Last Friday’s roundup included a sad item about a stunningly misguided editorial at my old college paper, the Georgetown Hoya. I had hoped that would be the end of it. But then the university’s administration made matters even worse by issuing a bizarre threat to an outside group’s First Amendment freedom. Alas, these sorts of occurrences are becoming ever more frequent on college campuses across the nation. Enforced orthodoxy, suppression of free thought and free speech, and absurdly fuzzy grasp of both principles and logic: All are rampant. I therefore felt I could not avoid writing a little piece using my alma mater as an example of the sad, sad trend. Please read it by clicking this link.
The controversy stemmed from a speech by a distinguished scholar taking issue with the radical trends in modern feminism. Here’s an excerpt:
But, worse, the editors write that “giving voice” to someone who argues that the statistics are inflated … will only “trigger obstructive dialogue.” What sort of Orwellian double-speak is this? How can “dialogue” be “obstructive”? Perhaps a diatribe, in certain circumstances, might be seen as somehow obstructive, but a dialogue by its very nature serves to illuminate, not obstruct.
The editors then don’t even seem to realize their own self-contradictions when, in the course of an editorial arguing that Sommers’s views should be silenced, they complain that “rape culture is a system that thrives on silence.”
