This fall, a community college in Arizona will host a training seminar for students and faculty that will focus on distinguishing “hate speech” from “free speech.”
In October, Maricopa Community College in Arizona will feature a two day conference titled “Hate Speech versus Free Speech: Navigating the Changing Boundaries in Today’s World,” where attendees will learn about speech considered to be “dangerous” to society, as well as methods for counteracting it.
According to the event website, the purpose of the training is to “help build long-term societal resilience to violence” by teaching students and educators methods for “identifying, resisting, and countering Dangerous Speech and its impact.”
On the first day of the conference, a series of lectures and seminars will focus on “decoding Dangerous Speech,” which is essentially a method for providing individuals with guidelines for how they can identify and subsequently classify speech that they may disagree with to be “dangerous.”
Day two of the conference is scheduled to feature several topics that will likely prove to be harmful to freedom of expression and freedom in education. In addition to providing educators with strategies for “integrating this content into a classroom setting,” conference participants will also focus on “leveraging an understanding of Dangerous Speech to design interventions that can counter the impact of Dangerous Speech.”
Susan Benesch, a lawyer with academic affiliations at several Ivy League universities who also founded the “Dangerous Speech Project”, will facilitate the entire conference along with Cathy Buerger, a researcher from the University of Connecticut who’s currently focusing on “global responses to dangerous and hateful speech as well as the process of identity formation among those who choose to respond to such speech.”
While the website for the “Dangerous Speech Project” does not explicitly list a political affiliation, it gives several indicators of the beliefs that its creators espouse. For example, in discussing the work that their organization does in the U.S., a section of the website titled “Dangerous Speech and the 2016 Presidential Election” prominently features a large photo of President Trump, accusing him of using “hallmarks of dangerous speech.” Additionally, the group cites a report from the widely discredited Southern Poverty Law Center that essentially blames Trump for any incidents of violence that occurred following the 2016 election.
