Thursday, March 17, 2005
PROFESSORS SCHOOLED
The Cavalier Daily’s Anthony Dick reports:
It isn’t often that a group of college professors is soundly and thoroughly embarrassed by a collection of mere students in an intellectual arena. But that’s exactly what happened at the end of February, when the University of Alabama’s Student Senate passed a sharp resolution directly opposing a heavy-handed, short-sighted and illiberal “hate speech” resolution that their Faculty Senate had already passed. The Faculty Senate’s original resolution called for the creation of a series of new regulations which threatened to drastically curtail First Amendment rights at their public university. With their remarkably independent and sophisticated response, UA’s students have schooled their teachers with a much-needed lesson in the fundamentals of a free and open society.
And how. Read the whole thing. Dick concludes:
This clash of paradigms between UA’s students and faculty is a sign of the times in academia, where the left has become the establishment, embracing the very tools of censorship and repression that 1960s radicals fought so bravely against. It’s also deeply instructive of how the left’s corrupting power on college campuses has tempted many leftists to become thoroughly illiberal, landing them on the wrong side of the divide between liberty and authority.