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By: Rikki Schlott

Published: Sep 6, 2023

Harvard University is officially 2023’s worst school for free speech.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its annual college free speech rankings on Wednesday, which dubbed the state of free speech at the Ivy League school “abysmal.”

“I’m not totally surprised,” Sean Stevens, director of polling and analytics at FIRE, told The Post. “We’ve done these rankings for years now, and Harvard is consistently near the bottom.”

Despite being the most acclaimed academic institution in the country, Harvard received a 0.00-point free speech ranking on a 100-point scale — a full 11 points behind the next-worst school.

FIRE says the dismal score was “generous,” considering Harvard’s actual score was a -10.69, according to its

Harvard’s score was dragged down by the fact that nine professors and researchers there faced calls to be punished or fired based on what they had said or written — and seven of the nine were actually professionally disciplined.

“I thought it would be pretty much impossible for a school to fall below zero, but they’ve had so many scholar sanctions,” Stevens said.

The score is calculated based on factors including how strong the school’s policies in favor of free speech are and how many professors, students and campus speakers have been targeted by authorities for their speech.

Bonuses are applied if the school’s administrators stand up for the rights of those whose free speech was threatened.

The rankings also take into account student sentiment about free speech based on polling FIRE conducted in partnership with research firm College Pulse.

Harvard’s lowest rank comes despite the fact that more than 100 of its professors banded together earlier this year to form a Council on Academic Freedom to defend open inquiry on campus.

“We are in a crisis time right now,” Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor and member of the council, told The Post in April. “Many, many people are being threatened with — and actually put through — disciplinary processes for their exercise of free speech and academic freedom.”

Second-worst on the list was the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, followed by the University of South Carolina in Columbia, Georgetown University in DC, and Fordham University in the Bronx and Manhattan.

Although Columbia University took the prize of worst school for free speech last year, it ranked 214th out of 248 this time around.

The number one school for free speech was Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan. The school earned 78.01 out of 100 possible points. 

“I’m not necessarily surprised that a technological school has a better speech climate, primarily for the reason that they don’t really talk as much about controversial topics,” Stevens said. “They’re there to make things work as engineers.”

Auburn University, the University of New Hampshire, Oregon State University and Florida State University rounded out the top five.

FIRE’s survey of 55,000 current students from 254 universities also yielded some staggering results.

Fifty-six percent of students worry about getting canceled for something they said, and 27% said it’s acceptable to use violence to stop campus speech in some circumstances.

As FIRE continues to be inundated with allegations of free speech violations, Stevens says the erosion of campus discourse should concern everyone.

“I’d say the state of free speech on campus is stagnant at best, and possibly a little worse than last year.”

By: Richard Dawkins

Published: Aug 20, 2023

I was about to start work on this commission, when in came an email from Twitter. They’d received a complaint that the following tweet violated their standards.

“Sex is not the same as gender.” But it’s not your gender that gives you the physique to tower over woman athletes & break their swimming records. It’s your sex. It’s not your undressed gender that upsets women in changing rooms. It’s your sex. You can’t eat your cake & have it.

Twitter sensibly over-ruled the complaint and cleared me of the proscribed sins that they helpfully listed for me:

Violent speech, violent and hateful entities, child sexual exploitation, abuse/harassment, hateful conduct, perpetrators of violent attacks, suicide, sensitive media, illegal, private information, non-consensual nudity, account compromise, plus various legal technicalities.

I’m sure the complainant was sincere. And that’s my point. A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid hypersensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say ,“I disagree with you for the following reasons.” But all they actually hear is “Hate hate hate!” So instead of putting a counter-argument (which I would be interested to hear), they resort to censorship. All too often it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse: “Transphobe! TERF!”

At least the above tweet was partisan. But so hair-trigger is the hypersensitivity, a mere invitation to discuss something is enough to set it off.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

That 2021 tweet caused the American Humanist Association to withdraw my title as 1996 Humanist of the Year. A 25-year retrospective swipe, which cost them the loss of several major donors. Once again, I have no doubt they were sincere.

