Re: Johns Hopkins 2021
Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 3:23 pm
Maybe one could infer from BJS47's post a certain implication of animus toward young people qua young people. I don't necessarily read it that way, but I can see how one could. Your response to BJS47, by contrast, is explicitly about age from the first word to the last. That you find exactly one of these posts to be unambiguously ageist, and think it isn't yours, strikes me as applying a very strange double standard.
The post in question was explicitly framed: "Regarding 'diversity' at JHU." The immediately preceding post, by SteelHop, discussed "diversity" as one motivation for Stanford's decision to cut several non-revenue sports. Although it hasn't been discussed much on the Hop thread, other threads have had more conversation about diversity as an institutional imperative in light of similar decisions at other elite schools. In that context I thought BJS47 did a decent job of lampshading the logical connection to previous posts.
Look, anybody saying anything about anything is exercising his or her constitutional right. If you think a particular group of protestors' slogans are inane and stupid, saying so doesn't impugn their right to protest, any more than your saying so about BJS47's posts impugns his right to say stuff on the internet. I'm not sure I grasp the reference to scare quotes: being an activist doesn't confer any special rights to speak, so whether the students are activists or merely "activists" makes no difference from a constitutional standpoint.
No argument there.
This seems like an odd requirement for somebody to be entitled to an opinion. I don't know much about these York Rd. protestors, but are they getting together, say, to recite Zen koans and modernist poetry as a form of pure performance art? Or are they taking positions on matters of public policy of interest to anyone with a stake in the overall direction of government and society? You can't have it both ways: if the students are engaged in core political expression on issues of broad public relevance, then any citizen has standing to comment, regardless of whether he or she is "impacted" in some narrow sense.
Maybe, maybe not. It's the offseason.
Here's what I took it to mean; the OP can correct me if I've got it wrong. It's a longstanding critique of "diversity," in the concrete way that concept has been interpreted and pursued in American society within the past generation or so, that it tends to produce institutions that draw upon a wider range of different demographic groups but are actually more, not less, uniform in their members' beliefs and outlook, as well as more homogeneous between one such institution and another.
If one defines diversity circularly just to mean the presence of certain groups pre-defined to be "diverse," then there's no problem here. But if you think of that demographic push as -- among other things -- a means to the larger end of promoting a more genuinely varied and unpredictable pluralism of ideas and perspectives, not only within any given institution, but also between each institutional community and its peers, then it seems to me perfectly legitimate to wonder if something has gone wrong along the way.
At least, if it is the case that students' social and political views are more rigidly stereotyped, less subject to idiosyncratic local and personal differences, than at some time in the past (this may nor may not be true, but I gather it's what BJS47 thinks), then that certainly looks like a relevant data point in determining whether "diversity" is a laudable ideal or hollow slogan. Which should presumably affect the way one thinks about institutions that appeal to it in making major decisions about, e.g., sports.
That is not what I said. My claim was that if we think somebody's age provides a license to be openly dismissive of their opinions, then there's at least as strong an argument for dismissing the opinions of the young as of the old. The clear implication was that no ideas should be dismissed purely because of the age of the person who has them. I do think BJS47 was openly dismissive of the student protestors. But that was because -- rightly or wrongly -- he sees their ideas as silly and shallowly conformist. This is a claim debatable on its merits, not an appeal to authority based on being, or not being, any particular age.
I can certainly sympathize with the impulse to defend someone whose expression you feel has been unfairly maligned. After all, I'm I don't-know-how-many-words deep into a defense of somebody else's post, who is clearly capable of speaking for himself, and whose modal contribution to the Hop thread is basically "That Q the K! That Q the K! I do not like that Q the K!" So whatever else we have to agree to disagree on, I guess we've both got that going for us.
