide," set out to explore the state of free speech on the nation’s campuses — re-examining several high-profile incidents and controversies. While not comprehensive, the report, published this fall, is impressively thorough, treating much of its content as teachable case studies, rather than a set of self-affirming anecdotes. Some press coverage, however, suggested that the PEN America report — titled “And Campus For All: Diversity, Inclusion, and Freedom of Speech at U.S. Universities" — had exonerated campuses from the charge that they insufficiently protect free speech, and that it sided with students who think "cries of ‘free speech’ are too often used as a cudgel against them,” as the New York Times put it. The report itself contributes in a small way to this confused take, largely due to a single line in its conclusion which (improbably) asserts that there is no “pervasive ‘crisis’ for free speech on campus.” But that same report exhaustively details dozens of cases where certain speech was inappropriately muted on campus. More examples: Skidmore College’s Bias Response Group determined that the posting of Donald Trump's official campaign motto "Make America Great Again" in classrooms where women and people of color worked constituted "racialized, targeted attacks." A tenured associate professor at Louisiana State University, Teresa Buchanan, was dismissed for the offenses of using off-color language (including "fuck no”) in class, and off campus (where she said “pussy” in a conversation with another teacher). Like the University of Colorado’s Adler, Buchanan was deemed to have created a "hostile learning environment." The authors write of the "chilling effect" such administrative actions have on professors who fear reprisals for unintentional offense, and as a result, will avoid certain subjects, including rape law and even some aspects of Greek mythology, out of an abundance of caution.
Harms
Lack of rape law education hurts survivors of sexual assault – they won’t win court cases
Soave 14 (Robby Soave, Dec. 16, 2014, “Profs Have Stopped Teaching Rape Law Now That Everything 'Triggers' Students”,http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/16/profs-have-stopped-teaching-rape-law-now)
Students seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor. Student organizations representing women’s interests now routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic. These organizations also ask criminal-law teachers to warn their classes that the rape-law unit might “trigger” traumatic memories. Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well. One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word “violate” in class—as in “Does this conduct violate the law?”—because the word was triggering. Some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress. Suk—who is one of the signatories on this statement of opposition to Harvard's illiberal sexual assault policy—goes on to note that the very real, terrible consequence of not teaching rape law will be the proliferation of lawyers ill-equipped to deal with such matters. Victims of sexual assault deserve competent legal representation; the legal system needs prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges who have vigorously studied the nuances of rape adjudication. Social progress on all these fronts will be rolled back if law professors stop educating students about rape. That would be a travesty of justice.
Stunts sexual assault activism on campus and reduces awareness of the issue
Baker 15 (Katie J.M. Baker, Apr. 3, 2015, “Teaching Rape Law In The Age Of The Trigger Warning”, https:www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/teaching-rape-law-in-the-age-of-the-trigger-warning?utm_term=.par3Gy4V7#.gcKwr03L4)
One criminal law professor at the college was so upset that she told the administration she would rather not teach rape law at all than be forced to teach it in a manner based on one student’s “deeply held personal feelings.” The professor, who would only speak anonymously, has decades of experience studying rape law and said she planned to discuss everything from the effects of trauma to campus rape activism. Instead, she spent class time reassuring students that she would not treat rape differently than other sensitive subjects. Some of her students were thankful for the email, she said, but others were confused since it came out of nowhere and was endorsed by the school. One distraught student told the professor that she was a rape survivor and now had no idea if she would be able to handle whatever was coming next. Some professors told BuzzFeed News that they had no problem incorporating their students’ concerns. Brooklyn Law professor Bennett Capers said he begins his section on rape law by reminding students that it’s a particularly sensitive subject and providing them with sexual assault statistics. “On the first day, a lot of students are reluctant to engage on the subject, but by the second, we have some of the most rewarding conversation I’ve had all semester,” he said. Capers also tells his students that rape law is a particularly fascinating area because it’s currently evolving. “They can push the law in new directions as they become lawyers,” he said. Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former sex crimes prosecutor and professor at Northwestern Law School, said she believes it’s up to the professor to manage the class well. She’s never had any problems. “I think students can make comments that have the potential to be deeply upsetting, but that can be navigated,” she said. Other professors aren’t as quick to bend to students’ requests for sensitivity. Professor Suk told BuzzFeed News that she wrote her New Yorker piece because she was hearing about more students who objected to or absented themselves from the classroom discussion on rape law than ever before. “I wanted to reflect on why, just at a time when sexual assault, particularly on campus, is getting so much attention, we might see a shrinking away from classroom discussion of these topics,” she told BuzzFeed News. Suk said she thinks the shift is indicative of a new form of “social suffering” as classroom experience that goes beyond the pain of individual victims of sexual violence. “The social designation of topics and forms of discussion as ‘traumatic’ has real consequences for classroom intellectual exploration,” she said.
