No Equivalent
By Mitch Berg
You could see this coming.
After St. Thomas disinvited Desmond Tutu (at the behest of its president, Father “Havana Denny” Dease, who certainly should be a laughinstock), you could count the hours until some lefty claimed that there was a culture of intimidation against liberal speakers on campuses.
Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein brings a note of reality to the discussion:
I agree with Smith when he criticizes the University of St. Thomas, an institution I very much respect, for its original decision, several months ago, to disinvite South African Bishop Desmond Tutu from speaking on campus. Well-intended and solicitous to the Jewish community as that move might have been, it nevertheless was unprincipled, dim and hugely counterproductive, and university President Dennis Dease was right, of course, to recently reverse field and reinvite Tutu.
But at the risk of framing this issue excessively in ideological terms, there was at least a subtle implication in Smith’s column that scholars and speakers on the left such as Tutu are generally treated by colleges and universities no worse than their counterparts on the right; that all different kinds academics and activists are abused and censored equally. Yet no way is this true.
For example, was there any left-leaning commencement speaker this past spring who was treated as abysmally as Republican Sen. John McCain was by graduating boars at the New School in New York? Or who on the liberal side of the aisle in recent years has needed police protection to get in and out of lecture halls as frequently as conservative writer David Horowitz?
And as for retrieved invitations, I know of no one other than Linda Chavez — in the supposedly open-minded 1980s — who was told by a college president in New York City, “If you insist on speaking, I can’t guarantee your safety.”But you invited me, or at least members of your faculty did,” she said in amazement, before being escorted from the building by bodyguards for a waiting car — but getting punched anyway.
Multicultural mavens frequently went batty at the thought of Chavez (a former head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission during the Reagan administration) speaking on their campuses, as she just wasn’t their style of minority. The president of the University of Northern Colorado, for instance, disinvited her after students rallied against her scheduled appearance. And then (you’ll love this one), instead of apologizing to Chavez, he apologized to the students for the “grossly insensitive” invitation in the first place.
Read the whole thing.
October 19th, 2007 at 9:02 am
Loved the column. I was in Jr High/high school during the 80s, but I recall the above events. Jeane Kirkpatrick had eggs thrown at her when she went to the liberal open minded city of Madison Wisconsin.
The hatred against President Reagan and anyone connected to him was immense.
October 19th, 2007 at 9:04 am
Mitch, is it you and Angry Clown in the bidding war over the Rush Limbaugh letter?
October 19th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Scene: Major Midwestern University, ranked in the top 5 in physics.
Date: Late October, 1980
Professor is lecturing on quantum electrodynamics. Grader drops off papers on his desk and turns around to head out. As he nears the door, the professor finishes on renormalization by adding, “Yes, it’s a normalized integral of probabilities, but it sums to an assured and definitive outcome, sort of like electing Reagan would destroy us all in a nuclear war.”
Grader, turning at the door: “I’m voting for Reagan.”
Prof stands there stunned, mouth open. Picks up the eraser and hurls it as hard as he can at the grader. Unhurt, the grader turns and leaves (we are talking about a theoretical physics professor here). Professor rants for a good 10 minutes on the evils of Reagan until the class ends.
October 19th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Nerdbert,
I think one of that professor’s students regularly appears in the Comment sections of Anti-Strib. lol
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
[…] You might recall last fall, when St. Thomas disinvited Bishop Desmond Tutu from a speech on campus because he “might offend Jews”. (And the reason you might recall it is that the local leftymedia actually deemed it worth covering (prompting cries of “intimidation of liberals” on the relentlessly left-of-center campus). Of course, the school’s president, Father Deese, has shown his commitment to freedom to be even more craven that this in the past; in 2002, when St. Thomas hosted a Cuban baseball team for an exhibition game, Manuel Chaoui defected, Father Dease forbade any Saint Thomas student from helping the young athlete in his sprint for freedom, making fairly ominous threats about what’d happen to any students caught harboring the fugitive from Castro’s worker’s paradise; Dease took the opportunity to shamelessly beg the Cuban government’s forgiveness for the fact that one of their slaves slipped away on his watch. […]