Posted on 02/05/2017 12:31:17 PM PST by reaganaut1
Much as administrators and faculty may dislike it, the fact is that public colleges are subject to both the First Amendment and the state legislatures that fund them. Legislators shouldn’t micromanage the campuses, but they must set some basic rules.
One of those rules should be that free speech and open inquiry will be protected.
You might find it surprising that academics need to be told to protect free speech and inquiry, but American campuses have become increasingly intolerant of speech that conflicts with “progressive” orthodoxy. I have often written about the rules imposed by campus officials that run afoul of the First Amendment, such as the speech infringement at Iowa State and the miniscule “free speech zone” at Grand Valley State.
Conservative and libertarian speakers have frequently been shouted down or disinvited from giving a scheduled address; students who say something that hurts someone’s feelings are likely to face charges brought by a “bias incident” team. In one of the most shameful events of all, a speaker at the University of Wisconsin, Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, was prevented from completing his off-campus talk when a mob of students that had been organized by a school administrator broke into the room where he was discussing the evidence of racial preferences in UW admissions.
Hitting the nail squarely on the head, in his January 31 Wall Street Journal column, Professor Peter Berkowitz wrote, “The yawning gap between universities’ role as citadels of free inquiry and the ugly reality of campus censorship is often the fault of administrators who share the progressive belief that universities must restrict speech to protect the sensitivities of minorities and women. They often capitulate to the loudest and angriest demonstrators just to get controversies off the front page.”
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
What an arrogant, condescending and insulting "progressive belief"!!
Such tyrannical measures have no place in a nation where "rights of conscience" and "freedom of expression" were carved out, even in the late-1700's in America, as boundaries past which government could not intervene in the lives of individual citizens.
If we, as individuals, become "sheep" who will submit to such improper use of our taxpayer dollars, then the "progressive" regressive wolves will surely kill freedom within our lifetimes.
American campuses have become halls of indoctrination.
They can start by breaking a few rioters heads and arresting their enablers
Rumor going around that Gaga is going to wear a Burka tonight....how many right wingers will riot and go tear up houston because of it??? None
Gaga should take it a step further and move to Syria or Iran. Or whatever burka-wearing hell-hole she wants.
Republicans continue to be the worst kind of traitors to the constitution and America. The Democrats are open about being traitors. Republicans hide and dissemble the fact they have long lost their manhood. Name one Republican who is ahead of Trump on the issues. Screw the uni party.
Universities were supposed to only promote Truth, for only Truth sets us Free.
That was destroyed by the early 1900s (unconstitutionally) when the communists took over the “system” to promote lies and warping the “truth”. They destroyed the Classical Christian Curricula for lies and disinformation and warped versions of history.
They promoted socialism (slavery/theft/the sodomite Keynesian “economics”) and “gender theory”—an irrational Marxist deconstruction of Natural Law (reason/logic/science) so that Slavery is Freedom and Boys are Girls. Our children are brainwashed and agency is destroyed-—they are literally programmed non-thinking “Bots”-—where emotions rule reason (like a tribal mindset).
We need to get back to freedom and a Justice system that ONLY promotes “public virtue” as all “Just Law” is required to do. As Justice John Marshall stated, when just law promotes vice it is “null and void”.
Justice Oliver W.Holmes destroyed our “Justice” system-—took Virtue OUT of Justice (the Queen of Virtue LOL). The Word game is the Marxist M.O. to destroy Western Civilization (Christianity) to return us to the Babylonian slave days, when sodomy, slavery, misogyny, pederasty and slavery were all “virtues”.
Our Ethic system is only based on the most rational, just, egalitarian system ever created-—the Christian Ethics system, so all “Just Laws” have to be in line with God’s Laws.
We are well into total irrationality—compete removal of Reality— since we allowed baby-killing and slavery Socialism/income tax) and sodomy (irrational demonic homosexual “marriage”) along with programming screens, to literally rot the brains of our children and make them so confused and irrational, they belief “snow is black” (Fichte 1810).
