No. of Recommendations: 3
I have to say, I think the world of Heather Mac Donald and her writing. Here, though, she's 100% in the wrong. In this piece she's talking about the recent appearance of the 3 university Presidents in front of Congress:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/right-deed-wr...Critics of the American university have seized on what they perceive as the most efficacious means for discrediting academia. But though accusations of tolerance for the genocide of Jews guarantees the most media coverage, conservatives are making a mistake in highlighting that alleged tolerance as the main reason to revamp the university. This mistake will come back to haunt them.
Absent a complete turnover of university personnel, a renewed authority to limit speech will be used overwhelmingly against conservatives. Even now, Penn is weighing sanctions against law professor Amy Wax for her challenges to campus orthodoxy. Had the public consensus been that the universities’ mistake was in not extending the same tolerance they showed to the pro-Hamas demonstrators to dissenters from leftist nostrums, Wax could have argued that she is entitled to the same protections for controversial speech. Now, with renewed support, even from the right, for student “safety,” Penn can argue that its newfound concern for Jewish student safety requires it to intensify its solicitude for the “marginalized” groups whom Wax allegedly jeopardized with her contrarian opinions.
A colleague of Wax’s has published an op-ed in the Washington Post unironically headlined: “To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict speech.”No offense to Heather, but this is why a lot of Establishment GOP types lose and will continue to lose.
An absolute GEM of a comment appeared on another site about this:
It is possible to argue two things at once:
1) we should have true free speech on college campuses; and
2) as long as you are going to have and enforce "speech codes" we want them enforced equally to leftists as they are to righties.
McDonald thinks that if you argue "1", you cannot argue "2". That's stupid.It's called arguing in the alternative. Yes, I would prefer "1" in a perfect world, and I will try to fight for 1, but in the meantime i'm going to demand that "2" be applied.
I'm against a lot of the idiocy in the tax code, but I'm going to take advantage of the stuff as long as it's on the books. I'm not paying more in taxes out of "principle".Spot.
On.
This hearing is a golden example of applying Saul Alinsky's rules to the left and making them pay.
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules and collecting scalps like Magill's is exactly the correct call here.
It goes without saying that free speech is the goal. But if we're going to have conservative speakers cancelled and conservative students piledriven for speaking their minds in an allegedly open environment, then that must happen to left wingers also. Before true free speech can be restored, left wing administrators and students need to live under the mailed fist of their own standards.
Because until they feel the pain, they won't change.