On July 26, I interviewed Helen Joyce about her book Trans. The interview is being very well received on YouTube. As it should be, for Joyce is extremely well-informed in her subject and she spoke cogently, soberly, reasonably.

But one of YouTube’s in-house judges heard only hate. And tried to censor the interview.

Short of an outright ban, YouTube has a variety of punishments at its disposal. In this case we got a minor slap on the wrist, a restriction on our video’s licence to advertise. But the real point is, yet again, the ludicrous hypersensitivity of the complainant. Those warped ears heard not reasonable argument deserving a reply, but “hateful and derogatory content”, and “hate or harassment towards individuals or groups”.

Obviously I can’t disprove that here. The interview runs to more than 10,000 words. But judge for yourself, it’s still up on YouTube. I earnestly challenge Evening Standard readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call hateful. Enter it, labelled “Challenge”, in the comments section under the video, and I promise to respond.

I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else?

Or there’s “violence”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”, and that is certainly the meaning I understand. Advocates of free speech often invoke, as a sensible exception, “incitement to violence”, where physical force is normally implied. But that sensible exception would mean something very different if you redefine “violence” to include the non-physical. If someone calls you “she” when you prefer “they”, I might see it as a mild discourtesy. But if you see it as a “violent” threat to your very existence, then our interpretations of “incitement to violence” — and hence of freedom of speech — are going to diverge sharply.

As a textbook example of incitement to real violence, you could hardly do better than “Sarah Jane” Baker’s speech at London Pride this year, where she told the cheering crowd: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”. Or Sky News (January 23) has a picture of two SNP politicians grinning in front of a large, colourful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “DECAPITATE TERFS”. They claimed they didn’t know the sign was there, and I sympathise. You shouldn’t be blamed for the company you keep. No doubt I shall be labelled “right-wing” for writing this article — and that’s the most unkindest cut of all.

The Guardian (February 14, 2020) reported that police officers turned up at Harry Miller’s workplace to warn him about his allegedly “transphobic” tweets, such as the obviously satirical, “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”.

Well, if Miller’s light-hearted satire is a hate incident, why not go after Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson, Private Eye’s royal romances of Sylvie Krin, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, Lady Addle Remembers, Tom Lehrer, even the benign PG Wodehouse? Satire is satire. That’s what satirists do, they get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society.

“Assigned Mammal at Birth” satirises the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm. What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.

A provisional guess, pending the child’s own decision (which is what really counts).

Joyce’s comment is: “And what are you meant to make of this if you’re eight? First off, that you’re very boring if you simply go along with what you were assigned at birth”. Her book quotes the boast of a mother of eight children, “without a single boring cis child in the whole bunch!” I recently received a moving letter from a highly intelligent American 12-year-old, worried that at her school it was not cool to retain your assigned gender. Yesterday I chanced to meet an American teacher whose school rules compel her to go along with a child’s declared gender and not tell the parents.

Miller’s case came up before Mr Justice Knowles, who thankfully didn’t mince words when it came to freedom of speech: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society”. 1984’s Appendix lays out the principles of Newspeak, the nascent language of Orwell’s dark dystopia. Newspeak was designed to make unorthodox thoughts impossible. There would be no words to express them.

O’Brien, Big Brother’s enforcer, holds up four fingers, and tortures Winston Smith until he really believes that 2+2= 5 if the Party wills it. Is that realistic? Could political power ever make you really believe a logical contradiction? The Times (January 18) reported that “a transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis”. If “with her penis” is not quite 2+2= 5, it’s getting close. 2+2= 4.5? Joyce’s book quotes Orwell in an epigraph: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Are we approaching that point?

But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other.

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It's a feature, not a bug.

duckspeak | dəkspēk |

noun    Thoughtless or formulaic speech.

Etymology duck +‎ speak, coined by George Orwell in 1949 as part of the Newspeak in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

https://www.abhafoundation.org/assets/books/html/1984/37.html

As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck. [..]

'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck.“

"In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases [..] one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful.

A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church."

-- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946)

Beware of robots.

