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Neural Foundry's avatar

Thestark asymmetry here is notable. 21 terminations in four months versus zero for Floyd comments really underscores how the political pendulum swung. What caught my attention is that partisans on both sides seem fine with firing faculty based on ideological disagreemnet rather than commiting to speech protections across the board. If universities keep responding to external pressure campaigns, academic freedom becomes whoever has the loudest mob.

Jim Kanalley's avatar

I think the general tone of the questions in the second survey have some bearing in the view of the responses. You have one, arguable two, that have fairly clear cut negative connotations, with one being outright violent. In the other two, one is on its face positive while the other has a negative connotation and may have *some* basis in fact, but neither does anything the way of advocating violence. The way I interpret the results of the poll is that left-leaning students seem to tend to agree with allowing more violent rhetoric when they agree with it while they don’t necessarily disagree with silencing speech they don’t like regardless of the implication of violence. Conservatives on the other hand seem to disagree with the advocacy of violence and the seeming negative view of their political or religious beliefs where ad hominem rhetoric is used to describe those beliefs. I think the questions posed or at least how they’re worded matters in why the responses were the way they were.

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