Vice makes slaves only. We are becoming a very lazy, immoral “culture” because of Hollywood and the school system which destroys virtue formation in children, on purpose. Only Classical Christian curricula creates critical thinkers and builds virtues this nation was founded on, along with an intact Natural Christian family.
Kurtz continued, “If true freedom of speech is ‘freedom for the thought that we hate,’ then freedom is actually a form of self-mastery. Far from being license, true freedom is actually an act of self-control, a refusal to physically extinguish even the speech we abhor.”
From 2 Timothy 1:7 (NLT):
For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.
The bill would restore free speech on campus through several means.First and foremost, schools would have to eliminate speech codes, speech zones, and other policies that unreasonably restrict speech.
They would also have to discipline students who break the free speech rules.
Another provision is that state colleges and universities would have to include in their orientations a discussion of the importance of free speech and tolerance for dissenting views. While it doesn’t specify this, schools should consider assigning John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in addition to or perhaps instead of the “summer book” they often assign to incoming students. That would be far more instructive than the usual soppy, politically-themed books they usually choose – see this report by the National Association of Scholars in that regard.
And capping everything off, the bill requires the creation of a Committee on Free Expression within the board of trustees of each state college and university. These committees would be charged with issuing a yearly report on the status of free expression on campus, a report that would go to the governor, the state legislature, and be available to the public. This obligation would, Kurtz argues, create a counterforce to the pressure that anti-free speech agitators put on school officials.
Personally, I’m against, full four square, the congress doing anything on this issue.
It. Is. Not. Their. Business!
It’s ours.
We want that crap to stop, then we have to stomp the crap out.
That’s what the 1st Amend is about. No top down fixes. It’s the job of we, the people, to decide at the local level what is and is not allowed.
Graduate & Professional Degree ping.
To be added or dropped, freepmail Albion Wilde.
Thats all well and good but College’s cant simply be required to do something and then not face repercussions when they fail to comply. The number one way is financial, threaten to take funds away from research programs, suspend state grant payments for students, etc etc. Some may skate by on donations from the wealthy but the vast majority will quickly have to adjust or die.
The problem is that the anti-free speech power is not the students - it’s the faculty.
The student activists are simply doing what they have been doing since they were five - striving to please the teacher.
Require the protection of free speech on any campus receiving Federal or state funds, adn cut off their money if they do not comply.
Only a very few — my alma mater the most notable among them — don’t receive government money, and they’re mostly good on free speech.
I don’t know about legislation, because legislating, even to protect free speech, is a huge can of worms.
What about, instead, a report on the tolerance atmosphere of each college and university? It could be similar to the academic assessments of each school that are published frequently. Such a report could cover the political leanings of professors, to what extent they base their curricula on their personal politics, whether all students feel equally welcome to express their opinions and whether they feel that expressing their opinion would affect their grades, and so on. Schools with politically balanced faculties (and a minimum of demagogues) would get higher scores than schools with majority leftist nutjob faculties. The scores would have to be calculated for each department, since science departments tend to be more resistant to political extremism than sociology departments.
Such a report would be time consuming to prepare, but would be very useful to people deciding where to attend college or whether their alma mater deserves to keep receiving donations.
What a reformist Dept of Education could do is formulate legal and policy guidelines and promulgate them among Republican-majority state legislators to instruct them on how to approach draining the swamps at their state universities.
Meanwhile, the Fed and new DOJ need to manage the problem of "rights" groups like the ACLU and all the racialist and "identity" lawsuit groups that are basically communist fronts.
One hopes that if enough state U's undergo a course correction, they will form, for many families, a viable alternative to the looney left private schools.
I often wonder what part of the Constitution gives the fedzilla any permission to be futzing around with education in the first place.
Either break the national teachers union or bring it to heel.
End the federal interference in education and return it all to the states and local govs.
And us citizens start paying attention to what’s going on in the classroom and campuses and/or stop sitting on our hands waiting for “the gov” to fix stuff for us.
We ain’t peasants or serfs and it’s time and way past time we stopped acting as if we were.
Good suggestions, but the larger problems of politicization of campuses I think is beyond hope. The universities need to be demolished.
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