Posted by Todd Zywicki:
Censorship:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_05_20-2007_05_26.shtml#1180109974
Greg Lukianoff, the President of FIRE, offers an intriguing hypothesis
about the tedious consistency of censorship tactics through the ages:
I have always found it fascinating that colleges and
universities--which tend to believe themselves to be centers of
perfect open-mindedness and progressive thought--so often end up
echoing the censors of bygone eras. As we note in FIRE's Guide to
Free Speech on Campus, for example, administrators' justifications
for punishing politically incorrect, ideologically incompatible, or
simply inconvenient speech at times echo the rationale of southern
slave owners in the early 19th century who wished to ban
abolitionist speech because it "inflicted emotional injury" on
slave owners. As we often have to point out, while politeness is a
virtue, it is of minuscule importance when compared with robust
debate and discussion.
The pattern that strikes me the most, however, is the tendency of
administrators to sound like the censors of the Victorian
era--morally infallible, plugged into absolute truths and engaged
in saving the country's soul from incivility or impropriety.
***
[T]he idea that education is about inculcating "correct" beliefs to
an ignorant public smacks of late 19th century imperiousness. It is
true that the similarity between the narrow-minded Victorian
censors and those of the present day campus may only exist because
authoritarianism manifests in a finite number of forms--the
rationales for censorship and repression are predictable, generally
uncreative, and tend to repeat through history with the monotony of
a terrible skipping record. The results are, also, sadly
predictable: crushing dissent squelches innovation and utterly
impedes the noble search for truth and greater understanding.
Greg's full essay is available [1]here.
References
1. http://thefire.org/pdfs/bf24d7afc68f338019fa23ed2f0df78e.pdf
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