"How unfree speech has transformed academe"

 
FYI to stimulate some summer juices to flow in whatever directions they
do..
 
The Chronicle of Higher Education <http://chronicle.com/>
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 Magazine & Journal
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Monday, June 6, 2005

A glance at the June/July issue of Policy Review: How unfree speech has
transformed academe

"Our universities are ailing," writes Peter Berkowitz, an associate
professor of law at George Mason University. Many colleges have
abandoned a core, liberal-arts education, he says, and "for all their
earnest words about the beauty and necessity of multicultural education,
university administrators and faculty preside over a curriculum that
routinely permits students to graduate without acquiring reading,
writing, and speaking fluency in any foreign language."

"Perhaps most alarmingly," writes Mr. Berkowitz, who is also a fellow at
Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace,
administrators often cave in to colleagues "who would sacrifice free and
open inquiry to tender sensibilities and partisan politics." They fail
to instill an "ideal of an educated person," and punish "those who
express hypotheses disagreeable to campus majorities."

Mr. Berkowitz makes his charges in a review of Restoring Free Speech and
Liberty on Campus (Cambridge University Press), by Donald Alexander
Downs, a professor of political science, law, and journalism at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison.

He praises Mr. Downs for assailing "damaging" incidents at major
institutions, including an attempt at Madison to abolish speech codes
that Mr. Downs opposed when he became "alarmed by the high-handed
manner" of enforcement. Mr. Downs concluded, says Mr. Berkowitz, that
free-speech restrictions are "inimical to the university's central
mission, the transmission of knowledge and the pursuit of truth," unless
they are triggered by "direct incitement to physical harm or violence."

Mr. Berkowitz argues that, through "progressive censorship," the central
mission of many universities has become the "inculcation" of a
particular moral and political agenda. Those who support that agenda, he
contends, advance "a demeaning stereotype according to which minorities
and women are not capable of fending for themselves in classroom
discussion and wider campus life by responding to utterances they find
wrong, irritating, or insulting with better arguments and suppler
words."

The article, "Educating the University," is available online at
http://www.policyreview.org/jun05/berkowitz.html
<http://www.policyreview.org/jun05/berkowitz.html>

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Received on Mon Jun 6 11:01:24 2005