Saturday, April 04, 2015

The Cultural Descendants of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement

What would those Berkeleyites of yesteryear think about today's universities and university students?
Students at Dixie State University have filed a lawsuit against their school after administrators refused to approve their request to distribute flyers to promote their libertarian club, hand outs that rebuked big government by playfully lampooning George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Campus officials denied the flyers on the grounds that they violated school policy, which does not allow students to disparage others, according to the lawsuit. But the students, members of Young Americans for Liberty, allege their free speech rights have been infringed, and a leader of the group said in an interview administrators are “silencing and marginalizing” them.

The lawsuit also cites an incident in which a security guard for the Utah campus actively monitored the group’s “free speech wall” display for so-called hate speech.
The irony of "free speech zones" is that, almost by definition, the rest of the campus is not a free speech zone.

2 comments:

Ellen K said...

It's a good think National Lampoon wasn't in its fruition now or it would have never been birthed.

Jean said...

I'm related to a fair number of yesteryear's Berkeleyites and they are uniformly appalled...