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The Schools Where Free Speech Goes to Die
Some of the worst offenders against the First Amendment are religious colleges.
A man walks by the campus chapel and bell at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, one of the many conservative religious institutions struggling to find their place in a landscape rapidly changing in favor of gay rights. (AP Photo / Elise Amendola)
Trigger warnings, safe spaces, micro-aggressionsin 2015, pundits, politicians, and other serious people had a lot of fun bemoaning academia as a liberal la-la land where hands are held and minds are coddled. Im rather old-school when it comes to free expression. I didnt go for author and Northwestern professor Laura Kipniss notorious essay cheering professor-student affairs, but surely it was overkill for grad students to bring charges against her under Title IX for having a chilling effect on student victims willingness to come forward. Wouldnt writing a letter to the editor have sufficed? As for dropping Ovids Metamorphoses from the Literature Humanities core class at Columbia after students demanded trigger warnings about its accounts of rape: Wasnt it bad enough that Ovid was shipped off to Romania? Must his beautiful poems follow him into exile?
Attacks on political correctness champion educational values: the importance of grappling with challenging ideas and texts, mixing it up with different kinds of people, expanding your worldview, facing uncomfortable facts. How will students grow into strong, independent adults in a tough and complex world if theyve spent four years lying on a mental fainting couch? Good question. Theres a whole swath of academia, though, that gets left out of the discussion, despite the fact that its restrictions on speech and behavior, on what is taught in the classroom or argued in a lecture series, would make Yale and Northwestern and the rest look like New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Im referring, of course, to evangelical and Catholic colleges. Some of these have no compunction about limiting freedoms that other colleges consider just a part of normal life. Many have strictures on dress (no more than two piercings in an earlobe are allowed for women at Pensacola Christian College), on dating and social life, even on how faculty members conduct themselves in their own homes. Lisa Day, who taught English at a small Christian college in Appalachia, told me in an e-mail: In the year before I arrived, the then-president required regular, often unannounced inspection of faculty residences, and any alcohol was confiscatedincluding vanilla extract. Students have been expelled for being LGBT; professors have been fired or forced to resign for coming out as transgender, for getting pregnant outside marriage, or for getting divorced. According to a report by the Human Rights Campaign, there was a sharp uptick last year in the number of schools that requested and received exemptions to Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination. From 2013 to 2015, 35 schools obtained waivers from the US Department of Education that would allow them to discriminate against students and faculty who are LGBT, female, or pregnant.
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Religious colleges also have plenty of restrictions on intellectual inquiry and debate, as well as on political associations. Student clubs for nonbelievers can be restricted: the University of Dayton, Notre Dame, and Baylor, all religious schools, refused requests to recognize atheist or humanist student organizations. In 2009, Liberty University even banned the student Democratic club. (University president Jerry Falwell Jr. recently made headlines for calling on students to end those Muslims by carrying concealed weapons.) Conservatives stood up for free speech at Yale in 2015 when students protested a lecture invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a critic of Islam, from the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. Program speaker series. I agreed with conservatives on this onebut where are they when the shoe is on the other foot? Catholic colleges, for example, will not invite supporters of abortion rights: The Catholic University of America even banned the actor Stanley Tucci from speaking on Italian cinema because of his support for Planned Parenthood.
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When it comes to academic content, its hard to argue that a college that makes faculty adhere to Christian fundamentalist tenets, or that refuses to let its students engage with pro-choice speakers even when theyre talking on another subject, is providing an intellectual toolbox for the modern world. Wheaton College in Illinois (not to be confused with secular Wheaton College in Massachusetts) suspended Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science who donned a hijab in solidarity with harassed Muslims, for writing on her Facebook page that Christians and Muslims worship the same god. Well, as theology its debatable, but thats the point: Debate has no place at Wheaton, which requires faculty to sign a faith statement declaring their belief in the literal Adam in Genesis. (Dont laughin 2011, John Schneider, a professor of theology at Calvin College, was forced into retirement after publishing an article that questioned the story of Adam and Eve.) When Darwinismthe foundation of modern biologycannot be taught, what kind of an education are students getting?
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http://www.thenation.com/article/the-schools-where-free-speech-goes-to-die/
SickOfTheOnePct
(7,290 posts)aren't bound by the First Amendment.
niyad
(113,585 posts)SickOfTheOnePct
(7,290 posts)was that private religious school violate the First Amendment. That isn't possible, as they aren't bound by it.
niyad
(113,585 posts)academic freedom and title IX. but, feel free to keep trying.
randys1
(16,286 posts)niyad
(113,585 posts)Ms. Yertle
(466 posts)Why bring up the First Amendment, if the author isn't discussing it?
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)(an apt word) are more or less nullifying the meaning of the word "education." Who hires the "graduates" of these reichwing diploma mills, and no, I don't include Notre Dame in their number.
niyad
(113,585 posts)KamaAina
(78,249 posts)KamaAina
(78,249 posts)She describes herself as a political centrist. Wonder what her take on this will be.
niyad
(113,585 posts)KamaAina
(78,249 posts)than it is ok with them
ehen oppression occurs in a context that conflicts with those goals (such as at Cheistisn colleges)
Christian colleges
it MUST be stomped out as a threat to liberty
that's what I think
niyad
(113,585 posts)KamaAina
(78,249 posts)Euthanasia/physician-assisted suicide is her pet issue.
niyad
(113,585 posts)KamaAina
(78,249 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Used to think of college as a place of learning. Now they're becoming places where ideas go to die.
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)and those who can take "offense" at literally anything and everything this is a damn awful time to be a college student, especially in the humanities.