We have been discussing student editors and student government leaders using their positions to retaliate against the exercise of free speech by other students with the support of faculty. This trend is hardly surprising as journalism deans call for censorship and journalism professors call for the rejection of neutrality in the media. Universities have generally remained passive as students and faculty harass and punish those with opposing views. The latest such example was detailed in a column on the site College Fix on how students at Cornell University moved to oust student representatives who voted against disarming and defunding campus police. What concerns me most is the silence of the university on the controversy.
According to the report, students failed to pass a resolution calling for the defunding and disarming of the Cornell Police Department. After the measure failed, student leaders called for the removal of opposing leaders from committees or the student government as a whole. Uchenna Chukwukere, the Student Assembly vice president of finance declared
“These 15 student assembly members watched us pour out our traumas and fears on the floor practically begging them to vote no, and finally send a message to the university that we can no longer allow these oppressive institutions to keep us down. Many of these assembly members are white-cis-het men and women who quite literally laughed and danced in our faces when the resolution failed…Their faces are all over social media…We will never forget… their campus careers are over. … We must disarm, defund, and disband the Cornell University Police Department.”
Eventually, after a series of failed votes, the student organizers were able to pass Resolution 30, calling to disarm campus police by two votes.
Student Dakota Johnson, a Marine veteran, recounted a confrontation with a government leader where he was allegedly told that “As a white man, you cannot be the arbiter of what is and isn’t racist and who is a good or bad person. … You will never be the arbiter because you are a white man.”
The question is the responsibility of universities when students use their positions to deny the free speech of other students or punish those who hold opposing views. There has been a conspicuous silence from faculty ad administrators as both free speech and academic freedom has been attacked in recent years. It is a disgraceful failure to protect the foundational values for academia. Many are afraid of being the next to be targeted by campaigns like those directed against the students at Cornell. This silence has continued even as faculty are hounded for their views or writings. We have been discussing these cases across the country including a similar effort to oust a leading economist from the University of Chicago as well as an effort at Harvard targeting a leading academic. It is part of a wave of intolerance sweeping over our colleges and our newsrooms — a campaign that will devour its own in the loss of academic freedoms and free speech.
Even if we will not protect our colleagues, we have a duty to protect the students who come to our campuses to learn and develop their own views and values. That includes protecting them from being formally punished or ousted for their viewpoints. If we do not fight for them and their rights, we have become entirely untethered from any principle other than our personal advancement and safety.
Bumper sticker from the 1960s: “Next time you’re in trouble, call a hippie”
I continue to maintain that college educationis a privilege, not a Right. Students ask for and are allowed to attend the school for the purpose of learning. Anything students or staff do that interferes with the learning process or that reflects badly on the college should be dealt with quickly and severely. One warning then immediate expulsion and or termination.
lazy brats by and large
solvermn, nisquire, and the two gray Anonymous’s below are all puppets of our blog troll.
Bumper sticker from the 1960s, when the police were “pigs”: “Next time you’re in trouble, call a hippie.”
My father’s generation was the “Greatest Generation.” It was the only thing Tom Brokaw ever said that I agreed with. I had hoped the Millennials would be the next great generation, but they will be worst generation if they don’t recover from this campus psychosis. This third-world ideology is blatant, anti-American bigotry, designed to change the subject from all the horrors beyond our borders (especially those perpetrated by Beijing). These radicals are just a newer version of “useful idiots.” Some of the troll scat seen on this comment board is proof there is no bottom with these people.
Diogenes, the most useless segment of society are Trump supporting Boomers. These zombies have been demanding tax cut after tax cut for the past 40 years. And only when Democrats are in the White House do they show any concern for the national debt.
Yet these zombie Boomers are going to drain a huge amount of wealth from the Millennials in term of Social Security and Medicare payments. And while draining this wealth they will continue promoting their hysterical fears of immigrants while supporting voter suppression tactics.
At the moment these zombie Boomers are promoting Trump’s false election in an effort to undermine every election from here on forth. Yet insultingly these zombies claim to be the ‘real American patriots’.
Tax cuts were needed to offset tax increases by Democrats; otherwise, taxes would have increased continuously.
Democrats always pushed for more Social Security and Medicare benefits–boomers and Republicans not so much.
Boomers are entitled to question election fairness; as I recall, Democrats wrote the book on challenging elections.
Boomers built the internet and ended the cold war, freeing hundreds of millions. So far, eggheads and their woke trolls can only claim speech codes and riots.
Diogenes:
Boomers didn’t end the Cold War! The Soviet Union fell in the early 90’s when the Boomers were just taking over. In any event, Boomers like you didn’t want to pay for Reagan’s Defense build-up. Nor did you have any interest in paying for George W’s invasion of Iraq. Boomers like you have always been, “Gimme, Gimme, Gimmie”.