Thus the plan: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech for professors and faculty memebers. Jenkins 14
Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University Perimeter College. - See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/693-free-speech-for-professors-all-it-costs-is-a-paycheck#sthash.qoPvdVBf.dpuf
I’m not denying that academic freedom is taking a beating all over the country. But what is even more endangered, it seems to me, is the right of faculty members to speak their mind outside of the classroom, off-campus, and apart from their contractual duties. In return for a paycheck, faculty members are increasingly expected to surrender their personal beliefs on controversial topics, lest—God forbid—they say something that might “embarrass the institution.” That, I would argue, is an attempt to suppress free speech. Of course, whenever the topic of free speech comes up, someone is bound to say something like, “Well, you might be free to say what you want, but you’re not free to determine the consequences of what you say.” Obviously, that’s true. But it’s also true that, if you have to pay too high a price for your speech, then it really isn’t free. Totalitarian regimes often punish people for unorthodox speech by ostracizing them and depriving of them of their livelihoods. Has the University of Illinois done any less in the Salaita case? Another argument in favor of limiting faculty speech goes like this: The First Amendment was designed only to protect people from government sanctions. Private citizens and corporations are perfectly free to punish people for their speech by demoting, firing, or not hiring them. Again, that may be true to some extent. But the University of Illinois is neither a person nor a private entity. Just like Kansas University in the Guth case last year, the University of Illinois is an arm of the government. Not the federal government (although I suspect they accept a lot of federal money), but is anyone seriously arguing that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to state governments, as well? (If so, you might want to take a look at the 14th Amendment.) Here’s one more argument that pops up on a lot of blogs: A person in any other line of work who said publicly what Salaita said would probably have been fired. Why should college professors be treated any differently? What makes them special? I think that’s the wrong question. Perhaps we ought to be asking: Why should colleges and universities treat people differently than other employers? What makes institutions of higher education special? Oh, I don’t know: Maybe the fact that they’re supposed to be places where the free exchange of ideas is encouraged? Maybe because, unlike Microsoft or General Motors, they pose as bastions of open-mindedness and free thought? Maybe because they owe it to students to model the way that ideas—even offensive ideas—must be considered, vetted, and debated, rather than simply suppressed? I don’t dispute that university officials had every right not to hire Salaita if it they didn’t want to (although the way they went about it was, at the very least, problematic, if not downright underhanded, and will probably cost Illinois taxpayers in court). But in exercising that option, I believe they sent the wrong message to faculty, students, and the nation. Even worse, they squandered a valuable opportunity to send the right message: that this country’s great universities really are the champions of free speech, free thought, and robust debate that they have long pretended to be.
Solvency
Free speech prepares students for the real world by reducing academic insulation.
