{"id":1472,"date":"2007-10-19T07:29:43","date_gmt":"2007-10-19T12:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1472"},"modified":"2007-10-19T07:29:43","modified_gmt":"2007-10-19T12:29:43","slug":"no-equivalent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1472","title":{"rendered":"No Equivalent"},"content":{"rendered":"

You could see this coming.<\/p>\n

After St. Thomas disinvited Desmond Tut<\/a>u (at the behest of its president, Father “Havana Denny” Dease, who certainly should be <\/em>a laughinstock), you could count the hours until some lefty claimed that there was a culture of intimidation against liberal speakers<\/a> on campuses.<\/p>\n

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein brings a note of reality to the discussion<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}