Yes, it is important to censure harmful and offensive speech. But there are ethical costs to widening the scope of our moral outrage to viewpoints that merely differ from our own.
Friends no longer: US president Donald Trump with his then national security adviser John Bolton in 2018.
EPA-EFE/Justin Lane
Competition in the marketplace for ideas is different to competition in the market for ordinary goods and services. Bad ideas don’t necessarily get trashed.
US president, Donald Trump, is taking on social media under the guise of protecting free speech.
EPA-EFE/Doug Mills/ Pool
Trump’s recent executive order may limit section 230 of the Communications Decency Act - the ‘bedrock of the internet’. What does that mean for Australia?
Twitter’s efforts to label misinformation during the US primaries haven’t met with success. So how do we sift useful coronavirus information from wrong or downright dangerous untruths?
A train attendant in Nanchang, China, gestures in solidarity with medical staff departing for the city of Wuhan, Feb. 13, 2020.
STR/AFP via Getty Images
Public criticism of the Chinese government’s handling of coronavirus shows that the Chinese people can overcome both strict censorship and a gaping class divide when they get angry enough.
A sign of the times.
Geraldine Wilkins/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Don Cherry and his supporters would do well to listen to others who are justifiably offended by his xenophobic comments, and learn from them. Canada would be an even better place for it.
University professors and students protest against Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and his government’s cuts to federal spending on higher education, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Amanda Perobelli/Reuters
Universities are increasingly under threat everywhere.
Protesters showed up at the University of Utah in 2017 during an appearance by Ben Shapiro, the former editor of the alt-right publication Breitbart.
(Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP)
Inclusive freedom reflects university values in protecting free thought, inquiry and expression, while protecting the dignity of all students and faculty by allowing them to equally contribute.
Academic freedom protects free speech, but also sets conditions.
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Academic freedom protects free speech, but also conditions it. Knowledge cannot be tested and doesn’t advance if there isn’t also a duty to be well informed and reasoned.
Chinese students come to Australia to study for the same reasons as other international students.
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The majority of students from China come to Australia to learn English and be exposed to a different culture. This helps them get a competitive edge over graduates in their home country.
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
shutterstock/Piotr Wawrzyniuk
Not only do some countries perpetrate direct attacks on students and academics but the internationalisation of higher education has also created new global threats.
Ugandan musician-turned-MP Robert ‘Bobi Wine’ Kyagulanyi has been a frequent target of the country’s cyber laws.
Dai Kurokawa/EPA
There is a strong framework of international laws and conventions that defend free speech, but Uganda continues to limit freedom of expression especially when the people criticise their president.
Union Square: contentious political rallies helped progressive social reformers argue for the protection of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC, USA
New York’s Union Square is an important site in American labor history. One scholar’s research illustrates the shifting meanings and inherent tensions of public space as an epicenter of civic life.
‘Choose life’ was scrawled across the sky last Sunday and again today as abortion legislation is debated in the NSW upper house.
You’re as free to write anything in the sky as you are to post it on the internet, provided you have a plane, or a pilot willing to relay your message.
There are more than 33 million students in Indonesia’s public schools, while the number of those enrolled in universities amounts to around seven million.
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The lack of safe spaces for students to express themselves and explore their academic passions can be seen as a reason why Indonesia doesn’t perform well in global education indexes.