Reader PietB called attention to this story at NYT as additional information on my post about Andrew Sullivan's post on Dr. Thio Li-Ann. Sullivan:
Thio Li-ann, a Singapore law professor, was forced to resign from an NYU human rights course after students protested what they called her anti-gay views.
It seems that the major form the protest took was that almost no one enrolled for her classes. There was, indeed, a petition signed by 748 people against her appointment, but I think real meat is the low enrollment. And note the word tricks here: they protested what "they called" her anti-gay views. By any objective measure, she's an anti-gay advocate who could put James Dobson to shame. Update: In that vein, please note that Dr. Thio was not "forced to resign." She withdrew her name because of the antipathy expressed by the students toward her repellent record on human, specifically, gay rights. Again, there's that low enrollment, which I understand was pathetic for a distinguished visiting professor.
As usual, I find myself with two prongs to this discussion. (Remember, there's never only one answer.)
First is Sullivan's reaction. Knee-jerk glibertarianism. Sullivan is too ready to condemn "the left" for doing what the right has done for years, which is taking those with opposed views to task. I'm not doing the "but your side does it, too" dance, because Sullivan is quite publicly appalled by the anti-gay stance of the rabid right in this country, but I don't recall him ever making the kind of sweeping denunciation of the authoritarian right-wing bigots here that he routinely makes toward the "authoritarian left." (I don't recall any instance of the left making up outright lies about their opponents, as is customary with Dr. Thio and her ilk. I provided a link to the notorious speech against repeal of 337A in my earlier post, but here it is again. It's pretty awful, just from a factual accuracy point of view, and the reasoning is based more on debater's tricks than anything else -- sort of what you'd expect from a law professor.) Sullivan's reaction to this sort of thing is "It's 'the left' doing it, so it must be anti-democratic," which is a stance that defies not only reason, but any shred of sanity.
To give credit where credit it due, Sullivan will be educated. It takes a lot, but he is open enough for that.
Another strand of this is the idea that she should be provided another forum for expressing her views, as repellent as they may be. Sullivan's post, as I noted, relies heavily on this piece by Wendy Kaminer. Let me point out that Kaminer's bias is evident in the last sentence of her first paragraph:
According to a petition protesting it, she had opposed repeal of a Singaporean law criminalizing homosexual conduct and "supported the imposition of a $15,000 fine on a free-access Singaporean television channel for presenting a gay couple and their child as a family unit." (If the latter claim is accurate, it surely undermines her credibility as victim of censorship.)
There's no reason to doubt the accuracy of that report. Dr. Thio has not disputed it any place that I can find, and to cast it in terms of "If it is accurate" to me reads as an attempt to undercut the credibility of testimony against Dr. Thio. What is accurate is that she has no credibility as a victim of censorship. She has not been censored. She's just been given to understand that her views are unacceptable to enough of those at NYU's law school that her appearance there would be a failure.
The major flaw in the Sullivan/Kaminer stance is simply that Dr. Thio has had ample opportunity to express her views on homosexuality and has taken advantage of it. Kaminer:
The refusal of law students even to hear opposing views, reflecting opposing moral codes, is particularly worrisome. I wouldn't want one of these future lawyers ever advocating for me. They're unlikely to learn how to argue effectively if they limit their law school debates to matters about which only presumptively reasonable people disagree. Uniformity of opinion breeds complacency, close-mindedness, and a tendency to mistake attitudes for arguments.
But the whole point is that her views are on record, and you can bet those students were aware of her views and her expression of them. As I pointed out in my previous post, her factual basis for her opinions is nonexistent and her reasoning is pure sophistry -- hardly qualifications to be teaching at NYU or anyplace else. (Perhaps in matters of pure, abstract, constitutional law she is a competent if not inspired teacher. I wonder if mere competence is enough.) I wonder what the reaction from the Kaminer/Sullivan camp would have been if a well-known gay rights activist had been invited to a guest lectureship at, say, Bob Jones University, only to withdraw after massive protests and denunuciations. Would we have heard snide remarks about the "authoritarian right"?
What makes me wonder if Kaminer really knows what she's talking about is simply that I've actually read Dr. Thio's 337A speech, which I discussed earlier. Dr. Thio disqualified herself as a teacher simply on the basis of the manner in which her "arguments" were presented and the fact that those arguments have, at best, a tenuous relationship with objective reality.
What I'm left with is that both Sullivan and Kaminer are saying, in effect, that those with radical views, unfounded in any sort of factual reality, should be provided a forum to express those views because they are radical and unfounded. This is, apparently, even more true if those views are offensive to a large portion of the prospective audience, and especially if that audience can in any way be typified as "liberal."
