Bucknell University, a well-regarded liberal arts institution set in a picturesque location in the rolling Pennsylvania countryside, looks entirely benign. Its campus is safe, its students intelligent. It counts among its alumni the famed author Philip Roth and Leslie Moonves, the president of CBS. It’s a college to which most parents would be proud to send their kids.
But if your son or daughter is the type who might join the Bucknell University Conservatives Club (BUCC), you would be well-advised to send him or her somewhere else. Because Bucknell really, really does not want to hear what the students of the BUCC have to say.
The BUCC has never exactly been welcome at Bucknell, and as the movie Indoctrinate U shows (directed by a Bucknell alum), the university is hardly a stranger to free speech controversies. The college’s latest assault on the free expression of its students began in March, when the students of the BUCC earned the administration’s ire by passing out satirical “Obama Stimulus Dollars” — fake dollar bills with President Obama’s face on the front and the sentence “Obama’s stimulus plan makes your money as worthless as monopoly money” on the back. Only an hour of this apparently unacceptable behavior was tolerated before administrators “busted” them for “solicitation” without prior approval. A look at Bucknell’s “solicitation” policy quickly reveals that, unsurprisingly, for something to be solicitation it must be trying to sell you something, but that didn’t stop Bucknell from illegitimately using the policy to shut down the BUCC’s protest.
Gotta love the left, right?
Bucknell is in Lewisburg, an hour and a half (or thereabouts) from here.
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