Founded in January 2023, Heresy Press addresses a growing void in today’s literary marketplace where conformity and timidity increasingly hold sway. When authors self-censor, agents select works along narrow ideological preferences, and publishers hedge their bets in order to avoid offending anyone, then literature loses. Heresy Press is here to give oxygen to unfettered creativity and to provide a home for authors and works that are not currently favored through the conventional publishing channels. Fiction in all of its forms is the mainstay of Heresy Press, with adult literary fiction, satire, comedy, speculative fiction, and young adult books leading the charge.

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“Publishers have adopted a defensive crouch, taking pre-emptive measures to avoid controversy and criticism. Now, many books the left might object to never make it to bookshelves because a softer form of banishment happens earlier in the publishing process: scuttling a project for ideological reasons before a deal is signed, or defusing or eliminating ‘sensitive’ material in the course of editing…. All of this is happening against the backdrop of a recent spate of shameful book bans that comes largely from the right.” (Pamela Paul, New York Times, July 24, 2022)

The new press serves as a real alternative to conventional publishers—both large and small—who increasingly deploy “soft” censorship tactics to avoid landing in hot water over boundary-pushing or “heretical” materials. Instead of adopting a “defensive crouch,” Heresy Press stands proudly for unbounded creativity and fearless expression. We discourage authors from descending into self-censorship; we don’t blink at alleged acts of cultural appropriation; we don’t pander to the presumed sensitivities of hypothetical readers; and we can hardly imagine conditions under which we would consider a retraction. Instead of playing it safe, Heresy Press is unafraid of controversy and criticism. Its ultimate commitment is to enduring quality standards, i.e. literary merit, originality, relevance, courage, humor, and aesthetic appeal. Every serious submission will receive a sympathetic hearing, regardless of the author’s age, gender identity, racial affiliation, political orientation, culture, religion, non-religion, cancellation status, etc. Fiction in all of its forms is the mainstay of Heresy Press, with adult literary fiction, satire, comedy, speculative fiction, and young adult books leading the charge.

Heresy Press is committed to freedom, honesty, openness, dissent, and real diversity in all of its manifestations. We resist conformity and instead operate within the Millsian model of the free market place of ideas. But while we stand firmly behind the First Amendment, any speech that is not protected by the First Amendment, notably incitement to violence, libel, targeted harassment, perjury, obscenity, etc. will not be considered for publication. We think of fiction as a realm that needs as much, if not more, freedoms to thrive in than common forms of real-world discourse: “No human endeavor requires freedom as much as creativity does” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). Heresy Press will consider contributions that some on this planet might deem blasphemous, politically problematic, inconvenient, or impolite, and it will never engage “sensitivity readers” to screen out such aspects. “All great truths begin as blasphemies” (George Bernard Shaw). Heresy Press and its products and representatives shall not be drawn into the vortex of cancel culture, with its apologies, mea-culpas, retractions, atonements, propitiations, etc. and instead focus on what matters—unfettered creativity and fearless imagination.

Welcome to the world of Heresy Press, where creative freedom holds sway and unbridled imagination rules! The press serves as a platform for all literary voices, including those currently sidelined or silenced (paradoxically often in the name of diversity). Heresy Press is here to offer adventurous readers a bounty of alluring, uncensored, relevant, and achingly beautiful stories.

Heresy Press’s first objective is to uphold the highest standards of literary excellence, insisting that, above all else, the writing be vibrant, the vision free from moralizing ideological agendas, and the material an uninhibited artistic exploration of human quandaries.

Instead of assuming that readers are frail creatures who need to be shielded from any and all potentially offensive, unfiltered, or “triggering” contents, Heresy Press assumes that its readers are resilient, curious, open-minded, and discerning people of any background who want to be swept off their feet by a narrative so powerful, they forget to check their phones for hours at a time. We are confident that our authors can deliver on this promise. Witness the first story published by Heresy Press, Raymond Welch’s flash fiction piece “Bad Girlfriend,” published in this issue of Speakeasy.