Update: Another comment: I've said before that I consider libertarianism a morally bankrupt political philosophy (and I won't go into the complete absence of intellectual underpinnings based on the ways human societies actually work), and neither Sullivan nor Kaminer have done anything to change my mind. Both seem to be, from their comments on this issue, just waiting for another chance to take a poke at "the authoritarian left" without every examining the realities of the situation under discussion. One has to wonder when The Atlantic became the final refuge of second-rate thinkers. Going back over this, I can't identify any real substance to Kaminer's text, and Sullivan's biases are embarrassingly obvious.
We now return to our previously scheduled program.
As for Dr. Thio's reaction to the controversy, it's no suprise that she attempted to take the moral high ground -- and failed. From the Straits Times:
In a response carried in the Insider Higher Ed portal, Dr Thio said: 'Everyone is entitled to their opinion, free conscience, free thought - that is a cardinal principle for every academic community.'
'We can be united in commitment to this principle, without slavishly bowing to a demanded uniformity or dogma of political correctness set by elite diktat. I cannot say I am impressed by this ugly brand of politicking which I hope is not endemic.'
'I think certain Americans have to realise the fact that there are a diversity of views on the subject and it is not a settled matter; there is no universal norm and it is nothing short of moral imperialism to suggest there is.'
Referring back to the $15,000 fine issue, Dr. Thio seems to believe that the idea that "everyone is entitled to their opinion, free conscience, free thought" has distinct limits, particularly for those who hold views opposed to her own. Now, she may make the argument that a free-access television station is not an "academic community," but why should such freedoms be limited to that milieu? That's not what democracy is about.
I'd also like to take issue with her comment about "moral imperialism." First, that is exactly what she is espousing, except that it's her concept of morality which much take precedence, at least in Singapore. She doesn't seem to like it when she can't have the game played by her rules.
There's also the fact that she's talking about a "morality" that is purely a social construct that has been ripped out of its original context, where it might have had some validity as a mechanism for social unification (there is evidence that the twelve tribes that became the nation of Israel were, in fact, a congeries of groups, not all of which were even Semites, that banded together under the banner of one God) and used as an instrument of social control in contexts in which it has become less and less valid, particularly as we learn more about human behavior, and even more particularly in this instance as we learn more about the origins and prevalence of same-sex attraction. (It's also, as I have stated before, a particularly shallow reading of morality that relies on a mechanistic view of people and doesn't come close to developing a basis for moral behavior.)
In short, the Sullivan/Kaminer whining about "free speech" is simply a matter of a shoe that fits on either foot. It's a much more complex question, even in this case, than either of them are really capable of dealing with, from all appearances.
As I see it, Sullivan and Kaminer are using Dr. Thio to attack those who are exercising their rights to free speech to protest Dr. Thio's appointment. The protests took a couple of forms, one of which proved very effective. PietB noted that she has lost face big-time because of the low enrollment in her classes. I suppose the Sullivan/Kaminer camp would hold the attitude that students should have enrolled because we not only must be willing to listen to offensive viewpoints, but must make a special effort to do so.
Sullivan remarked:
It seems to me that gay rights supporters should always, always, always defend the freedom of speech and association of our opponents. In a free and open debate, we will always win because our arguments are so strong.
No one has attacked Dr. Thio's right to express her views. She has been criticized for the content of those views, and the university was, quite rightly, I think, criticized for providing a forum for those views. Let me point out that we are in the age of the Internet -- it's not like anyone of any prominence (and large numbers of those with no prominence whatsoever) is lacking a public forum: the Internet is one big public forum, and maybe Sullivan should alter his conceptual basis of the universe to take account of that fact. Dr. Thio has exercised her right to free speech. That's not the question. The question is whether an American university must provide her yet another forum to express those views.
I found it particularly revealing that Kaminer quoted the remarks of Richard Revesz, dean of NYU's law school, without apparently understanding what he actually said:
"At the same time, our evaluation of Professor Thio's strength as a scholar might have been usefully informed by an assessment of the analytic cogency and methodological integrity of the arguments and evidence she marshaled for her position."
That sounds to me very much as though he's saying that if they had investigated a little more thoroughly and actually read any of her statements in terms of their "analytic cogency and methodological integrity," she never would have been offered the appointment to begin with. (And as for the evidence, I've already noted that what I saw was carefully selected to support her agenda, and in large part was either misinformation or complete fabrication.)
Damn -- I'm certainly not a law professor -- I don't even write for the Atlantic -- and I could spot the holes in her reasoning a mile away.
Lord save us from wishy-washy libertarians. I mean, if you're going to argue a position, make sure you've actually got a position to argue before you open your mouth.
(Footnote: I've heard from a correspondent in Singapore who is terribly embarrassed by Dr. Thio. As he put it, that's the part of Singapore that he didn't want me to know about, and earnestly wants me to understand that they're not all like that. In fact, most of them aren't.)
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