Posted on 06/30/2015 8:38:46 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
Apparently university administrators no longer read George Orwell because they dont seem to recognize how Orwellian their policies are. Speech codes are almost never identified as such by the many colleges and universities that impose and enforce them. Instead, speech codes come in many forms, often with innocuoussounding titles: free speech zone policies that limit student or faculty expression to small, remote areas of campus; email policies that ban offensive communication; civility policies that mandate politeness on pain of punishment; andmost commonlyoverbroad, vague harassment policies that rely on subjective, amorphous definitions and thus restrict vast swaths of protected speech, Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), said in a congressional hearing earlier this month.
Lukianoff testified before the U. S. House Judiciary Committees Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice on June 2, 2015. For Forty Years, Religious Student Groups Frequently Have Been Discriminatorily Excluded from College Campuses, Kim Colby of the Christian Legal Society testified in that same hearing. Kimberlee Wood Colby is the Director of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom at the Christian Legal Society.
Harassment is making someone un-comfortable, students began asserting some 20 years ago, attorney Wendy Kaminer testified before the committee. That makes me a harasser, Id respond, since I strive to make at least a few people uncomfortable everyday, Kamner, a self-professed feminist, recalled.
I read an interesting article on public universities, that said public funding for them is going down (as a percent of state budgets) because there are so many other calls now for state gov’t money — Medicaid, public employee pensions, etc.
This message brought to you on behalf of accuracy in academia.
What would Socrates or Plato say about diversity directors?
Well, all we know of Socrates is what Plato told us, and Plato was all in for dictatorship.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.