Free Speech (If No One Objects)

nationalreview.com ^ | 9/10/2014 | Editors

[rktman]

When, this spring, Brandeis University reneged on its commencement invitation to human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it revealed the cravenness that characterizes many of America’s leading institutions of higher education. The decision of Yale’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program to invite Hirsi Ali to New Haven as part of its speaker series has exposed the same quality in many of that school’s students.

[rktman]

You can bet that if yassar(that's my baby)ara-fat was still kickin' around, he'd be welcomed with open arms.

[henkster]

As a private institution, Brandies can allow or ban whomever they wish. No First Amendment issue here.

[rktman]

You would be correct.

[stremba]

You are certainly correct. Brandeis has the right to refuse to ban anyone they want from speaking on campus. However, having the right to do something does not make it the right thing to do. It certainly casts Brandeis University in a bad light when they engage in censorship. University education is supposed to be all about the free exchange of ideas, even ones that are uncomfortable or offensive. In fact, it’s especially offensive, uncomfortable, and challenging ideas that a university education is meant to present to students.

[henkster]

Don’t get me wrong. Brandeis should be renamed the “Lenin-Trotsky Institute.” They show all of the worst principles of leftist politically correct doctrine; the closed-mindedness, the intolerance of dissent, the repression of free expression of ideas. All of this should be unacceptable to true academicians. But there are very few such creatures to be found. Instead they are all Communist Party hacks spouting the Party Line in lockstep with Lenin’s principles of iron discipline. They are as intellectually dead as the professors you would have found at Moscow State University in 1966.

But it is still incorrect to portray this as a 1st Amendment issue. That important Constitutional right guarantees Marxist institutions their right to be close-minded, politically correct and repressive to their members.