We have yet another event cancelled by students who are opposed to allowing others to hear opposing views on campus. Students at Washington College blew whistles and yelled over Princeton University Professor Robertle George to prevent him from speaking. While expressing disapproval, the College has yet to announce any disciplinary action against any student.
Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland is the 10th-oldest college in the United States. It was the first college chartered after American independence. Yet, it has now become the latest example of an anti-free speech movement that has taken over our campuses with the support of some faculty.
Professor George was giving a speech titled “The Truth-Seeking Mission of the University.” Protesters were allowed to march around the room, blowing whistles and blaring music. As reported by the Star Democrat, “we have the power here to make our voices heard.” They also had the power to stop others from speaking or hearing opposing views.
Notably, Washington College President Mike Sosulski was in attendance. Yet, the campus police reportedly decided not to intervene to ask the students to leave because “they did not want to escalate the situation.” Instead, they allowed the protesters to shutdown a free speech event with the university president there.
The College also sent mixed messages. Brian Speer, a spokesman for Washington College, explained that “the students took issue with homophobic and transphobic statements that Professor George has made in the past.” However, there was no explanation of why the protesters were allowed to take control of the room or why there were no disciplinary actions announced by the college.
Antoine Jordan, director of student engagement, said he could not be more proud of the protesters, though that comment may have come before the disruption.
Speer noted that the college declined to cancel the events and offered alternative forums for protesters. He added that the disruption “is not consistent with the core values of the liberal arts to which Washington College is committed.”
However, the College harrumphed as protesters stopped George speaking but did nothing to stop it. Instead, the university president reportedly sat there like a decorative ficus plant.
The Star Democrat reported that Washington College Associate Professor of Political Science Joseph Prud’homme, founding director of the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture, tried to get the students to respect free speech. One protester yelled in response “How did Hitler rise to power?” The student then added “because he was given a platform.”
It is that simple. The college then backed off and the protesters won, again, in silencing an opposing voice.
The pattern is all too familiar. For example, Stanford Law School dean Jenny Martinez released a powerful defense of free speech in a 10-page letter to the entire school. The letter also revealed that Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach has been put on leave after her disgraceful condemnation of conservative appellate judge Stuart Duncan. Martinez chastised the students responsible for cancelling Duncan’s remarks by shouting him down. However, Martinez decided not to hold a single student responsible for the disgraceful treatment of the judge and the disruption of the event.
That is also the case at other schools.
Northwestern University has been consistently ranked as one of the worst university’s for free speech. Students previously succeeded in cancelling a speech by former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Student Zachery Novicoff embodied the rising intolerance to free speech on campus. He is quoted as saying “There’s a limitation to free speech. That ends at overtly racist old white dudes.”
I previously criticized former Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro for his lack of support for free speech on campus. Schapiro denounced what he called “absolute” free speech positions and endorsed speech sanctions, including treating speech as a form of assault.
Schapiro helped create the environment of intolerance at the school. For example, we previously discussed a Sociology 201 class by Professor Beth Redbird that examined “inequality in American society with an emphasis on race, class and gender.” To that end, Redbird invited both an undocumented person and a spokesperson for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to speak to the class. It is the type of balance that is now considered verboten on campuses.
Members of MEChA de Northwestern, Black Lives Matter NU, the Immigrant Justice Project, the Asian Pacific American Coalition, NU Queer Trans Intersex People of Color and Rainbow Alliance organized to stop other students from hearing from the ICE representative. However, they could not have succeeded without the help of Northwestern administrators (including Dean of Students Todd Adams). The protesters were screaming “F**k ICE” outside of the hall. Adams and the other administrators then said that the protesters screaming profanities would be allowed into the class if they promised not to disrupt the class.
Of course, that did not happen. As soon as the protesters were allowed into the classroom, they prevented the ICE representative from speaking. The ICE official eventually left and Redbird canceled the class to discuss the issue with the protesters that just prevented her students from hearing an opposing view.
The comments of the Northwestern students were predictable after being told by people like Schapiro that some offensive speech should be treated as a form of assault. SESP sophomore April Navarro rejected that faculty should be allowed to invite such speakers to their classrooms for a “good, nice conversation with ICE.” She insisted such speakers needed to be silenced because they “terrorize communities” and profit from detainee labor. Here is the face of the new generation of censors being shaped by speech-intolerant academics like Schapiro:
“We’re not interested in having those types of conversations that would be like, ‘Oh, let’s listen to their side of it’ because that’s making them passive rule-followers rather than active proponents of violence. We’re not engaging in those kinds of things; it legitimizes ICE’s violence, it makes Northwestern complicit in this. There’s an unequal power balance that happens when you deal with state apparatuses.”
So Northwestern had the names of the students who disrupted an actual classroom, but elected to do nothing.
Other faculty have supported the use of a heckler’s veto. Years ago, at Rice University, I debated NYU Professor Jeremy Waldron who is a leading voice for speech codes. Waldron insisted that shutting down speakers through heckling is a form of free speech. It is not. It is a rationalization for stopping certain views from being voiced or heard in higher education.
CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek showed how far this trend has gone. When conservative law professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech,” Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. (Bilek later cancelled herself and resigned). Even student newspapers have declared opposing speech to be outside of the protections of free speech.
The solution is obvious but it requires courage. School administrators need to suspend students for disrupting such events and to expel repeat offenders. In this latest incident, a college president just sat there as the students took over an event as his staff muttered aspirational statements about free speech.
American higher education is facing an existential moment in the rise of the greatest anti-free speech movement in our history. We must either stand firm against the forces of intolerance and orthodoxy — or cede control of our campuses to whatever mob has the loudest members.
For some unknown reason, I awoke this morning with a Joni Mitchell song in my head – Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Then I read this article and reflected on the past 3.5 years.
Higher education in America: gone. The rule of law in America: gone. The southern border: gone. Energy independence: gone. Law and order in our cities: gone. Low inflation and unemployment: gone. The prospect of an at least somewhat enjoyable retirement: gone. Trust in our revered institutions: gone. Most importantly, freedom in America: gone.
Those protesters have more in common with Hitler’s brown shirts than they do with freedom and liberty.
Conservatives really need to stop whining about this. It will keep happening until they start giving the liberal speakers the same treatment.
The counter to my own argument would be that when I went to college I was working on a real degree that lead to real employment and there wasn’t time to care about fake “causes”.
“Sat like a decorative ficus plant”. Well said professor. That shows the utility of College Presidents and alludes to their brainpower. Their are capable of raising funds form other brain dead alumni who would seem to care less about their former university. However when action or thought is called for they sit there like the decorative plant, immovable and unthinking.
An encouraging development is that college attendance is down about 15 % over the last 2 decades because of apparent costliness and the fact of being untrained for the job market after a very expensive 4 years of college as well as just less students as fertility rates drop. We could only hope for more. The fact that the college tuition loans are going to now be paid should also be encouraging as more of the little darlings have to get out in the marketplace and make some money to pay for their loans just like the rest of us. I want to see film of their first encounters in the real job world. Maybe be covered by CNN and MSNBC.
Eventually these colleges will have to pare back courses and professors or they will be become unsustainable as institutions. That can only help, also.
Lastly, if a college wants a plant as their president then I would suggest Audrey from “Little Shop Of Horrors”. That could truly shake things up, especially after she yells “Feed Me” and grabs a senior or a professor for food.
Red Guard. Nothing much different from these fascists in 2023 (except in degree) to the mass murderer Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
Straight out of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and straight from the pages of “Life and Death in Shanghai” by Nien Cheng. Every authoritarian regime needs to shutdown and then censor dissenting voices to survive. These students should read how things went in the USSR, Red China, and 1930s Germany and Russia, just to name a few of the stars of tyranny, but history (at least the unrevised history of the modern world) interests them not.
A friend of mine asked these two questions on FB:
1) what is it YOU will “never forget” about 9/11/01? That beautiful blue sky that morning and watching the 2nd plane fly directly into the building.
2) what is it that you think as a nation we should “never forget” about 9/11/01? Unity–but I think it has been forgotten.
In respect to a speaker being cancelled at a college because a group does not agree with his opinions and ideas and is fearful that they may learn something different. They are afraid that someone from their group might question the propaganda that is being fed to them. We are so far away from the coming together that was felt after 9/11. Is that what the elite couldn’t tolerate?
This summer I read several historical novels about how Germany took over the different European countries, one at a time walked right in. In the Poland takeover, rumors were spread and accepted by gullible people that the Jewish people spread disease. Then they moved the Jewish families to the walled off Ghetto, not allowing them out. Limited their food. Made the Ghetto smaller, more crowded, and then of course with the Germans help disease and sickness spread within the Ghetto.
Control. Start with control of the mind. If you possibly have a different opinion or a different idea (The Great Barrington Declaration for example), you will be ostracized, possibly lose your position because you question the authority.
A good youth book to read is The Giver by Lois Lowry. Everything is taken care of. Everything is good. Until it isn’t. When you read it, remember, the author wrote it for children.
Please note how CNN and Christine Amanapour are celebrating her 40 years at the network…a sweater with the slogan “Be truthful, not neutral”. That is “journalism” today.
And the truth is whatever they say it is because they have no fear of challenges to prove otherwise. Shut down dissent. How long before Justin and BHO (because we know he is the Puppetmaster) enter into a similar agreement that Himmler and Bocchini did in 1936 to extradite dissidents to each other’s country for special handling? How soon before we start seeing the same internal exile Mussolini used? Where will the first confino be opened? In Germany, it was Dachau on March 22, 1933, less that two months after Hitler was sworn in as chancellor on January 30. By July 14, 1933, Germany banned all other political parties. From then on to the countries destruction, the National Socialists ruled the one-party Reich.
“How soon before we start seeing the same internal exile Mussolini used?”
Too late.
See federal officials putting the screws to social media companies, cancel culture, and the stories in JT’s post.
