Professor Cohen obviously subscribes to the same belief that FIRE President Greg Lukianoff expressed last month when he appeared on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes to discuss the attempts by the administration of DePaul University to silence the attempts of the College Republicans to protest last year's Ward Churchill appearance there.
And we have two maxims at FIRE. One of them is that sunlight is the best disinfectant...
The shades that obscure DePaul have been opened--opened widely--by Cohen in this American Thinker article. Read it all here.
For those in hurry, here's an excerpt:
DePaul has become a symbol of what has gone wrong with academia, an icon for political correctness run amok. All three incidents exposed the central problem with the politically correct academy: the preferential treatment of women and minorities.
In the Klocek case, pro-Palestinian students, by positioning themselves as the victims of offensive speech, were able to successfully demand that DePaul get rid of a long time well qualified employee who had argued with them about the Arab/Israeli conflict. DePaul's response in this incident would not hold when the professor in question is a leftist insulting a conservative. See below.
In the case of the Ward Churchill visit, the DePaul administration was angry at the College Republicans for upsetting the director of the DePaul Cultural Center. They had criticized her for inviting a speaker who is notorious for saying that the victims of 9/11 got what they deserved, and had incurred her wrath by pressing her to explain why they were spending the students' tuition dollars to highlight such views.
In the case of the affirmative action bake sale, the activity was shut down after a group of African American students got into a serious but heated discussion about affirmative action with the organizers of the sale.
The common concern that appears to have motivated the school administration in all three cases is what it sees as its role as the special protector of minorities and minorities alone. The university has just put into place an elaborate anti-discrimination policy that is in effect a speech code designed to protect some fifteen "protected classes" of people from perceived harassment. But as can be seen from the university's actions in the cases that have been addressed by FIRE, such policies in practice are defined so broadly as to make the protected classes immune from criticism of any sort. At DePaul the right not to be offended has become the right to not be criticized--if you can position yourself in one of the fifteen protected classes.
Hmmm...that last sentence ties into my prior posts today about Denmark.
Technorati tags: DePaul Ward Churchill Free Speech Academic Freedom
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