(Dec. 18, Nola.com) The situation: Tulane University under national fire for issues relating to “diversity,” to its claims that “racism and sexism are fundamentally present in all American institutions,” and for “Initiatives For The Race and Gender Enrichment” of the college.
It could have been a widely circulated Dec. 3 article in the conservative flagship publication “National Review,” written by Tulane School of Medicine professor Dean Robinson, complaining about Tulane’s heavy-handed obsessions with racial and gender “identities.” (More on that later.) But it wasn’t. It was a cover story in the May 14, 1991, Gambit New Orleans Weekly, by yours truly. More than 31 years later, Tulane appears to have gone even farther — gotten worse — in replacing traditional “liberal arts” with leftist artifice and oppression.
Indeed, in rankings released Dec. 13 by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Tulane was one of 94 colleges and universities, out of 486 considered, that earned an awful “red light” rating because of its habit of “maintaining policies that clearly and substantially restrict free speech.”
Arguably even worse than Tulane’s red-light rating in FIRE’s “Spotlight on Speech Codes” is how Tulane fared in the separate (but obviously related) FIRE “College Free Speech Rankings.” Students themselves answered a 31-question survey. Only 26% of Tulane students think it is “never acceptable” to “shout down a speaker or try to prevent them from speaking on campus.”
For one example, 42% believe the school should “definitely” not even allow a speech by someone who believes “abortion should be completely illegal,” and another 22% think such a speaker “probably” shouldn’t be allowed on campus. Only 15% are absolutely sure the voice of such a speaker should be “allowed.”
Moreover, a way-too-large 37% of these petty totalitarians believe there may be justification for “blocking other students from attending a campus speech.” Clearly, these overgrown adolescents take some cues from a benighted administration. Only 27% of Tulane students believe the administration, if faced with supposedly “offensive speech,” would be “very likely” (21%) or “extremely likely” (6%) to “defend the speaker’s right to express” those views…. [To read the full column, please follow this link.]