Heresy Press is a disruptor, not only in terms of its emphasis on radical creative freedom and its faith in a resilient reading public. We do almost everything differently from conventional publishers, both big and small:

Heresy Press treats authors with respect, which means answering queries and submissions personally, and in a timely manner.

Heresy Press does not prescreen submissions according to identity criteria, and it does not hire Sensitivity Readers.

Heresy Press doesn’t charge for submissions and it will never ask authors to contribute financially to their publication.

Heresy Press pays a generous across-the-board royalty on the net profit of all income streams generated by publications of the press, thereby greatly simplifying and disentangling the often complex and opaque process of calculating payments to authors.

Heresy Press runs a very lean operation with lots of professional volunteerism and little overhead cost, thus generating better returns for authors and progressing at a fast pace.

Heresy Press nimbly negotiates between print-on-demand and print-run approaches while also issuing e-books and audio-books.

--

Essay about the State of Publishing (Part I)

The publishing industry has largely adopted an approach and an outlook that New York Times columnist Pamela Paul has called “a defensive crouch.” Instead of approaching submissions with an eager mindset that goes: “Is it innovative, brilliantly written, daring, fresh, and beautiful?” now many gatekeepers in the world of publishing first raise a set of anxious questions: “Does this author have the right kind of identity, and does it match the identity of her protagonist?” “What will our Sensitivity Readers say to this?” “Is there a clearly identifiable moral center that we approve of?” “Does this story contain any slurs or words that are degrading, regardless of context?”

All of these questions (and probably several more) are intended to ward off potential Twitter-storms and to preempt outrage from thin-skinned readers; significantly, all of these concerns also reflect an obsession with thematic content at the expense of aesthetic considerations:

Authors must write in own-voice. If they portray characters other than members of their own identity group, they are guilty of cultural appropriation. Sensitivity readers stand by to flag any transgressions that agents, editors, and publishers may have missed (or merely suspected).

Authors must take an approved stance on minorities, diversity, transgenderism, racism, guns, immigration, etc., and Sensitivity Readers will make sure that authors stay within the prescribed safe lanes.

Authors must not make anybody uncomfortable by depictions of discrimination, racism, oppression, harassment, or violence, except in explicit condemnation of them, and treatments of Islam are inherently suspect. The Sensitivity Reader’s job is not done until no “problematic” scenes are left standing.

There must be no ideological ambivalence in the text. The reader should not have to wonder whether the author sanctions the views and actions of her characters. Instead, there must be congruence between the opinions of the writer and the conduct and mindset of her literary creations.

With this checklist in hand, agents, editors, publishers, and Sensitivity Readers are placing the focus on what the story is about not how well it is told. Matters of style, of poetics, narrative structure, and aesthetic form are underrated or completely neglected.

The question is how have we ended up here? What has led to this strange, anti-aesthetic climate? I want to sketch an answer to these questions based on my personal experience of the “business” of academic literary criticism.

The current state of affairs in publishing has been long in the making. In essence, it is the result of a paradigm shift in academic/scholarly approaches to literature that started in the 1980s with the rise of critical theory, spearheaded by thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School and French Poststructuralism. Theorists like Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze and the legions of their followers across the French and Anglo-American academies, shifted the principal attitude from a model that foregrounded the aesthetic and formal properties of texts—as evidenced in the structuralist and New Critical paradigms—to a critical focus that prioritized content over form, focusing predominantly on the expression and rendering of power relations through the medium of language and discourse.

The Marxist thinking of philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School (e.g. Adorno and Horkheimer)—i.e. that all human relations as well as their cultural expressions are manifestations of differential power relations—filtered down into the way literature was treated as a playing field of unequal and essentially inequitable social relations. Hence the birth of the race-class-gender trinity, the literary critical approach that was based on what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

Before the wide adoption of that paradigm, literary critics were generally paying homage to what structuralist critic Jonathan Culler defined as the “hyperprotected cooperative principle.” This denotes a sort of contract between reader and author, a bond of trust where the reader approached a work of literature with the conviction that things are arranged the way they were for a reason. Hence, even seemingly incongruous, illogical, or paradoxical parts of the work are there because they were part of the author’s artistic vision, and the critical reader’s job was to figure out how to make sense of the seeming contradictions, tensions, and mysteries within a larger context. Structuralists believed that there were deep mental, societal, and cultural patterns embedded in texts, narratives, myths, traditions, and beliefs, i.e. figurative traces of mental universals and shared human essences or archetypes. Accordingly, their task consisted in unearthing the—often hidden—patterns that inform the myriad different versions, stories, tales, and narratives that are circulating in cultural and literary traditions throughout the world.