Wrong. Boomers were the green line in those days–just like our fathers had been–but that’s not what I really want to talk about.
If you’re a millennial, this BS needs to stop. Most of what Teach and Prof told you is BS. The reason they all agree is because lefties go into education. That’s their vocational bias. It’s their echo chamber.
They get more government funding from Democrats for brainwashing young dolts. Brainwashed dolts vote Democrat so that Democrats can raise taxes and blow it on more education bureaucracies. It’s a business model, dude. It’s not reality. It’s their reality.
For the rest of us, it’s a con. The cost of education in this country has risen faster than medical inflation, but you’ll never hear that from them and their coreligionists in media (another vocational bias of the left).
Why do you guys never question them? You insult everything else on their behalf. What’s up with that? Let’s face it, you never questioned the motives or perspectives of the eggheads who sold you this woke stuff. That is pseudointellectual capitulation.
You need to start questioning now. YOU STILL HAVE A CHANCE TO BE THE GREATEST GENERATION but not by believing whatever you hear from some faculty Marxist or some talking head in the media.
I don’t expect you to believe me. I don’t want you to believe me. I want you to think for yourself. All things good will follow from that. Please.
These zombies have been demanding tax cut after tax cut for the past 40 years
You mean people are asking that they get to keep more of their money? Citizens income is not the property of the Federal Govt.
“Their campus careers are over.” (Big Daddy Idi couldn’t have said it better) “Uchenna Chukwukere: My name is Uche Chukwukere and I am a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences double majoring in Chemistry and Biological Sciences! I was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia and grew up in a Nigerian-American household.” (from his website)
**************************************
Bring in third worlders, get third world attitudes and problems. Loving unfettered, unvetted, un-American immigration yet? it’s about time we dropped the pretense and met these challenges to liberty head on and with force if necessary. It’s gotten that bad. We can always start with charging this guy with making terroristic threats if you want to.
Who will become the “Mike Adams” of Cornell…?
As I have been saying: the Left is Fascist
Young:
Technically, more tyrannical than fascist since their economics and aims are global not national but the concept plays.
It’s a mutation of the Fascist virus.
And I like using the word because they hate it so. Like ‘racism’ they think only they can use it as an insult. Own petard sort of thing.
Anyone who takes being called fascist or racists as not an insult is already lost to evil.
Everybody and everything is ‘racist these days and I no longer care about it. The accusation has lost not only its sting but its utility.
By current standards you are almost certainly racist and fascist.
Molly you make me laugh. How many classes did I have at university where the leftist professors mocked Christianity and told us that ” all ethics are relative to culture” etc etc
Hence the use of the teleological word “evil” by you is senseless and laughable
if all values are relative and culturally determined, well, if that is so then your “evil” is no more binding on me than the Poohbah of Scientology or the Imams.
Do you follow the Imams? Scientology? Pray tell me what is your authority?
aha. You have none, as I thought. You only have your opinion and we all have that and another thing that stinks.
So, you have your values and we have ours. Celebrate our cultural diversity and quit calling us names!
Saloth Sar
SS-
She is upset that her favored barbs have become dull and no longer sting.
You have made a good point. For her so much is relative, perhaps all, but she can still rummage around in the wreckage of her morality to discover ‘evil’ which, oddly, she applies to anyone who disagrees with her racist and fascist leanings.
I’m so steeped in postmodernism that I finally applied it to myself
if there is no truth, as they say, then I am free to choose my own
SS
Why not? The MollyGs of the world do it all the time.
Fascists and racists the lot of them.
except fascists have snappy uniforms and she does not
Saloth Sar
She should get in touch with Hugo Boss.
SS –
I have been rethinking Franco. He is despised by the Left and we are all supposed to think he was pure evil. But I am not so sure.
Reading Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’ about his time in the trenches fighting Franco’s forces only to go behind the lines to Barcelona and discover that the true Communist/Socialists were liquidating his friends and likely would do him, it is likely that Franco’s enemies were more evil by far. Despite fighting Franco’s forces in front line trenches, Orwell and his wife had to flee Spain incognito to escape not Franco’s agents, but the homicidal agents of the Left.
Franco was brutal, but he was fighting a brutal enemy and he wasn’t going to make Kerensky’s mistakes.
What Franco did do was walk a tightrope between massive belligerents engaged in a world war and still manage to keep Spain out of the conflict. That was quite a feat.
