Illiberal Education
As my regular readers may have noticed, I have a deep concern over the current course of higher education and its stifling of dissent. Here, my friends is an illustration of just how far things have come- At Citrus College in California, a professor required students to write anti-war letters to the President and penalized those who refused to do so. In addition, one week later, this same professor required students to write letters to a state senator, expressing a certain viewpoint. Fortunately, through the work of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) the professor has since been sanctioned and the students have received apologies. Read the full story here.
This is just one more example of the moral decay at our institutions of higher education. First came speech codes, which violated First Amendment rights, in order to protect sensitive folks and their feelings. And now we have professors actually dictating students' beliefs with the threat of punishment. The thought police truly are here and they reside in what used to be a bastion of open discourse, our colleges and universities.
One has to wonder, in light of recent events, whether the college radicals of the 60's were actually fighting for power to dominate academe rather than for their purported free speech rights. Many of the same people who fought for freedom in the 60's have become the thought police of the 90's and 00's. What 60's liberals were able to do was replace one orthodoxy with another that is equally pernicious and detrimental to the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual growth.