Not So Free Speech at MSU
By Anthony | December 4th, 2006 | 12:51 amWhat’s the deal lately with college students disrupting invited speakers at their colleges? First we had the Gilchrist incident at Columbia, and now this:
Protesters said they came to show their opposition to controversial Republican congressman Tom Tancredo, of Colorado, who spoke at the event. Before Tancredo arrived and while the event was being set up, protesters gathered on the fourth floor of the law college with signs that read “Ignorant Racist.”
Someone in the building set off a fire alarm twice throughout the evening. After the first alarm was pulled, a few hundred people were evacuated from the building. …
Randy McPherson, whose sign read “Where’s the wall to keep you out?” came to protest when he heard that the congressman would be speaking.
“God works in mysterious ways,” said McPherson, a food science and premedical junior, after the second fire alarm was pulled. “(Tancredo) shouldn’t be here.”
I’m all for protests if you’re against something. But to actually disrupt a speaker and prevent him from speaking, especially if he’s an invited guest at your university, is over the line. The problem isn’t so much the disrespect for the speaker, but the disrespect for the idea of free speech. Students that pull these kind of stunts are undermining their credibility and their cause.
(Hat tip: Ed Brayton)
December 5th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
This type of behavior is becoming the norm unfortunately. It speaks to the post last week which I related to morality. Morality as I am using the word is a person’s or group’s beliefs that govern their actions. Positive beliefs, or morality, allow for civil behavior. Negative beliefs, or morality, lead to the type of behavior described in your post. Positive morality is more likely to occur when the individual or group believes in a higher being who has laid down laws for civil behavior. Negative morality occurs more often when the individuals or groups laws are of their own making. We are seeing this lack of guidance by a higher being because God has been relegated to a sermon on Sunday morning, whereas negative and self destructive behaviors are bombarding the psychi from every direction ( music, news, stores on tv and movies, …..). The students in your post quite simply do not see their behavior as wrong or contrary to the ideal of free speech. Their response is the aggressive condemnation they have learned.
December 5th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
“Positive morality is more likely to occur when the individual or group believes in a higher being who has laid down laws for civil behavior.”
As I mentioned in the recent prayer thread, there is evidence that the correlation actually may go in the opposite direction – societies with a more secular orientation often exhibit lower rates of things like homicide, suicide, STDs, etc.
December 6th, 2006 at 8:44 am
I’ll chime in and say that there just is no evidence that a certain belief system equates to higher morality. We’ve seen plenty of pious people who are wallowing in the gutter and I know more than a few people who don’t go to church but who lead fine, upstanding lives. Its tempting to make a generalization that *overall* religious people are more moral, but it simply isn’t true. Religious people have their demons too. They lie, cheat sin and act badly just like the rest of us. They are human, as we all are.
Ultimately I think a person’s behavior comes down to their upbringing. Were they taught right from wrong by their parents? Did they have the social means to become educated? Were they afforded the opportunities as the rest of us?
As for these students being jerks, sure what they are doing is wrong, but if I was in their shoes these past six years and saw the injustice that this Bush lead government was foisting on the public at large I’d be mad too.