Mac Humanities Fail Again

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Apr 2017

You have to wonder what kind of education Mac humanities students are getting for all the money they are spending.  The piece below was written by another one of the grievance-studies profs at Mac Humanities.

RE: Mac protesters were defending their principles.

As a Professor of English and Culture Studies, Dr. Amber Dean seems strangely unfamiliar with that quintessentially English cultural phenomenon of “Speaker’s Corner.”  This is a place where anyone can go to harangue a length on anything they choose, and where anyone can go to listen and, within limits, to heckle.  Speaker’s Corner demonstrates “the tolerance which is both extended by the law to opinion of every kind, and expected by the law in the conduct of those who disagree, even strongly, with what they hear.”

In Common Law, freedom of speech is not be limited to the inoffensive but extended also to “the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome, and the provocative, so long as such speech did not tend to provoke violence.”  Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights accorded the right for speech to be offensive.

Amber Dean is not only incoherent but utterly at sea when she says in one place that she supports the right of Dr. Jordon Peterson to free speech, and in another says that his speech must be responsible, reasoned, rigorous, and have been peer-reviewed or he can’t be allowed to speak.  Free speech is, well, free.  If speech is free, then it isn’t subject to limitations Dr. Dean pulled from out of a conveniently placed hat.  Besides, what was "responsible, reasoned, rigorous, and peer-reviewed" about the protests against Dr. Peterson?

After a bit of thought, one can understand that if speech must be subject to peer review before it can be spoken in public, then absolutely nothing new can be said in public.  It must be said before it can be reviewed, and academic peer review is notoriously political.  That’s why speech needs to be free.

Amber Dean then wades into the human rights of students, and holds that the rights of students are superior to those of visiting professors.  But if a student felt his or her rights would be violated by listening to Dr. Peterson, there was nothing that required them to go and listen.  However, the disruption of Dr. Peterson’s talk did violate the rights of those students who wanted to hear him.  Those who disliked what Dr. Peterson was going to say could have protested somewhere else.  That way they could have protected and expressed their rights, and not have violated the rights of other students and of Dr. Peterson.  Somehow, this compromise escaped the notice of Dr. Dean.

Amber Dean apparently doesn’t like it when protest tactics are returned upon herself and her friends.  These tactics may be wrong and offensive, but she has no rational defense against it, since these people are merely exercising their rights in accordance with her terms of analysis.

Common sense politeness forms no part of Dr. Dean’s analysis.

The Op-ed piece by Dr. Amber Dean is yet another appalling work product that has been published recently in the Spectator.from the Humanities Department of McMaster University  Mac Humanities must be the place where intellect goes to die.

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