I understand these kids come from parents who encourage this behavior, but I don’t believe all the parents with kids in these schools approve. Why are they still sending their children and their money there?
“. . . decided not to intervene to ask the students to leave to because ‘they did not want to escalate the situation.’”
Right. Because surrender always placates fascist bullies.
The Jacobins are on the rise. Eventually they will eat their own. Remember Robespierre
“How did Hitler rise to power?” The student then added “because he was given a platform.”
How little these children know of history. Hitler allowed no one to speak against the nazi party, anyone who did was quickly dispatched.
Take the White Rose, Hans and Sophie Scholl, as well as Christoph Probst were executed by guillotine four days after their arrest, on 22 February 1943. During the trial, Sophie interrupted the judge multiple times. No defendants were given any opportunity to speak.
“No defendants were given any opportunity to speak”. Sound familiar dear children? Maybe you should speak and LISTEN to those who fought against fascist who refused to let others speak? It just might case light on a different perspective?
PS: in the event America can wrench it’s education system from the hands of those bent on fundamentally transforming the nation, each American student should be made to visit Collevile-sue-Mer, Normandy France. There they’ll find a garden of stone with residents who provided all the right to speak freely.
O T (Biden)
All Demo readers. Here is a headline from today’s Daily Mail –
“Iranian president laughs at the Biden administration by saying he’ll use $6 BILLION from ‘hostage’ deal on whatever he wants – and not just on humanitarian trade as the US promised”
Would they be laughing at Trump?
Why don’t we call these people “insurrectionists”? They are doing more to destroy political democracy, or any system built on consent, than ALL of the J6 protestors combined, and they are using more violence.
Because they’re left-wing, just like the BLM rioters in 2020. In our two-tiered justice system, that kind of treatment is reserved for conservatives.
The Civil Rights Act needs to be amended to condition federal money on the recipient’s compliance with free-speech requirements. The universities will not see the light until they feel the heat – dollars-wise.
kansas, this is a viable path. Civil Rights ARE absolute, not like the malleable Bill of Rights.
5 years of engineering school and 3 years of architecture school allowed me ZERO time for any of this BS. Maybe THAT’S the problem? — ridiculously easy coursework leaving the little pinheads way too much free time. Protests by people who’ve yet to live in the real world aren’t worth the time it takes to pay attention to them.
Ralph, unfortunately these little pinheads will be in positions of power and influence in the not too distant future. These universities are hurling us toward destruction of our republic. Most nation states collapse from within. Couple this insanity in our universities with uncontrolled spending, open borders and fraudulent elections how is it possible to survive other than becoming a fascist state.
We are well on the road to becoming what these students can’t even properly define–fascist dictatorship. They believe fascism is only on the right, totally ignoring the decades-long tyrannical government in Moscow and its satellites. Same coin, different sides. I do believe the survivalists have the right idea because this ain’t going to end well. And that time is drawing near. Does anyone believe we’ll be celebrating joyfully the 250th anniversary of the birth of America in 2026? I believe those of us old enough to know history by having lived through it will simply be nostalgic for a nation whose security appeared guaranteed after the Soviet Union collapsed as all totalitarian regimes eventually do. Little did we know, that which had finally imploded was regenerating on our own soil, in our own institutions. The cancer spread and infected our once great, never to be again, nation.
“… these little pinheads will be in positions of power and influence in the not too distant future.”
Don’t count on it. The more-likely possibility (probability) is that they are merely the noisy youth commanding the spotlight that will soon fade as they themselves age into poorly-trained, inferior, chubby, divorced cogs in the socio-induxtrial machine called America.
There was a version of them even back in my college days (early-to-mid 1970s), when they all thought they’d grow up to be Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin — supposed agents of great change in their day, later to be revealed as obscure footnotes in the history of America that didn’t turn out they way they would have preferred.
In short: I hear lots of noise from the college pinheads, but most of it’s just the current political fad — and political fads are ALWAYS noisy.
Excellent points, Mr. de Minimis. There’s another – why aren’t these kids using free time for genuinely recreative, fun activities? These would likely teach them much more wholesome and profitable lessons (even if many are “don’t do that”) than a commitment to shouting others down will.
The elimination of free speech and the First Amendment is the desired outcome of followers of the Religion of Woke. I’m sure President Sosulski was proud of his students.
In this latest incident, a college president just sat there as the students took over an event as his stuff muttered aspirational statements about free speech.
I just spoke with his lawyer, who defended the college president’s inaction on the grounds he had eaten nothing by Twinkies for a month and he’s super-intelligent. The lawyer also mentioned that his client was exhausted from having shut down free speech at least 17 times in the prior 10 hours, and that kind of exhaustion is a recognized excuse in a court of law.
Time to end all federal aid and loans to colleges, cities, states.
Let Democrats FUND their actions! If they are DOING politics in College…END the FEDERAL money for this!
democrat protestors are terrorists.
protesting…is saying you want something peacefully.
Today’s Democrats THREATEN you with violence….a TERRORIST!