Vivanco 16 (Leonor Vivanco, August 25th, 2016, “U. of C. tells incoming freshmen it does not support 'trigger warnings' or 'safe spaces'”, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-university-of-chicago-safe-spaces-letter-met-20160825-story.html3
"It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive," the report states. "Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community." The university is preparing students for the real world and would not be serving them by shielding them from unpleasantness, said Geoffrey Stone, chair of the committee, law professor and past provost at the U. of C. "The right thing to do is empower the students, help them understand how to fight, combat and respond, not to insulate them from things they will have to face later," Stone said. While the university doesn't support, require or encourage trigger warnings, it does not prohibit them, he added. Professors are still free to alert students to certain material if they choose to do so. Jane Kirtley, a media ethics and law professor at the University of Minnesota, called U. of C.'s move "refreshing." She said colleges should resist setting limits on what views and opinions are acceptable to air in open forum and should encourage students to discuss things they find uncomfortable. "If universities are not providing platforms for people to be offensive, then I don't think that they're doing part of their job," Kirtley said. "If listening to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is going to make your blood pressure go up 400 points, then fine, don't listen to them. But that doesn't mean you can say we can't have Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton speaking on campus because it would be offensive to even know they were talking." Another Midwestern institution has followed the University of Chicago's lead. In 2015, the board of trustees at Purdue University in Indiana endorsed the principles articulated in the U. of C. report. "Our commitment to open inquiry is not new, but adopting these principles provides a clear signal of our pledge to live by this commitment and these standards," board Chairman Tom Spurgeon said in a statement at the time.
An atmosphere of academic openness is a prerequisite to knowledge.
Jacobson 16 (Daniel Jacobson (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan). “Freedom of Speech under Assault on Campus.” Cato Institute. 30 August 2016. https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/freedom-speech-under-assault- campus#full
Mill held that an atmosphere of intellectual freedom not only cultivates genius but is also a prerequisite for even commonplace knowledge. For our beliefs to be justified, we must be able to respond to the best arguments against them. Yet people naturally dislike what Mill called adverse discussion—that is, exposure to opposing arguments—and tend to avoid it. Hence, they are led to argue against straw men as much from ignorance as dishonesty. For those reasons and others, Mill defended freedom of speech in uncom- promising terms: “There ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine,” regardless of its falsity, immorality, or even harmfulness.4 Mill’s arguments for free speech anticipated several psychological phenomena that are now widely recognized: epistemic closure, group polarization, and confirmation bias, as well as simple conformism. Epistemic closure is the tendency to restrict one’s sources of information, including other people, to those largely in agreement with one’s views, thereby avoiding adverse discussion. Group polarization describes how like-minded people grow more extreme in their beliefs when unchecked by the presence of dissenters. (Whence Nietzsche: “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”5) Confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on evidence that supports what we already believe and to discount contrary evidence. These phenomena are widespread and well documented, and they all tend to undermine the justification of our beliefs. Hence, the toleration of unpopular opinions constitutes a prerequisite for knowledge. Yet such toleration amounts only to its immunity to punishment, not its protection from criticism.
Spillover effect – challenging oppression in everyday discussions is key to shaping larger cultural landscapes.
Malik 2 (Kenan Malik, I am a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. My latest book is The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, “why hate speech should not be banned”, April 12, 2012, https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/)
Much of what we call hate speech consists, however, of claims that may be contemptible but yet are accepted by many as morally defensible. Hence I am wary of the argument that some sentiments are so immoral they can simply be condemned without being contested. First, such blanket condemnations are often a cover for the inability or unwillingness politically to challenge obnoxious sentiments. Second, in challenging obnoxious sentiments, we are not simply challenging those who spout such views; we are also challenging the potential audience for such views. Dismissing obnoxious or hateful views as not worthy of response may not be the best way of engaging with such an audience. Whether or not an obnoxious claim requires a reply depends, therefore, not simply on the nature of the claim itself, but also on the potential audience for that claim.
