"Freedom of opinion does not exist in America." -ADT

Some people worry that Eben's style of classroom critique suppresses free speech, scares it away. Personally, I disagree. The opportunity cost of free speech in a classroom is that everyone in the room—including the speaker—can't listen to anyone else. A teacher with scarce time ought to judge which of his students' ideas fall below his intellectual standard, and redirect those to a forum where they can be developed, at less cost, to meet that standard.

If Eben believes in open information, and this class is about challenging authority, why is the classroom so much more friendly to authority than to challenges? I might ask Eben, but I have a theory: the professor wants us to absorb his opinions ("listen"), so that we can only critique them later—i.e., after thinking—i.e., intelligently. He reserves the TWiki as our forum for that critique. Eben, I oblige.

The TWiki removes the externality of speaking on listening. Ideas interact here more like J.S. Mill expected them to, more like particles in an ideal gas (i.e. here, when we don't listen, it's because we don't WANT to). It's the best forum for us to hear each other, the safest forum for us to learn from each other, and the LAST asylum for free speech. TWiki has the potential to be our town-hall democracy.

How should we use that potential?

MichaelBrown reminds me [which I deleted because it was responding to an older draft] that Eben gave us a guiding principle: the TWiki helps him "evaluate contributions/participation to a degree." I suppose we might infer from this a second principle, that it is supposed to be some kind of learning tool. That's all we've got. Default to anarchy and the rule of the strongest, unless we all agree to be a democracy. We're reenacting Dr. Zimbardo's prison experiment, and now we get to decide what sort of prisoners we'll be.

I say the prisoners should take over this prison. It's what Eben would do in our position. He didn't include the class rules in the box, but neither does a Ouija Board. They work the same way. And even if I'm wrong, and my made-up rules break his HIDDEN rules, we won't hang separately if we all agree to hang together: we're graded on a curve.

So, join my revolution! We already have a Constitution and we're working on a Bill of Rights.

We must protect free (TWiki) speech.

Once we lose free speech here, our asylum from the classroom, we lose it entirely. Therefore this TWiki should be immune from legitimate in-class suppression. If we could do more good to the TWiki than harm to one speaker by suppressing any in class speech that suppresses TWiki speech, then we should sacrifice that piece of speech for the sake of Free Speech, because the premise of the principle in paragraph 1 is to maximize the BENEFITS of discussion, as a SUM of class and TWiki (is everything a fallacy of distribution, or just me?).

Free Speech is a social not a legal function. I suspect that Kate and Barb are irrepressible enough, but yesterday's class made me fear for the future Kates and Barbs who will speak neither in class nor on the TWiki. Critiques by Authority Figures in their capacity as Authority Figures (okay, okay, I mean Eben) can be as chilling on our posts as the edicts of Public Authorities. Authority Figures can mobilize laughter, which is a kind of public force. And many of us confuse their descriptive statements for prescriptive ones, since that is what humans do. And many of us can't learn to think like lawyers by learning to argue like lawyers, because we who can't yet argue like lawyers will look stupid when we argue with real lawyers.

How would you guys vote on a First Amendment Plus No Prior Restraints (Except for this one [thanks, DanielHarris]), sanctioning speech by Authority Figures that discourages posts on the TWiki by Inferiority Figures? Eben, we haven't passed the rule yet, so you can opine too!

-- AndrewGradman - 24 Jan 2008

Please don't deactivate my account.

-- AndrewGradman - 25 Jan 2008

Your ideas of "free speech" and prior restraint are almost completely at odds with mine. Prohibiting "critiques that deter people from speaking freely," if you could do it, would be a prior restraint. The critiques are not restraint--they're speech. Prior restraint would be Eben's deactivating your account or running your posts through a moderation queue.

Eben's critiques probably /chill/ speech to some degree, but they aren't some distinct sort of "anti-speech"--even if our brains occasionally explode at the collision.

-- DanielHarris - 25 Jan 2008

Andrew and Daniel, In case you’re curious about what someone thinks about this “free speech” issue who has been, according to another observer, “blasted” by Eben, I agree for the most part with Daniel, but would tweak and expand the analysis a little further: I don’t think his critiques are meant as "anti-speech," but I assume he is aware that his critiques lead, as you say, to some of our brains occasionally exploding at the collision. And what is the nature of this collision? I think it is largely his refusal to meet our expectation that teachers respond to our remarks with a modicum of diplomacy, fewer and less intense episodes of histrionics, and more of an exhibition of what is currently termed "emotional intelligence." [Don’t get me wrong on the emotional intelligence part: I don’t think he’s devoid of it, I just think he refuses to show much of it.] In other words, it’s not so much what he says that tends to chill expression, but how he says it. I don't think he can't meet our behavioral expectations, it's just that he refuses to do so. Why? Perhaps to get us to think outside of our little self-imposed boxes, and he knows he can do this more effectively by lobbing his data, observations, and opinions into the classroom arena in this manner. My suggestion (for whatever this is worth): try not to take the theatrics too seriously (or personally), listen to what he says, but think for yourself.

-- BarbPitman - 26 Jan 2008

I'm freaked out that we need a Constitution, Bill of Rights, revolution, etc.

The way this community is using the wiki is really interesting and new to me. I've seen wiki's used in lots of companies (I even implemented MediaWiki? at my last job, woohoo me) and their general purpose is to centrally store facts relevant to the community (a funny example I've seen is a wiki category devoted to providing definitions of nonsensical words that a co-worker notorious for making up her own adjectives commonly used).

I guess there's no "wrong" type of content, but my point is that the general tone of conversation seems odd. I sort of expected more discussion specifically on ideas relevant to our readings, notices of other references to check out to expand understanding, etc. We so far have some of that, but we also have a lot of elaborate discussion on classroom management, predictions about what Eben is feeling or "wants" us to say/think, and general venting. I'm not trying to criticize, but let's think about this. Especially because, although participation in wiki discussions is probably limited by many factors (time, general interest, comfort with the technology, etc) I think the direction that the existing conversations take will influence how many people participate in this community at all.

-- MakalikaNaholowaa - 26 Jan 2008

Barb, thanks for your constant support. Makalika, I admire what you say. You burst my bubble in a tenth of the time it took me to blow it up. My response is, To take on a "consilient" view of the class and the world it's about, I have conflated the class's form with its content. The use of the TWiki itself, and everything else unconventional about the class management, is part of the education. Everything in this class is so new, to legal education and to us, that it must be an experiment. For better or for worse, I have started a dialogue that will permit us to EXPERIENCE firsthand the ideas we're talking about. That seemed to me to be the preexisting theme of the course. I suppose I might have asked privately, but I also assumed that in WikiCulture? , Secrets Secrets Are No Fun.

Your last sentence is the most compelling. It does teach me a lesson, which is that I should stop asking meta-questions of "What is this class about," and confront the material head-on. Still, at some early point I internalized the idea that the class is precisely About Questioning Authority. It's entirely possible I just brought that assumption to the table -- a chip on my shoulder. Either way, it makes me hesitate to take any one stand against the material. It makes me schizophrenic. Really, can anyone in this class distinguish, for certain, the Form from the Content?

P.S. Eben, there is one thing I'd like to apologize for, and that is setting a precedent for referring to you in the third person. I need to fire my proofreader.

-- AndrewGradman - 26 Jan 2008