Gyroscopic Investing

"The people who believe that colleges and universities are places where we want less freedom of speech have won," Mr. Lukianoff says. "If anything, there should be even greater freedom of speech on college campuses. But now things have been turned around to give campus communities the expectation that if someone's feelings are hurt by something that is said, the university will protect that person. As soon as you allow something as vague as Big Brother protecting your feelings, anything and everything can be punished."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 34854.html

I've always thought that true freedom of speech required a bit of courtesy in the "free speakers."

As I recall from college, the sense seemed to be that the more obnoxious a person was the more of a "free speaker" he was.  What happened instead, I think, is that a lot of listeners to the "free speakers" just decided to save their energy rather than having unpleasant arguments about things with people whose minds weren't really opened to being changed.

To me, the second the argument starts is normally the second that the mind closes up pretty tight, like hardening a fortress against an attack.

I think that a dynamic search for truth is more like a seduction than a siege.  The mind opens when a person is engaged in a real two way discussion in which he feels safe and respected.

Creating such conditions is sort of the intellectual equivalent of the candles, incense and Barry White.

Mike Adams (a conservative college professor at U NC)

http://townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/

has some columns that might interest you.  I know a college assistant prof here in Pittsburgh who is liberal in many ways, but is from britain and beleives in God.  She has to keep her mouth shut about her beliefs as that is frowned upon to put it mildly by liberals.

Many/most college professors are far left liberals who only believe in free speech if it agrees with them.  In some ways colleges indoctrinate students into these beliefs, which is perhaps partly why the country...is as it is.

Benko wrote: Many/most college professors are far left liberals who only believe in free speech if it agrees with them.  In some ways colleges indoctrinate students into these beliefs, which is perhaps partly why the country...is as it is.

This was exactly my college experience. My profs were stuck in the 60s, still fighting intellectual battles that had been won decades ago. The indoctrination effects were very strong.

Pointedstick wrote:

Benko wrote: Many/most college professors are far left liberals who only believe in free speech if it agrees with them.  In some ways colleges indoctrinate students into these beliefs, which is perhaps partly why the country...is as it is.

This was exactly my college experience. My profs were stuck in the 60s, still fighting intellectual battles that had been won decades ago. The indoctrination effects were very strong.

Yup. When I was in college in the late 90s/early 2000s, professors and students kept mentioning "McCarthyism" with a shudder at every possible opportunity, as if Joseph McCarthy were still alive and hunting commies relentlessly.

Tortoise wrote:

Pointedstick wrote:

Benko wrote: Many/most college professors are far left liberals who only believe in free speech if it agrees with them.  In some ways colleges indoctrinate students into these beliefs, which is perhaps partly why the country...is as it is.

This was exactly my college experience. My profs were stuck in the 60s, still fighting intellectual battles that had been won decades ago. The indoctrination effects were very strong.

Yup. When I was in college in the late 90s/early 2000s, professors and students kept mentioning "McCarthyism" with a shudder at every possible opportunity, as if Joseph McCarthy were still alive and hunting commies relentlessly.

Tell me about it, brother.

I went to Berkeley, birthplace of the free speech movement.  By the time I graduated in 94, there was still free speech, as along as it agreed with the party-line.