But there is more. Reading an account of an American P-47 pilot whose plane was badly damaged over France he struggled to get as close to the Spanish border as possible so he could leave Vichy France and be restored to his squadron. It turned out he was able to fly all the way back to England, but that was the first I heard that American pilots stood a chance of being returned to the war if they made it to Spain. Despite his outward appearances, it seems Franco was willing to return Allied aviators to the fight. If they had landed in truly neutral Switzerland they would have been interned for the duration of the war.
Not all to the Franco story has been told.
Says the fascist racist named MollyG who knows nothing worth knowing.
Why was FDR a “great admirer” of Mussolini?
Why were Hitler and Mussolini complimentary of FDR’s New Deal?
“The Nouveau Bolsheviks”
The American Communist Deep Deep State
___________________________________
The Russian Imperial Romanov family (Emperor Nicholas II, his wife Empress Alexandra and their five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei) were shot and bayoneted to death by Communist revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, under Yakov Yurovsky in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918.
– Wiki
_____
Just incidentally, the American Communist Deep Deep State is wholly unconstitutional.
The communists (liberals, progressives, socialists, democrats, RINOs) are unconstitutional and in the process of committing treason and insurrection against the Constitution, Bill of Rights and the United States of America.
The communists (liberals, progressives, socialists, democrats, RINOs) are mortal enemies of America and Americans.
Please cite the specific line in the US Constitution that makes these group unconstitutional.
Politics is a continuum of force and is defined by the fundamental social distinction between adversaries and allies
All those george named are evidently not allies.
Our social politics is alive and we will outlive the constitution.
Those who twisted the constitution like a pretzel to fit their aims, will miss it when it’s gone, when the rubber band has stretched so thin it’s lost elasticity and binds no more.
For our part, we intend to live on under any circumstances
Saloth Sar
Kurtz must have a mouse in his pocket, but the question is whether it also suffers from dementia and delusions of grandeur.
The end of 2020 has brought, for me at least, some clarity.
I no longer care to raise my BP by reading an endless stream of this kind of dribble. Lies and dribble fermented in the singular mind set of partially educated, highly opinionated, wrong headed stooges. While 4- year degrees abound, I doubt that so many of them will lead to much of anything of value or importance. Even science has been tainted. ie. Ice caps melt and water rises. Only when ice melts, the waster level lowers. I learned that from experiments in my 7th grade science class.
Trying to deal with the likes of articles like this is pretty shameful when viewed in its entirety.
Law Professor whats-his-name should be ashamed for his contribution of glorifying stupid, wrongheaded thinking for the sake of eyeball views. This is NOT an exercise in free speech. It is an exercise in shameless foolhardiness. Of ‘MY LIES ARE BIGGER THAN YOURS’, of ‘YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOUR TALKING ABOUT AND YOUR UGLY’.
So I will begin my 2021 early, with a long hot shower, to rid myself of what I have become. A useless blog feeding useless ego’s. Have at it children!
Then the CCP wins. Enjoy your Communist Party limited freedoms…
One can only hope that the assault on free speech ends with the close of 2020. Alas, I fear it will not, and that the pressure to censor opposing thoughts and speech will elevate with their return to power.
We will never forget… their campus careers are over. …
Careers? So these enrolled tyrants consider this a career? Why? Who accumulates thousands a year in tuition, etc. debt and considers that a career? Given the silence from faculty and administrators towards protecting the rights of their students, one would conclude these student tyrants are effectively employed by the universities as street-level activists moving a larger agenda. What a scam; universities get paid through loan programs, student activists run amok in brownshirt careers and our country’s culture is perpetually infected by this lefty cycle of indoctrination and oppression.
Police need to be accountable to elected officials, who are accountable to the voters. Campus police are accountable to campus administration, which is not accountable to the voters. This is absolutely wrong and should never be tolerated in a free society. Campus and other similar police need to be disbanded and their roles taken over by municipal police. They can hire the same officers for the same roles, but the chain of command must end with an elected official.
Molly, 23,000+/- people attend Cornell Univ. plus staff of about 10,000. That is the size of a small city. Cornell, as is all schools, is a non-profit, therefore do not contribute to the tax base. They fund their own campus security as do most schools. Schools also work with the police departments of the towns/cities they are in for serious crimes. You would ask a municipality to provide the security to a school? Therefore, you saying the local tax payers should foot the bill to provide security to a bunch of entitled brats and faculty. The response time to a crime call-in on campus is usually faster because of a campus police department that knows the geography of the school which is often outside of a town proper. As with practically all of the ‘defund the police’ crowd you may not have thought this through……try to think about the unintended consequences and at the same time reflect on the fact that it is usually the behavior and actions of a person that determines the outcome of a police interaction.
