Albena Azmanova: Safe speech vs free speech: higher education’s false dilemma

By Dilip -

In the ‘cancel culture’ era, universities should remember that the original purpose of free speech was to empower the weak, not to shelter them. Universities in the US and the UK have become a battleground in the war between safe speech and free speech. I believe that this is a false dilemma – and understanding its falsity can enable us to detect the social forces imposing it on us. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,” wrote George Orwell in 1945 in an introduction to Animal Farm.

The introduction was so controversial that it was not made public until 1972. In it, Orwell relays how hard it was to get the novel published. Significant sections of the English intelligentsia in the 1940s held Stalin in high regard, so a book that was a thinly veiled attack on the Soviet Union and its dictators was scarcely timely. Four publishers, afraid to expose themselves to public scrutiny, rejected it. One said: “I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.”…

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/safe-speech-vs-free-speech-higher-educations-false-dilemma/

Reflections of an American living in India...

This year's Oscars could have been a moment of pride for China. Then politics got in the way

Anushka Baruah - What Ramjas teaches // MSU Baroda Cancels Workshop on Caste citing Ramjas incident: Protest by Indian Cultural Forum Collective

The essay by AK Ramanujan censored by DU's Academic Council

A K Ramanujan works dropped from new DU syllabus

Sambhaji Brigade vandalised the Bhandarkar Institute in Pune in 2004
Javed Anand - Ms Wadud, we are ashamed

The Return of the Show Trial: China’s Televised “Confessions”. By Magnus Fiskesjö

Tom Phillips - Cambridge University Press accused of 'selling its soul' over Chinese censorship

Book reviews - ‘Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962,’ by Yang Jisheng

The People's Republic of Thuggery - Chinese agents bar access to the 'free' wife of Liu Xiaobo

Stephen Alter - The right of the reader

Speaking freely - essays on speech & censorship

Infochange Agenda # on censorship: The Limits of Freedom

Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges // "Borges and I"

The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay

Kafka: An End or a Beginning?

Books reviewed - Lost in Transformation: biographies of Franz Kafka

'Before the Law' - a parable by Franz Kafka


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