Speakers have to take into account their audience. Claiming a privilege not to do so is insane.

Sometimes that's difficult: I teach 160 kids a year. My audience comes from a dozen countries and speak everything from Thai and Vietnamese to Igbo and Spanish or Urdu; they range from homeless kids in group shelters who show up in the morning needing every bandage I had because they're beaten up just before school to spoiled kids whose parents give them a new BMW on their 16th birthday (wrapped with a bow and delivered to the school parking lot during class).

At the same time, the audience has to take into account the speaker. If an engineer is invited in to lecture my class, I don't expect him to accommodate even most of the students. I should have tried to prepare them for his terminology, but when he says something that sounds off the kids should be aware enough to say, "Ah, that word can't meant what I think it means."

And this is never more true than when your audience is 160 kids from a dozen countries....


There's this idea in academia that public space and discourse is negotiated, and not negotiated sets of symbols for the purposes of comprehension but negotiated power. If you fully accommodate your audience, you have ceded power to them and bound yourself to their discourse and their framework. If you fully accommodate the speaker, then you've basically castrated yourself. The entire field is on a power-trip. It's a hold-over from the '50s and '60s and is sometimes found in other fields, but really in the social sciences and those bits of humanities that have social advocacy at their core.

Negotiating over the public commons is good or bad, depending on the "rightness" (not that they say this) of the speaker or the audience. If an ethnic-studies professor is lecturing a group of Confederate-flag waving loons, he's not going to cede squat to his inferiors. If a group of BLM activists are listening to somebody they disagree with, "respect" means accommodating them. This is how it should be, because the currency of the realm is power: not truth, not communication, not compromise or mutual understanding.