Posted on 01/23/2017 6:14:07 AM PST by reaganaut1
American college campuses are becoming the main battleground for the First Amendment, usually because faculty or administrators don’t respect the free speech rights of students. In November I wrote about such a case at Iowa State.
Another case showing the authoritarianism that increasingly characterizes the professoriate involves the master’s program in social work at Rhode Island College (RIC). A student who did not believe that lobbying the state legislature for “progressive” causes was properly a part of his education and suffered for it filed suit against the school in state court.
This remarkable case started way back in 2004, when William Felkner, a graduate student in the college’s social work program, objected to its internship requirement that called for all students to work to “advance social change.” To the faculty, that meant advocating the sorts of “progressive” policies they favor, but the conservative Felkner did not care to advocate policies that he found philosophically repugnant. He therefore accepted instead an internship in the administration of then-governor Donald Carcieri, a Republican.
That bit of independence was too much for the Professor James Ryczek who reported his defiance to the chair of the Master’s in Social Work Program, Lenore Olsen. She then informed Felkner that he could no longer pursue his degree at RIC.
Writing here in 2005, Greg Lukianoff, then the Director of Legal and Public Advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), said “Forcing a person to publicly state one thing when he or she privately believes something else is one of the hallmarks of a totalitarian state. It is shocking that (RIC) President Nazarian would allow this.”
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
We need some right wing foundations to help with lawsuits like this. Heck, we need the Justice Dept to weigh in with amicus curae support.
Beyond my previous comment, we need to fire professors and administrators who do things like this, and/or defund their institutions / departments.
The Leftist Fascists who are running academia need to be deposed and banished.
These large universities need to be starved of both funds and students.
Soon to be Attorney General Sessions should unleash a full scale investigation of this institution with all federal funds suspended pending said investigation. Make them sign a consent decree that will enforce a change in behavior which will send a warning shot across the bows of the other universities.
In the 70’s, Propaganda Analysis was a required course to graduate at ISU. They used the Readers Digest to show us how we were being manipulated by the establishment. Nothing new.............................
Control these bastions of enemy commie fascist, progressive useful idiots by pulling the federal funding.
“We need some right wing foundations to help with lawsuits like this. Heck, we need the Justice Dept to weigh in with amicus curae support.”
Just remove funding from public universities until a white christian male group is approved on campus with the same rights as all other groups. If anything, I would call the white christian male group a minority group and take all benefits derived from that designation.
Play Alinsky’s game against the left.
E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one)
Bump
Outside of the defunding (as should be our STEP #1 of any\all ‘resolutions’), I’d need more info before hrumph’ing:
Was the ‘requirement’ part of the syllabus?
If it were spelled out in black-n-white, one should read all before signing on the bottom line.
Otherwise, yes, I’d sue the dog-squeeze outta the whole cabal.
In this case they did what all these schools do, create a requirement that the student do something favoring “social justice” or “social progress” and leave those terms undefined. They then enforce them to mean liberal activism. When challenged in court, though, they act as though the terms are effectively meaningless. It's another in a line of lies schools will commit to enact unconstitutional policies.
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