8 Comments

The feeling I have is such deja-vu. The Caltech LGB group was prevented at the last moment in 1985 from hosting a speaker from Johns-Hopkins (who was a Harvard Fellow) on "Lust, Love and Limerance" because "Lust" was unacceptable in the title.

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The deplatforming on the right and left are therefore fundamentally different. If the Newman people object to Catholic institutions hosting anti-Catholic speakers or performances that is different from Palestinian supporters objecting to Jewish speakers at secular institutions. Nazis and Skokie and all that but would you consider it deplatforming if a Jewish institution didn't allow neoNazis to speak? Or if a HBCU did not welcome the KKK?

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Whats the left /right % for the whole dataset?

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FIRE has supported our local underground socialist student paper. Just recently they posted my essay criticizing the Colleges' Title IX & DEI program: https://bereatorch.com/2024/03/08/deconstructing-the-baffling-bull-behind-title-ix-at-our-college/

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“College isn’t the place to go for ideas.”

-Helen Keller

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Where are all these right-wing protesters depicted on the charts? I never see any in real life.

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Religious institutions mostly

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Well, that sounds correct.

But -- taking issue with the author, not you -- it is absurd to compare religiously based objections to speakers whose views on abortion or gay marriage explicitly oppose the raison d'être of the institution to Harvard/Stanford/Michigan's opposition to common views that 60+% of Americans hold or held recently.

Mostly small, explicitly religious institutions probably educate 1 or 2% of all American university students. Note that I exclude large, nominally religious institutions that are more-or-less nearly secular at this point, such as Notre Dame. (I went to such an institution decades ago and it was more-or-less secular even then.)

I see no contradiction between expecting large, secular universities to welcome all sorts of viewpoints while also expecting (even hoping) that small, religious institutions conduct their religious missions.

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