Professors have high influences on students after college/the real world. Jaschik 13
Scott Jaschik, Editor, is one of the three founders of Inside Higher Ed. With Doug Lederman, he leads the editorial operations of Inside Higher Ed,overseeing news content, opinion pieces, career advice, blogs and other features. Scott is a leading voice on higher education issues, quoted regularly in publications nationwide, and publishing articles on colleges in publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Salon,and elsewhere. He has been a judge or screener for the National Magazine Awards, the Online Journalism Awards, the Folio Editorial Excellence Awards, and the Education Writers Association Awards. Scott served as a mentor in the community college fellowship program of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, of Teachers College, Columbia University. He is a member of the board of the Education Writers Association. From 1999-2003, Scott was editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Scott grew up in Rochester, N.Y., and graduated from Cornell University in 1985. He lives in Washington. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/12/study-finds-choice-major-most-influenced-quality-intro-professor
Maybe it’s much more simple: Undergraduates are significantly more likely to major in a field if they have an inspiring and caring faculty member in their introduction to the field. And they are equally likely to write off a field based on a single negative experience with a professor. Those are the findings of a paper presented here during a session at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association by Christopher G. Takacs, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago, and Daniel F. Chambliss, a professor of sociology at Hamilton College. The paper is one part of How College Works, their forthcoming book from Harvard University Press. In their study, they tracked the educational choices of about 100 students at a college that isn’t named but that sounds like Hamilton College. Students were interviewed about their original educational plans and why they either followed through on those plans or changed them, and they were tracked over their college careers and after graduation as well. What they found challenges the views of many experts that choice of major is “fixed” by such factors as a desire for a lucrative career. And their findings also suggest that those policy makers who want to attract more students to science and technology fields need to focus on teaching quality in those fields, not just financial benefits. Overwhelmingly, the authors write, students’ "taste formation" in choice of major is due to faculty members, although the influence can go either way. "Faculty determine students' taste for academic fields by acting as gatekeepers, either by welcoming them into an area of knowledge, encouraging and inspiring them to explore it, or by raising the costs of entry so high so as to effectively prohibit continuing in it," Takacs and Chambliss write. "Faculty can positively or negatively influence student taste for a field -- some compelling teachers can get students engaged in fields that they previously disliked, while other, more uncharismatic faculty can alienate students from entire bodies of knowledge, sometimes permanently." The research found the role of the first faculty member is strong whether the student has an intended major or doesn’t. And the interviews -- up to four years after graduation -- found that students remembered the professors who inspired them and those who annoyed them, and attributed their decisions on majors to those faculty members. In interviews here, both authors said that there are clear implications for colleges and departments that want to encourage students to major (or at least consider majoring) in certain fields. And the change may be more important in departments where senior faculty members may not want to teach freshmen. "It’s important for department chairs and deans to recognize who their more skilled teachers are, and the teachers they can use to draw students into certain majors," Takacs said. College leaders need to go to departments and say “why don’t you get so-and-so to teach this introductory course.” There is real danger in failing to do so, he added. Many of the students indicated that they made judgments not just on the professor or his or her discipline, but entire branches of disciplines -- with a bad course in any science field, for example, leading students to write off all science. The authors, based on their interviews, talk about the phenomenon of “majoring in a professor.” Chambliss said that there may be some fields that so many freshmen want to study that a single bad experience may not be decisive. But for lesser-known fields, or subjects thought to be challenging, enrollments are going to fall. "English and history can probably survive a bad course, but geology can’t," Chambliss said. Nor can subjects with sequential curriculum, where students must move from course to course in a pattern and can't skip over a course taught by someone with a bad teaching reputation. This is the case in many science fields. "Once they leave, they don’t come back," he said. "It’s important to do better in your intro course than in your capstone courses." Of course, as others here pointed out in questions to the authors during their presentation, many departments let their senior scholars focus on the senior seminars or graduate courses. And one sociologist here, while agreeing that the authors were correct, said she wondered about the “backlash” a chair or dean would get upon telling a senior faculty member who was a skilled teacher that his or her reward was going to be teaching the intro course. But Chambliss said that this is in fact what they should do. He noted that departments spend a lot of time talking about how to make their overall curriculum more inviting, but that a “very small intervention” and one that doesn’t necessarily cost any money can be more transformative. At a large university, making sure the right person is teaching the intro course can affect the experience and future choices of 500 or more students each semester, he said. “If you put someone who is not as good, you have damaged a lot of students.” (Chambliss practices what he preaches. A senior member of Hamilton’s sociology department, he is also one of those who teaches the 101 course there.) Chambliss and Takacs acknowledged that the impact of the first instructor may be different at some large universities, where students apply and enroll in divisions of a university focused on, for example, business or engineering or liberal arts. But they said that they suspect that within those divisions, one would find the same impact. One of the arguments offered by proponents of massive open online courses is that they can expose students around the world to “the best professor” in a given field. Chambliss is quick to say that this research does not back the idea that MOOCs will attract students to various fields. “Charisma alone is not the answer,” he said, noting that while part of the students’ judgments of their professors in the new study was based on the quality of lectures and presentations, far more was about the extent to which professors were engaged with students, took steps to get to know their students, were personally accessible, and so forth. "This is about the caliber of the people you meet in the classroom," he said.
