Campus Speech
Well, at least the Harvard Black Mass didn’t happen Monday night.
The Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club invited the devil himself to campus. Lucifer’s speaking gig was arranged in conjunction with the New York Satanic Temple. The event was to take place in the form of a Satanic Black Mass. Joining the Prince of Darkness at the lectern was to be Harvard professor Christopher Robichaud. According to USA Today Robichaud planned to remark on religious liberty.
Not surprisingly, Catholics were outraged and the thing was moved off campus under a storm of protest. At the last moment it was cancelled altogether.
In April Brandeis University cancelled altogether its offer of an honorary doctorate for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She writes and speaks about real religious liberty and the real war on women in Muslim countries. She’s also a critic of Islam itself. Condoleeza Rice was driven away from her Rutgers University speech by unhinged faculty members and their poorly informed students accusing her of war crimes. IMF boss Christine Legarde was also disinvited from her speaking engagement at Smith University.
I’m not equating disinviting Legarde, Rice, or Ali to disinviting Satan. I’m equating academics to nuts.
In a column about the lack of due process in college, Thomas Sowell discusses “free speech” zones on campus:
The track record of academics in other kinds of cases is not the least bit encouraging as regards the likelihood of impartial justice. Even on many of our most prestigious college campuses, who gets punished for saying the wrong thing and who gets away with mob actions depends on which groups are in vogue and which are not.
This is carried to the point where some colleges have established what they call “free speech zones” — as if they are granting a special favor by not imposing their vague and arbitrary “speech codes” everywhere on campus.
The irony in this is that the Constitution already established a free speech zone. It covers the entire United States.
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