Posted on 12/27/2017 8:19:47 AM PST by truthfinder9
A teacher’s assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada was chastised after she showed a video of two professors from the University of Toronto, Jordan Peterson and Nicholas Matte, debating the use of gender-specific pronouns. She was teaching on that subject in a communications class. The university president has offered an apology.
Lindsay Shepherd, the TA in question, was called into a meeting with staff and faculty. She secretly recorded the meeting. She told them, in part:
"I don’t see how someone would rationally think it was threatening. I could see how it might challenge their existing ideas. But for me, that’s the spirit of the university, is challenging ideas that you already have.
…The thing is, can you shield people from those ideas? Am I supposed to comfort them and make sure that they are insulated away from this? Like is that what the point of this is? Because to me, that is so against what the university is about, so against it. I was not taking sides, I was presenting both arguments."
You can listen to her recording here.
Does this sound at all familiar? It should. Merely stating that there is a legitimate controversy over evolution is problematic on most university campuses. One student we’re aquainted with, five years into a PhD in an unrelated subject, happened to state to his doctoral committee that he didn’t think survival of the fittest helps much in explaining biological novelties – and immediately his doctorate was in jeopardy.
Lindsay Shepherd is right: You can’t preserve inquiry and the search for truth in universities if you censor controversies in the classroom.
This is nothing new. There’s no concept of freedom on many campuses. This is a monumental failure of basic civics. It is so fundamental that its loss is symptomatic of catastrophic failure.
It depends. How much will they depend on funding from Government and the massive debt bubble of government and students?
This might have been relevant some decades ago. It is all settled and past tense now. The Universities are and, outside of the hard sciences, only are bastions of Communist “thought” and activism, the factories for the Revolution, as it were.
That and the concomitant submersion of the K-12 schools in the same swamp is the reason there is no possible reclamation of the Republic short of a geographic division of the nation into two or more.
I have no say over Canada, but I’ve elected a lot of Republicans in this who just pass the money onto institutions like this in the United States without making a peep of noise.
That’s just one more reason why most of the time I don’t vote Republican anymore.
> Lindsay Shepherd is right: You can’t preserve inquiry and the search for truth in universities if you censor controversies in the classroom. <
From the universities’ point of view, there is an easy workaround here. Controversial speech will be reclassified as “hate speech”. And it is oh so easy to censor hate speech.
This sort of thinking will not be confined to just universities. Say something non-PC online, and you can lose your job. So this is a very serious problem. It could mean the end of the First Amendment.
They will censor because academia is the center of the Progressive movement.
Oddly enough, I attended Liberty University. Hard right. Strong Baptist dogma. When I started, I was a Methodist. In one of my early required bible classes, I had to write a paper on my soteriology. I told the professor that I do not follow OSAS and she wrote back that it’s ok as long as I can defend my beliefs.
So Liberty is more open-minded than any liberal university. Now I’m a 5 point Calvinist and they accepted that too, as long as I could defend it.
I believe that there are many parents questioning the sending of their hard-earned money to the university where Tommy or Sue attends, after the illuminating anti-speech activities of the last two semesters.
Because to be an army you have to march in lockstep. No deviation allowed.
The ultimate stupidity in our bastions of higher education are the “free speech” or “1st amendment” zones.
All the rest of the campus, of course, is Constitution-free.
Here is something you are not allowed to say at university faculty meetings....
Universities have more stupid and intolerant people than any other institutions.
“Will universities embrace freedom, or censor ideas?”
The answer is “yes.”
They will embrace the freedom to deconstruct society in any way possible. They will censor the idea that traditional morals can still exist in that deconstructed society.
The way they get there is by following money, doled out by the State for deconstructing society with nothing useful to offer in its place. And they positively, absolutely, reject the freedom to worship the God of the Bible through Jesus Christ. Even the ones with a “Christian Mission” practice this. They just usually do it under the radar.
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