...and then abandons the draft when it becomes clear it's really about all the reasons for suppressing speech:
The trouble is, many of the academics on the working group tasked with drafting this statement don't actually seem to believe in free expression. Only this can explain the hopeless, incoherent mishmash they came up with. (I am sorry to note that their grammar and syntax are hopeless, too.) No wonder the president, Santa Ono, wanted to shelve it.
"In my view this is a feeble and troubling document that is unworthy of a university that wants to be taken seriously," Paul Russell, a philosophy professor who has been involved in other speech debates on campus, said via e-mail.
(Amusingly, one of the drafters of the failed statement on freedom of expression was none other than our old friend Alan Richardson, the apparatchik posing as a philosopher at UBC, who tried to bully his colleagues into not communicating with me back in 2014, to no avail.)
In a follow-up editorial, a Canadian newspaper wrote:
The UBC draft statement subsequently asks the right questions, such as, "How can we equip students to tackle future challenges, if they are shielded from demanding, provocative thought?" Or, "How can we create significant breakthroughs if entire lines of inquiry are forbidden?"
But after citing these critical goals, it reaches the startling conclusion that the freedom of expression required to achieve them is not of paramount value.
"Freedom of expression does not trump all other rights," the draft says. "In the university community, freedom of expression can only thrive constructively when accompanied by other rights, including the equality rights of equity, diversity and inclusion."
The statement raises worries about "deliberate attempts to create a toxic environment." And it makes the claim that "freedom of expression rests on the potential of making positive, constructive contributions to the university community" – an implication that the school can decide which expression is positive and which isn't.
American universities that have wrestled with the issue have come to a different conclusion: that, as the University of Chicago puts it in its own statement on freedom of expression, "concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community."
I reached out to the UBC philosopher Paul Russell, who kindly gave me permission to share his apt observations about the draft statement:
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