Read this, and then come back.
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I noted on The Other Club’s first anniversary that the largest minority of posts had involved free speech issues. There was no plan for this, but I think I understand how it happened to unfold that way.
Statists of all stripes autonomically target free speech. Totalitarian minds go after that first. The vast majority of perpetrators lean far to the left and very, very often are gender-feminists. Issues surrounding free speech arise frequently on campuses, perhaps the only redoubt left to the gender-feminists. The irony is that this happens because the Universities are claiming to preserve freedom of speech.
What passes for a liberal education today – mocking of western civilization in favor of overarching cultural relativism, political correctness and statist bias – is not worth lamenting. Fix it or let it die, but as it stands it is a cruel joke.
The anecdotal evidence presented above at The Midwest Conservative Journal, when piled up with the constant din of issues like Larry Summers at Harvard, or Taliban ambassadors with (maybe) GEDs being admitted to Yale, or the tolerance of Ward Churchill by Colorado, or Juan Cole at the University of Michigan, or Noam Chomsky’s infamous career – simply provide other data points.
On Churchill and academic free speech I will say this: If Pons and Fleischmann can be disgraced for faking cold fusion, why is Churchill immune regarding lying on his resume? I don’t care if the lie is about having created technology for cold fusion or about being Amerind – free speech does not cover it. There is no public obligation to finance either lie. I guess hard science is just that.
The point is that our public universities are so far out of touch with reality that we have professors like Sally Jacobsen convinced that their personal beliefs are sufficient to trump the free speech rights of others, using graduate students as agents in a felony, because of their personal anger. This is, in fact, morally equivalent to Islamofascism. A connection The Other Club has noted in the past. A few examples:
Feminism & Jihad
And, of course Ms Della Sentilles as the poster child for just about everything that’s wrong with today’s universities.
I recall a professor I know who, when asked by his university’s Women’s Studies program to recommend a book for their reading list, suggested “The Betty Crocker Cookbook.”
Good thing he wasn’t working at Ohio State.
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“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptanble opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”-Noam Chomsky
“How did we end up in a world where David Irving sits in a cell for querying the numbers of the last Holocaust while men march through London streets promising a new Holocaust and are given a bodyguard of police officers to help them do so? The more we hedge ourselves in with “hate speech” regulations, the less we’re able to hold any genuinely inquiring discussion on the issues we face. And once that’s the case, as the angry young men in the streets have figured out, you might as well just burn and kill to get your way. Canada and Europe need more free speech and less free incitement to murder. Instead, on the vital question of the age, we’re retreating into darkness–one intimidated cartoonist, one browbeaten editor, one beleaguered publisher, one terrified Danish schoolgirl at a time.”Extreme cases make bad law,” we say. But extreme cases make the best defence of principle. In 1847, a man called Don Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew living in Greece, had his house burned in an anti-Semitic riot. He appealed to the Greek government for redress (the sons of some ministers had been involved) and got nowhere. But he chanced to have been born on Gibraltar and thus was, technically, a British subject. And so he turned to the British government. And, though to most Englishmen’s eyes a century and a half ago no one could have seemed less English than this greasy dago Jew moneylender, Lord Palmerston began a naval blockade of Greece–on the grounds that Don Pacifico was a British subject like any other–until the government in Athens backed down. In Palmerston’s words to the House of Commons, “As the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.” Civis Britannicus sum: that was all Don Pacifico had to say.”-Mark Steynhttp://www.westernstandard.ca/website/index.cfm?page=article&article_id=1511&pagenumber=1