The school can pay the same amount they do now, but to the local town. They are also quite welcome to host a police precinct on campus that is focused on campus. But the control and accountability of the police must not lie with unelected administrators. I have thought this out quite well.
Karen, in New York, ‘campus police’ are licensed security guards, not police officers. There is a provision in New York state law for campus security to be deputized if they’ve passed through a training course. IIRC, one impetus for that was to finesse jurisdictional issues. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a campus security guard carrying a firearm in 21 years employed at New York state educational institutions.
One thing you’re forgetting is that the students and employees of Cornell account for not quite 30% of the population of Tompkins County and a higher share of the three municipalities proximate to the campus. Another 7% of the county’s population are associated with Ithaca College. The gown is a high % of the town.
well Molly another cutesy opinion sorry but the billionaires want the universities to remain unaccountable little islands, green zones for globalism
So the trend of universities privatizing their police functions will continue unabated just as it’s been going strong 3 plus decades long
You’re behind the times
Saloth Sar
There is a problem emerging here that Turley and others seek to ignore – these issues are racist and are good examples of true racism. After all, an “ism” is a philosophy or belief. Or, as Webster states, “Ism definition is – a distinctive doctrine, cause, or theory.” Without exception, those behind these movements are people of color, and they have been brainwashed by years of teaching of what amounts to Critical Race Theory. They use the tactics of Bolsheviks and Maoists to intimidate those who do not support them. They use fake racism is a weapon when they are themselves racists who care about no one but themselves.
The message of both parties should be to provide additional funding for “constitutional” policing and to only defund “unconstitutional” policing (using the Judicial Branch courts’ definition of constitutionality).
Most rank & file officers take orders from their top management (police chiefs, police unions, mayors, college presidents, etc.). Reform starts at the very top, not at the bottom of this military style hierarchy.
It’s a losing strategy to make enemies of those at the bottom forced to follow orders. The focus should be at the top management level.
the top management level are corrupt and chosen by billionaires, or their lackeys, who are taught which persons are acceptable or not
here is a story I saw on pbs that didn’t make the mainstream press from about a year ago. hmm, fascinating. strange how these wunderkind Democrat mayors “handle’ their voting base
I guess years later, having licked the boots of billionaires hard enough, he got a promotion
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-buttigiegs-decision-on-police-chief-shadows-his-presidential-run
ss
History shows that the oppressor becomes the oppressed in the end. But these simple minded little pissants don’t see the truth because they didn’t or won’t study history.
In my youth back in the ’40s there were no campus police. The municipality police did the job.
In the ’60s there were unarmed security guards on campus. Armed with a radio they called the police if needed.
Then along came the War on Drugs. Students got drunk. Students got high. The police now had a law with war-level priority to enforce. The campus police became the enemy of students just havin’ fun, when they should have been seen as their security force providing a safe environment in which to learn.
The Cornell film department released a new version of “Its A Wonderful Life”
In the new version, Clarence the Angel tells George Bailey to just kill himself because he’s white.
The only lessons students in these ‘elite’ schools are getting is in intolerance. It started long before President Trump came on the scene but has certainly been ramped up over the last 4-5 years. I have a good laugh when anyone on the left talks about how intolerant those on the right are. I don’t know why any parent would continue to spend tens of thousands per year to send their children to these schools. They are filled with hypocritical cry babies who will always blame someone or something else for their life disappointments. It is like a circular firing squad…one person is offended by someone’s comment, so the next person who doesn’t want to be left out of the group joins in joins in, then the next, then the next. Round and round it goes until it comes back to smack the original one offended in the butt. Eventually every revolution eats its own.
“Unfortunately , the same can be said of many republicans” ?. WTF ? , are you one of those left nutzoids of hate or what !!!!. What are called “liberals” today LACK all moral courage…and even a sense of decency. Liberals of today want to rule like communist heathens where comrades down with the sickness are more equal than others. Crawl back in your hole of blind hate !.
The irony of your saying “Crawl back in your hole of blind hate !” seems to have flown over your head.
phergus
Try using wit or even just common sense when you write.
You postings sound like you are a looney.
Seriously. you sound deranged.
I have some clients who lived near that campus before they are put in jail. They will get out soon and agree with defunding and removing the campus police. One guy is a rapist. Watch out Molly.
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” – Dante Alighieri
The moral courage of liberals is outstanding.
Unfortunately, the same can be said of many Republicans.
Politics seems to breed cowards and demagogues (or does it just attract those people with preexisting conditions?).
Unfortunately the same can be said of many republicans ????. You hate much often ?. What a condescending tone ..typical liberal whom perceives themselves superior and their Marxist drivel genuine.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach (or become politicians).
And those who can’t teach, teach teachers.