Free speech is key to make sure people like trump don’t get elected.
Soave 16 (Robby Soave, Associate editor at Reason.com, enjoys writing about college news, education policy, criminal justice reform, and television, “Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash”, Nov. 9, 2016, http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-leftist-political-corr
Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness. More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness. I have tried to call attention to this issue for years. I have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the wrong thing. And ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP presidential primaries, I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man who stood in opposition to it. I have watched this play out on campus after campus. I have watched dissident student groups invite Milo Yiannopoulos to speak—not because they particularly agree with his views, but because he denounces censorship
and undermines political correctness. I have watched students cheer his theatrics, his insulting behavior, and his narcissism solely because the enforcers of campus goodthink are outraged by it. It's not about his ideas, or policies. It's not even about him. It's about vengeance for social oppression. Trump has done to America what Yiannopoulos did to campus. This is a view Yiannopoulos shares. When I spoke with him about Trump's success months ago, he told me, "Nobody votes for Trump or likes Trump on the basis of policy positions. That's a misunderstanding of what the Trump phenomenon is." He described Trump as "an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness." Correctly, I might add. What is political correctness? It's notoriously hard to define. I recently appeared on a panel with CNN's Sally Kohn, who described political correctness as being polite and having good manners. That's fine—it can mean different things to different people. I like manners. I like being polite. That's not what I'm talking about. The segment of the electorate who flocked to Trump because he positioned himself as "an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness" think it means this: smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the throats of ordinary folks who aren't up-to-date on the latest requirements of progressive society. Example: A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe they should change that view. Maybe it's insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright. If you're a leftist reading this, you probably think that's stupid. You probably can't understand why someone would get so bent out of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it's not a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who's the delicate snowflake now, huh? you're probably thinking. I'm telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust your approach has delivered the country to Trump. There's a related problem: the boy-who-cried-wolf situation. I was happy to see a few liberals, like Bill Maher, owning up to it. Maher admitted during a recent show that he was wrong to treat George Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain like they were apocalyptic threats to the nation: it robbed him of the ability to treat Trump more seriously. The left said McCain was a racist supported by racists, it said Romney was a racist supported by racists, but when an actually racist Republican came along—and racists cheered him—it had lost its ability to credibly make that accusation. This is akin to the political-correctness-run-amok problem: both are examples of the left's horrible over-reach during the Obama years. The leftist drive to enforce a progressive social vision was relentless, and it happened too fast. I don't say this because I'm opposed to that vision—like most members of the under-30 crowd, I have no problem with gender neutral pronouns—I say this because it inspired a backlash that gave us Trump. My liberal critics rolled their eyes when I complained about political correctness. I hope they see things a little more clearly now. The left sorted everyone into identity groups and then told the people in the poorly-educated-white-male identity group that that's the only bad one. It mocked the members of this group mercilessly. It punished them for not being woke enough. It called them racists. It said their video games were sexist. It deployed Lena Dunham to tell them how horrible they were. Lena Dunham! I warned that political-correctness-run-amok and liberal overreach would lead to a counter-revolution if unchecked. That counter-revolution just happened. There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind. The presidency just went to the guy whose main qualification, according to his supporters, is that he isn't afraid to speak his.
