christiefan915
Catalyst
The author makes some great points. Speech isn't necessarily free at con institutes of learning. Some clips from the article...
Political correctness may run amok at liberal colleges, but what about Christian correctness at conservative colleges?
Trigger warnings, safe spaces, micro-aggressions — over the past year or so, pundits, politicians and other serious people had a lot of fun bemoaning academia as a liberal la-la land where hands are held and minds are coddled...
Attacks on “political correctness” champion educational values: the importance of grappling with challenging ideas and texts, mixing it up with different kinds of people, expanding your worldview, facing uncomfortable facts. How will students grow into strong, independent adults in a tough and complex world if they’ve spent four years lying on a mental fainting couch? Good question. There’s a whole swath of academia, though, that gets left out of the discussion, despite the fact that its restrictions on speech and behavior, on what is taught in the classroom or argued in a lecture series, would make Yale and Northwestern and the rest look like New Orleans during Mardi Gras.
I’m referring, of course, to evangelical and Catholic colleges. Some of these have no compunction about limiting freedoms that other colleges consider just a part of normal life. Many have strictures on dress (“no more than two piercings in an earlobe are allowed” for women at Pensacola Christian College), on dating and social life, even on how faculty members conduct themselves in their own homes...
Students have been expelled for being LGBT; professors have been fired or forced to resign for coming out as transgender, for getting pregnant outside marriage or for getting divorced. According to a report by the Human Rights Campaign, there was a sharp uptick last year in the number of schools that requested and received exemptions to Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination. From 2013 to 2015, 35 schools obtained waivers from the U.S. Department of Education that would allow them to discriminate against students and faculty who are LGBT, female or pregnant.
Religious colleges also have plenty of restrictions on intellectual inquiry and debate, as well as on political associations. Student clubs for nonbelievers can be restricted: The University of Dayton, Notre Dame and Baylor, all religious schools, refused requests to recognize atheist or humanist student organizations. In 2009, Liberty University even banned the student Democratic club. (University president Jerry Falwell Jr. recently made headlines for calling on students to “end those Muslims” by carrying concealed weapons.)
Conservatives stood up for free speech at Yale in 2015 when students protested a lecture invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a critic of Islam, from the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. Program speaker series. I agreed with conservatives on this one — but where are they when the shoe is on the other foot? Catholic colleges, for example, will not invite supporters of abortion rights: The Catholic University of America even banned the actor Stanley Tucci from speaking on Italian cinema because of his support for Planned Parenthood...
When it comes to academic content, it’s hard to argue that a college that makes faculty adhere to Christian fundamentalist tenets, or that refuses to let its students engage with pro-choice speakers even when they’re talking on another subject, is providing an intellectual toolbox for the modern world...
If students are being denied a broad, mind-stretching education at universities often considered among the best in the world, what about the biased, blinkered, partial education that students are receiving at religious colleges? What about the assumption that no changing of the mind shall be permitted? Isn’t education supposed to challenge one’s settled beliefs?
And with Title IX exemptions in hand, colleges are free to ban and expel LGBT students, discriminate against women, use the Bible as a science text and fire professors who disagree — without putting their federal funding at risk. The truth-in-advertising principle may protect the right of private colleges to do this. But the last time I looked, separation of church and state was still in the Bill of Rights.
(Article here)
Political correctness may run amok at liberal colleges, but what about Christian correctness at conservative colleges?
Trigger warnings, safe spaces, micro-aggressions — over the past year or so, pundits, politicians and other serious people had a lot of fun bemoaning academia as a liberal la-la land where hands are held and minds are coddled...
Attacks on “political correctness” champion educational values: the importance of grappling with challenging ideas and texts, mixing it up with different kinds of people, expanding your worldview, facing uncomfortable facts. How will students grow into strong, independent adults in a tough and complex world if they’ve spent four years lying on a mental fainting couch? Good question. There’s a whole swath of academia, though, that gets left out of the discussion, despite the fact that its restrictions on speech and behavior, on what is taught in the classroom or argued in a lecture series, would make Yale and Northwestern and the rest look like New Orleans during Mardi Gras.
I’m referring, of course, to evangelical and Catholic colleges. Some of these have no compunction about limiting freedoms that other colleges consider just a part of normal life. Many have strictures on dress (“no more than two piercings in an earlobe are allowed” for women at Pensacola Christian College), on dating and social life, even on how faculty members conduct themselves in their own homes...
Students have been expelled for being LGBT; professors have been fired or forced to resign for coming out as transgender, for getting pregnant outside marriage or for getting divorced. According to a report by the Human Rights Campaign, there was a sharp uptick last year in the number of schools that requested and received exemptions to Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination. From 2013 to 2015, 35 schools obtained waivers from the U.S. Department of Education that would allow them to discriminate against students and faculty who are LGBT, female or pregnant.
Religious colleges also have plenty of restrictions on intellectual inquiry and debate, as well as on political associations. Student clubs for nonbelievers can be restricted: The University of Dayton, Notre Dame and Baylor, all religious schools, refused requests to recognize atheist or humanist student organizations. In 2009, Liberty University even banned the student Democratic club. (University president Jerry Falwell Jr. recently made headlines for calling on students to “end those Muslims” by carrying concealed weapons.)
Conservatives stood up for free speech at Yale in 2015 when students protested a lecture invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a critic of Islam, from the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. Program speaker series. I agreed with conservatives on this one — but where are they when the shoe is on the other foot? Catholic colleges, for example, will not invite supporters of abortion rights: The Catholic University of America even banned the actor Stanley Tucci from speaking on Italian cinema because of his support for Planned Parenthood...
When it comes to academic content, it’s hard to argue that a college that makes faculty adhere to Christian fundamentalist tenets, or that refuses to let its students engage with pro-choice speakers even when they’re talking on another subject, is providing an intellectual toolbox for the modern world...
If students are being denied a broad, mind-stretching education at universities often considered among the best in the world, what about the biased, blinkered, partial education that students are receiving at religious colleges? What about the assumption that no changing of the mind shall be permitted? Isn’t education supposed to challenge one’s settled beliefs?
And with Title IX exemptions in hand, colleges are free to ban and expel LGBT students, discriminate against women, use the Bible as a science text and fire professors who disagree — without putting their federal funding at risk. The truth-in-advertising principle may protect the right of private colleges to do this. But the last time I looked, separation of church and state was still in the Bill of Rights.
(Article here)
