[645] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
MIT & Harassment
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Sun May 13 02:46:26 2001
Message-Id: <200105130645.CAA01075@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: mit-talk@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 02:45:28 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
> According to MIT, harassment by speech is not defined just in terms
> of what class that speech falls into, but rather on whether it
> creates an offensive, intimidating, or hostile environment
> (paraphrasing MIT's policy).
To clarify what I meant, I was talking about classification in terms
of "harassing speech" vs. "non-harassing speech." MIT attempts to
make a coherent and consistent boundary between the two, which is
difficult, but which can be accomplished through an accumulation of
specific cases, and lots of reasoning. (I'm thinking of the
U.S. judicial system, which holds that sort of consistency as an
ideal, and does a good though necessarily imperfect job of attaining
it.)
> If someone in (gender/race/social-class/dorm) <foo> overhears their
> professor tell a joke to another professor about the lack of mental
> skills in <foo>s, does that constitute an intimidating environment?
> Probably. Is it harassment? Yes, according to MIT policy. Should
> it be? Obviously not.
While I think I agree with you that the standards of what is
acceptable free speech at MIT (at least with regard to harassment)
should probably be set no higher than the civil standard, I don't
think it's at all "obvious." It definitely depends on what priority
you give to various values; there is no objective morality to set a
standard here. MIT or its members might (do) have entirely valid
concerns which compel them to set a different standard.
Reasonably, though I happen to think perhaps suboptimally.
> >Dartmouth has no pretense of tolerating certain classes of speech
> >which it deems harassing. Neither does MIT.
> This is true, yet at the same time ignores the issue at hand.
Exactly!
