Thursday, February 15, 2018

Robert Nozick: “If you come and disrupt my course, I’m going to beat the shit out of you!"

 Robert Nozick, Harvard philosophy professor and author of Anarchy, State and Utopia, knew how to handle disrupters.

From a 1977 interview:

I had been at Harvard as an Assistant Professor in the mid-sixties and then came back in 1969 as a Full Professor. That was immediately after the student uprisings, building takeovers, and so on, at Harvard the previous spring. When I arrived in the fall of 1969, there was a philosophy course listed in the catalog entitled “Capitalism.” And the course description was “a moral examination of capitalism.” Of course, for most students, then, it would be taken for granted that a moral examination would be a moral condemnation of capitalism. But that’s not what I intended. We were going to read critics of capitalism. But we were also planning to read defenses of capitalism, and I was going to construct some of my own in the lectures.
Some of the graduate students in the philosophy department knew what ideas I held, and they weren’t very happy about a course being taught in the department defending those ideas. Now it was true that there was another course in the department on Marxism by someone who was then a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and students did not object to that. But still some students objected to my giving a lecture course on capitalism. I remember early in the fall (I guess I was scheduled to give the course in the spring term), a graduate student came to me at a departmental reception we had, and said, “We don’t know if you’re going to be allowed to give this course.” I said “What do you mean, not allowed to give this course?” He said, “Well, we know what ideas you hold. We just don’t know whether you will be allowed to give the course.” And I said, “If you come and disrupt my course, I’m going to beat the shit out of you!”
And the student was taken aback and said, “But you are taking all this very personally.” And I said, “What do you mean, personally? You are threatening to disrupt my course! you can do other things; you can stand outside the room and hand out leaflets. You can ask students not to register for my course. But if you come into my classroom while I am lecturing and disrupt the class, then I take that very personally.” In fact, at some point later in the term, this student and some others said they were going to make up leaflets and hand them out outside of my classroom. I said, “That’s fine; that would be really exciting.” Then they didn’t get around to doing it, and so I prodded them, “Where are the leaflets? I was counting on something special happening with the leaflets.” But it turned out that it was a lot of trouble to write up a leaflet, to get them run off on a mimeograph machine, and so they never got around to doing it. Thus I never had the privilege of being “leafleted” at Harvard.
It would have been fun to have Nozick around these days with snowflakes on campus.

 -RW

(ht J.D Tuccillie)

7 comments:

  1. Of course if The Lab Manager or myself ever said anything like this, every leftist boomercuck that posts on this site would be kvetching about 'muh NAP'.

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    1. Umm did u just compare yourself and your ass buddy to Robert Nozick? Unlike you, he’s able to make it 2 sentences without crying about immigrants or muh white culture.

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    2. Paul, a NAP analysis would look at who legitimately owned the property on which the students and Nozick confronted each other, and what rules the property owner set in terms of disruptive speech and physical violence. I would hope that anyone using the NAP to argue with you or TLM would take a similar approach.

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  2. Reminds one of Reagan's comments as governor of Cal. Violence on campus will be met with lawful force.

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  3. Nozick knows one thing that Paul seems to miss. He knew that they didnt have the passion to stand their ground or incite chaos. Snowflakes are not a recent phenomenon!

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    1. I also know that most libertarians, and especially jews, are not well versed in physical violence.

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  4. Tell that to Aaron Zelman or Alan Rice.

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