This now quaint view of literary interpretation was ditched for the hermeneutics of suspicion sometimes in the late 1980s and 1990s, as critics began to look for signs of the authors’ benighted, socially regressive—and occasionally also adequately progressive—views on matters of racial supremacy, gender inequity, and class warfare. A whole industry, comprising conferences, journals, associations, books, and more sprung up in response to the desire to treat literary texts as compendia of their authors ideological views and opinions, especially in regards to issues of race, class, and gender. Students and future professional literary critics were taught to analyze literary texts for the ways in which they socially constructed, and thus “made” these categories. From being considered a locus of aesthetic pleasure, the text thus morphed into something more closely resembling a crime scene. One may argue that this transition is a symptom of a larger erosion of trust happening on a society-wide scale.

It hardly surprises, therefore, that legions of literary agents and editors are now ensconced in all echelons of the publishing industry who are willing to ditch works of literature, no matter how brilliantly written, on the basis of perceived sins of omission and commission detected on the thematic level of content, character, subject matter, ideological tendency. No wonder, too, that some readers are loudly condemning certain works of literature for their authors’ views, failing to recognize the discontinuity between an author’s own moral (or immoral) views and the characters and events inside the fictional world. If the moralizing approach to literature were to become utterly dominant, then the canon of available literature would shrink to the works of a few unconditionally virtuous, progressive, magnanimous, unprejudiced, and saintly individuals. But what level of riveting, dark, disturbing, funny, and boundary-pushing literature could we expect from such unblemished hands?

The hermeneutics of suspicion has poisoned the appreciation of art, with artists and readers everywhere now paying the price for the prosecutorial approach to literature that has been inculcated into generations of budding literary critics. For the past 50 years, we have failed to teach students to analyze and appreciate the craft of literature as an artistic endeavor and a human striving for profound aesthetic experiences. Attempts in that direction would have likely met with withering scorn by the scholarly community as a new form of “aestheticism.”

There is obviously nothing wrong with having a distinct critical perspective, and it is also true that language is one of the vehicles for encoding and disseminating pernicious stereotypes. However, literature is not the place where we should insert the lever in order to dislodge injustice and rid the world of prejudice. The emphasis should rather be placed on education, on tolerance training, on integration of neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and so on. Instead of purging library shelves of unwelcome books, let’s drive initiatives that strengthen social cohesion through trust-building, dialogue, and compassion. Much more damage than good is done by putting art in fetters over forbidden words and disfavored ideas. This censorious approach is directly counter-productive, since literature is instrumental in broadening minds, enlarging empathy, fostering dialogue, and practicing virtue, albeit vicariously.

Having said, this, I much prefer Oscar Wilde’s aphorism “The telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of Art” to Shelley’s activist dictum about poets being “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” They are not, at least not in the sense of “legislator” as a person with actual political and legal power or direct socio-economic impact. Poets wield a very different kind of influence–they gift us with soaring diction, they broaden our horizons with new perspectives, and they provide us with deep understanding of ourselves and others via the most effective teaching tool in existence: storytelling. Let’s never lose sight of that.

This is not a plea for uncritical reading. Far from it. But there’s a difference between being an uncritical reader and being a humble, fair, and undogmatic critic. We need more of the latter.

(To be continued)

– Bernard Schweizer (Director Heresy Press)

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If you're a writer or a reader frustrated by the current stifling orthodoxy of what can be said and who is allowed to say it, you might like to consider a look at Heresy Press.

YEAH!