Big U. administrations do not usually micromanage their presses until they sniff something that upsets them. Then, they micromanage.

And to the person who asked: yes, an administration can exert control over a university press. It holds the purse strings and usually has final say on hiring/appointments.

I’m interested in the suggestion that some donor was involved. Does anyone know about this, or are we speculating?

It is not the cartoons that cause violence, it is those that cause the violence who are ultimately responsible for any violence. But, that would involve responsibility, reason and restraint. It is this appeasement that strengthens their resolve, and boosters their demands, and escalates their rhetoric and violence. Peace through appeasement is a false promise, that never bears fruit.

Why can’t you just leave the cartoon in the book and put it in the adult section of the library?

JM wins the thread!

During the heyday of the British Empire, it was if not mandatory, at least politic for the imperial government to undertake/not undertake policies it wished to have because to do so would have resulted (they believed) in disorders in India.

No cites at hand, but everything the British did in the Middle East was done while looking over their shoulders at the Muslims in India.

The value of publishing the mo-toons is that, if the muslims riot and murder, it demonstrates to civilized people what kind of culture we are dealing with. Exposing the Truth has value, even if it has a cost in blood. Doing nothing has a cost in blood also, it’s just that the blood happens somewhere else, where you’re not looking.

Yale has taken the easy stance to dodge the truth. How can they be credible on in any other instance?

In that sense, if they read it, maybe they would have been convinced to keep the pictures. That is what she thinks. Indeed, maybe that is the very reason Yale asked them not to read it.

If the book was expected to have a low press run and not be distributed in certain countries, it might have been possible that most of the people who would be angriest about publication of the cartoons might not have heard about the book, or might not have found anyone in their country to target for violence with regard to the book. Even though it was known that some people might want to react with violence, the experts might have deemed the possibility of such violence occurring low enough to justify republication of the cartoons. That isn’t what they actually did decide, but they could have decided that.

I am stunned that no one has anything to say that the true deniers of free speech are the people who would be responsible for the violence caused by publication of the book.

No, no, no, they’re just poor misunderstood victims…. who scare Yale’s frilly knickers yellow.

Not a lawyer, but a former agent, editor and soon to be publisher… I’d say the author has a pretty good case for at least breach of fiduciary obligation…

This is what happens when you don’t assimilate into a culture.

Why all the beating around the bush about ‘concern about violence’? What nonsense!

I welcome our islamic overlords.

Administrators may be gutless wonders as a species, but faculty are no better, and institutions of higher learning already succumbed several decades ago. The late Allan Bloom detailed the sorry spectacle at Cornell during the 1960′s:

“You don’t have to intimidate us,” said the famous professor of philosophy in April 1969, to ten thousand triumphant students supporting a group of black students who had just persuaded “us,” the faculty of Cornell University, to do their will by threatening the use of firearms as well as threatening the lives of individual professors. …The professors, the repositories of our best traditions and highest intellectual aspirations, were fawning over what was nothing better than a rabble; publicly confessing their guilt and apologizing for not having understood the most important moral issues, the proper response to which they were learning from the mob; expressing their willingness to change the university’s goals and the content of what they taught.

Thanks, Dear.

As a professor, I find this kind of discussion very difficult. I truly believe that academics should embrace risks (as we would like our students to do). And, I am inclined to think that administrators are unacceptably risk-averse. On the other hand, I realize that I do not face the problems that administrators face.

I do not have to deal with bad press from all over the political spectrum; in particular, I do not have to respond to grandstanding politicians, talking heads, or pundits whenever they find something of which to make hay.

I do not have to deal with parents who think their children are not being kept safe. (I do have to deal with parents who think their children should receive better grades, but that is far less serious in my mind.) If something terrible does happen, no one follows me around with a camera crew. And, it is highly unlikely that anything that happens in my classes will result in the killing of any number of persons.

I do not like what Yale did in this case. But, I do not know what I would have decided, had the decision been mine, about the publication of the cartoons.

We have seen lots of risky short-term behavior in the markets; I do not mean to claim that ‘business’ as such is always risk-averse or given to long term thinking. But, higher ed is increasingly influenced by the more cautious version of the business (and legal) mentality.

Faculty are ‘conservative’ in some ways: we tend to want to do things as we are accustomed to doing them, we do not sudden change in curricula, and so forth.

However, the current crop of administrators is cautious in another way. They fear controversy, upset, bad press, and liability. I think it is the latter kind of ‘caution’ and sort-term thinking that is the cause of decisions like this one at Yale.

I am probably being less than fully articulate. Forgive me.

PatHMV: And when the KKK threatens to riot if you allow Jesse Jackson to speak at your university, Chris? Academic institutions are about the most long-term-thinking institutions we have in our society. If they won’t see the inevitable consequences of succumbing to threats of violence, then we really don’t have much hope.

Pat: I fear, and am sorry to say, that this is not longer entirely true. Higher ed has been – if not invaded – influenced by the cautious, short term thinking so common in contemporary business. It is to be much regretted, but I think at this point we can only hold the line.

I think the larger issue is the institution (and the perception that other institutions like it) that is supposed to stand for core values, e.g., academic freedom, succumb to the pressures du jour at the expense of those core values they portend to espouse. It’s just like they are all for civil liberties, until somebody does something un-p.c. – then that action must be banned. You have free speech, until it’s “hate speech” etc. etc. etc. It’s the larger perception that such behavior is cowardly and unprincipled that is the issue.

So we are clear: A prominent University censored content from a book based on the opinions of experts who had not read the book in question.

We went deep into this the first time, and while many quibbled that you can’t characterize this as “censorship,” I remain resolved that you can. Look up the other thread if you care for that debate.

ChrisTS, I would agree with your intuition that the administrators and lawyers might be largely to blame too, which would explain why the “experts” didn’t read the book – all the lawyers needed was an expert opinion (or 20) to hang their hats on.

ricky: You know, there are a billion blacks in the world, and 99.99% of them are nonviolent, so I’m going to take the “consistent” position not to open my door to this unknown black person because 100,000 violent blacks are enough scary people to be worried about.That’s not cowardice because, after all, I’m not worried about my safety but that of my wife and children.

Not opening your door on a 1/10,000 chance that the person on the other side is violent isn’t the same as announcing to the whole billion that your family, at [YOUR ADDRESS] is one that the violent few are looking for.

I don’t see why the experts on violence should have read the manuscript. They were to weigh in on the likelihood of violent reaction, not on the value of the book. The latter had already been determined by the editors of the Press.

The Administration wanted to determine the likelihood of violent response to the cartoons’ being republished in the book. Someone – I am guessing it was the Administration – assessed the benefits of the book as determined by the Press against the risks as predicted by the external experts, and decided they wanted to publish the book without the cartoons.

I certainly would like to know why the author was supposed to not read the reports from the experts. Perhaps they requested this?