Tyrants and Snowflakes

At a time when government and institutional overreach has never seemed more extreme, tyrants at the helm are using every means at their disposal to stifle free speech. Elsewhere -- on alternative media and in universities, in particular -- speech is being censored, ostensibly to protect the tender sensibilities of snowflakes -- those infantile sad sacks who need protection from normal debate and such thoughts as have not before penetrated the bubbles they inhabit.

A. Universities

Universities, under the thumb of federal education bureaucracies, institute Star Chamber proceedings against male students ostensibly to stem the (nonexistent) rape culture on campus, encouraging slanderous attacks on them and discouraging would-be defenders. 

Simultaneously, they are preventing students and teachers from exercising a broad range of free speech. The latest example comes from Portland State University. To illustrate the stupidity of “gun free zones” a student wanted to advertise “murder free zones”. The university considered flyers promoting such zones could be “libelous” and “triggering,” and banned them. How this could be libelous escapes me. “Triggering”, in case, you missed it is a word used often in academic atmospheres to indicate speech or events that might set off fearful or unwanted emotions and feelings. Students of such tender, childish mindsets are to the critics of triggering bans “snowflakes” too delicate for the sometimes-heated world of debate and idea exchange which are essential to democracy. So we are left with this: to preclude heart flutters in those who consider “gun free zones” beyond parody, a student was banned from making fun of them.

I’m in full agreement with University of Chicago Professor Charles Lipson who argues on Facebook:

These are grotesque violations of basic democratic rights to voice alternative viewpoints, which universities should lead the way in protecting. Instead, universities have decided they should be a challenge-free bowl of mush, unwilling to let students grapple with alternative viewpoints. This is not just wrong. Protecting the students as if they are delicate flowers is a betrayal of universities' basic values."

It has also not escaped my attention that so often what is considered “triggering” and, therefore banned, depends on the orientation of the banners. Have you any substantial doubt that the Portland college banners oppose guns and anyone who disagrees with their viewpoint? 

On campuses throughout the country Jewish students, for example, are assailed, intimidated and even the recipients of death threats in anti-Israeli demonstrations without anyone in any of the overstaffed administration offices intervening. 

In sum, while at the same time ostensibly protecting delicate students, campus administrators are too often stifling students and teachers who oppose their own views and ignoring incidents where some students block free speech by violence and threats of violence. In this way, too, they betray the basic values of their institutions.

Via: American Thinker

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Colleges and Universities Have Grown Bloated and Dysfunctional

 American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I’ve written before of their shameful practices — the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society.

In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual corruption would have been understood by George Orwell.

Alas, even the great strengths of our colleges and universities are threatening to become weaknesses. Sometimes you can get too much of a good thing.

American colleges, dating back to Harvard’s founding in 1636, have been modeled on the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The idea is that students live on or near (sometimes breathtakingly beautiful) campuses, where they can learn from and interact with inspired teachers.

American graduate universities, dating back to Johns Hopkins’ founding in 1876, have been built on the German professional model. Students are taught by scholars whose Ph.D. theses represent original scholarship, expanding the frontiers of knowledge and learning.

That model still works very well in math and the hard sciences. In these disciplines it’s rightly claimed that American universities are, as The Economist recently put it in a cover story, “the gold standard” of the world. But not so much in some of the mushier social sciences and humanities. “Just as the American model is spreading around the world,” The Economist goes on, “it is struggling at home.”

Via: Human Events

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