By Ken White
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donkeyrock shared this story from  Popehat.
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I do not anticipate an end to the war for, or against, free speech in academia. Last week was a bloody one in that struggle.
In California, the Regents of the University of California had an opportunity to wave glorious banners of censorship, blow trumpets, and retreat from the field. Some committee or working group proposed a Statement of Principles Against Intolerance, a dog’s breakfast of poorly-defined wrongthink that would be patently unconstitutional if made mandatory. The Statement had what amounted to a censorship-abjuring loophole: it said that it could not “be used as the basis to discipline students, faculty,
or staff,” making it more a proclamation of feels than a rule.
But it does not appear that bargain will hold. At a contentious Regents’ meeting, several Regents demanded that the policy be be reworked to inflict punishment for violations of the vaguely-worded and generally unprincipled intolerance code. Regent Richard C. Blum threatened that his wife, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, would interfere and make trouble if the Regents didn’t commit to punish people for prohibited speech. Meanwhile, students and faculty battled over whether the intolerance statement should adopt the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism and therefore cave to some factions that believe that Jews have a special right to be protected from certain arguments about Israel.
I predict that the University of California will take the wrong path and wind up buying a beach house for some lawyer.
Free speech still has principled support in academia, articulated by leaders who insist that students act like adults. In Nebraska, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor Harvey Perlman rebuked calls to censor preachers in Nebraska Union Plaza with a forthright call for free expression:
The university does not condone these comments. One would hope that the campus could enjoy intellectual disagreements without this type of rhetoric. Nonetheless, as far as we can determine the speakers were within their First Amendment rights of free speech. We have designated the plaza outside the Nebraska Union as a place where provocative speech can be conducted without disruption of the ongoing activities of the university.
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We all have the option to avoid the plaza if we neither want to hear nor be subjected to this type of language. In the end, we are fortunate to live in a free society where speech is …Click Here To Read The Full Story >>>
Source:: Donkeyrock_BlurBlog
