The Nation fesses up!

There can be no more denial, no more prevarication. We have our guilty plea. Progressives have been stifling free speech on our university campuses. 

A law student — at Harvard, no less — admits on the pages of The Nation (one of the most earnest enablers) that progressives are guilty of Stalinist suppression of constitutionally protected political speech. Why this mea culpa? Because, the law student contends, progressives supporting Hamas are getting a taste their own medicine. (Not that Hamas allows dissent, Gays for Palestine!)

We excerpt from that Harvard Law student’s confession in The Nation:

“It’s time for progressives to recommit to academic freedom”

In recent years, we … encouraged the suppression of conservative voices on our campuses. Now, the same justifications we once offered to restrict conservative speech are being used to silence us. It is time for progressive students to reclaim our commitment to academic freedom.

For most of the last century, the commitment to free inquiry and expression was an important principle of the progressive cause. … Then, over the last several decades, a new generation of progressives lost sight of this commitment. We detailed the ways in which words can hurt us. …

In response, universities adopted hate speech codes. … a survey conducted last year asked students whether “shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus” was acceptable. A majority of “very liberal” students answered it was “always” or “sometimes” acceptable. Only 17% of “very conservative” students felt the same way.

In 2017, when I was a student at Pomona College, my classmates physically barricaded and shut down a speaking event with author Heather Mac Donald, whose core argument was that black people are safer with more police around.

Some of us remember the speech codes delineating what may be uttered and what is forbidden speech. Prof. Donald Downs, now retired, led the way out into the sunshine. During the #Me Too craze, the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin was populated with drop boxes where cowards could wreck professors’ reputations with anonymous allegations. Young totalitarians disrupted disfavored speakers or vandalized landmarks.

 → Which is why Republicans held hearings on campus free speech last year.

 → The WI Institute for Law & Liberty conducted this 2020 review of free speech in Wisconsin higher education.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression now ranks UW-Madison a decent 60th nationally with a score of 53.57, giving it a grade of “average.” Harvard is the most inhospitable to free speech; its 0.0 score ranks it a dead last #248 on the FIRE survey. It’s speech climate is “abysmal.” 

Blaska’s Bottom Line: We’ll know free speech is alive and well when anyone to the right of Barack Obama schedules a speech at UW-Madison.

Is the takeover of Library Mall at UW-Madison
or Hamilton Hall at Columbia protected speech?