bounty44 -> RE: Progressive Education (2/26/2016 5:52:53 AM)
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"Adam Falk, President of Williams College, Joins the Fight Against Free Speech" quote:
Yesterday, Adam Falk, the president of Williams College, disgraced himself, the college that he leads, and the institution of free speech that he has claimed to support. He did this by disinviting John Derbyshire, the mathematician and commentator, from speaking at Williams for a student-run program called “Uncomfortable Learning,” a series specifically designed to bring serious but alternative points of view to the expensive (this year’s tab: $63,290) and coddled purlieus of Williamstown, Massachusetts, where nearly all the faculty are left-leaning and the students, with rare exceptions, are timid if irritable politically correct babies… I won’t keep you suspense any longer: John Derbyshire’s unpardonable offense is to have opinions about race that differ from those certified by the examining board of politically correct attitudes. John Derbyshire inadvertently burned his bridges with the politically correct establishment back in 2012 when he published an article expressing some of his thoughts on the realities of race in contemporary America. You can read his offending column here and learn a bit more about his views from an interview he conducted with Gawker here. I am proud to have published many articles by John Derbyshire at The New Criterion, and will continue to do so. By his disreputable actions yesterday, Adam Falk has indisputably joined the ranks of the neo-McCarthyites who, basking in the conviction of their own virtue, present themselves as staunch defenders of free speech just so long as there is no cost to do so. As soon as anyone with a challenging opinion shows himself, their native intolerance rises up and they start babbling like a character out of Ring Lardner: “Shut up, he explained.” http://www.amren.com/news/2016/02/adam-falk-president-of-williams-college-joins-the-fight-against-free-speech/ "The Condescending Paternalism of Williams President Adam Falk" quote:
As FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors has said, “You cannot say to people, you’re too weak to live with freedom..”… Yesterday, Falk unilaterally canceled a speech by John Derbyshire, who was invited as part of the student-run “Uncomfortable Learning” speaker series. While Falk claims to “respect” students’ desire to explore ideas, he believes that sometimes “administrators” (i.e., him) must “step in and make decisions that are in the best interest of students and our community,” saying, “The college didn’t invite Derbyshire, but I have made it clear to the students who did that the college will not provide a platform for him.” … If Falk’s patronizing of Williams students was not already clear enough from his nauseatingly condescending letter announcing the cancellation, consider this: Zachary Wood, the president of the student group who invited Derbyshire—[said]: he is strongly opposed to the positions expressed by Derbyshire, but those views are held by millions of Americans and need to be debated and disproved. “I disagree with John Derbyshire on just about everything, but I think he should be allowed to speak at Williams College,” he said. “We should hear what he has to say, and take him to task for it. I wanted to understand his positions and refute them.”… This is not how Williams College sees it. Rather, the Williams administration believes that students must be shielded from hurtful speech—even if they explicitly seek to engage with that speech for the purpose of challenging it and possibly opening the speaker’s mind. John Derbyshire and the students might actually have learned something from their encounter with one another. That is, one would think, nearly always the point of inviting a speaker to a college campus, and was in fact the explicit purpose of this invitation. But Adam Falk thinks he knows better. If you find it jarring that in 2016, a white college president would unabashedly take it upon himself to determine what ideas about race are too dangerous for the college’s black students to hear—even when the person expressing the “dangerous” ideas was invited by one of those black students for that very purpose—you’re not the only one. https://www.thefire.org/the-condescending-paternalism-of-williams-college-president-adam-falk/
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