Saturday, August 26, 2017

Free Speech At Berkeley? Not Everyone Is Impressed.

I've written, most recently here, about the UC Berkeley chancellor's stated commitment to free speech on campus.  That should be a "duh"; that it's not shows how far Berkeley has fallen.  That the student body president openly challenges that commitment is sad indeed:
A University of California, Berkeley professor and the student body president recently condemned the school’s decision to allow right-wing speakers on campus.

UC-Berkeley will host conservative speakers Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, and Ann Coulter in September, and school administrators are preparing students by rededicating themselves to free speech after the same speakers were shut down by rioters earlier this year.
According to a letter sent out by Chancellor Carol Christ, “public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view.”

However, American and African American Studies Assistant Professor Michael Cohen took to Twitter on August 23 to demonstrate his outrage with the decision and chastise the administration for failing to ban the speakers from campus...

As of August 24, Cohen has taken down some of the tweets reported by Campus Reform, but Student Body President Zaynab Abdulqadir-Morris shared similar sentiments...

Abdulqadir-Morris further claims that the university is not bound to the constitution, but only to the “code of conduct which denounces hate speech.”
Zaynab has a few things to learn.

No comments: