Category: Columns

Columns

MIT’s Orwellian language masks its stance on Gaza protests

Posted on | Michel DeGraff

In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fictional language Newspeak is designed to control human minds and hide reality — for example, claiming that ‘war is peace’ and ‘ignorance is strength’ or, in the case of my native Haiti, calling a violent invasion a ‘peacekeeping mission’— so that the ruling classes of the world, aka ‘Big Brother’, can strengthen the power of their totalitarian regimes. In recent months, this dystopian use of language as a political weapon for a variety of nefast objectives (gaslighting, dehumanisation and manufacturing consent) has intensified in the context of the war on Gaza and associated protests and counter-protests, police crackdowns on student encampments against genocide. Most surprisingly, doublespeak has permeated even curriculum-related disputes with my own departmental colleagues at MIT about what’s ‘fit’ to teach as linguistics and what my expertise (or alleged lack thereof) should allow me to teach as such. Is ignorance really strength, even at MIT, even among linguists? If linguistics were taken as an indispensable tool for unveiling Newspeak’s semantic distortions and for advocating for liberation and community-building, it might help usher a better world — by Michel DeGraff (MIT)

Columns

Leiden University’s ties with Israeli universities

Posted on | Leiden University

Leiden University has recently received various petitions from students and staff concerning our ties with Israeli universities. We have also held extensive discussions with the University Council in response to questions raised on the subject. We think it important that our partners and research projects reflect our values and respect human rights, equality, academic freedom and integrity. We therefore need an ethical assessment framework similar to the one for collaboration with the fossil fuel industry.

Columns

Suspending Student Protesters Would Be a Palestine Exception to Free Speech

Posted on | Alison F. Johnson | Steven Levitsky | The Harvard Crimson

We find no evidence that the current encampment has been any more disruptive than earlier protests. Previous protests have gone on longer. They have been more disruptive. They have employed the same methods — loud chants, controversial signs, tents — in exactly the same places. Indeed, a good case can be made that the latest generation of student protesters have been unusually restrained. And yet only today’s student protesters face a mass suspension. Such disproportionate penalties for relatively minor rule violations break sharply with more than 50 years of Harvard practice. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is an instance of “the Palestine exception”— a markedly lower tolerance for pro-Palestinian speech than for other speech.