Author: admin

Another day, another group of
insolent students demanding that their university censor a
prominent speaker and deprive the rest of campus of the opportunity
to learn from him.

George Will is slated to give Michigan State University’s fall
semester commencement address on December 13th and receive an
honorary degree from the university. But because one of the
thousands of columns he has written in his life
was deemed controversial by those on the far-left side of the
campus sexual assault issue, some students want him disinvited from
campus.

Will strikes me as conservative with some good libertarian
instincts; as such, I don’t agree with everything he says. I will
note, however, that he has recently made very smart contributions
to the cause of criminal justice reform. In a
column lamenting the brutality that caused Eric Garner’s death
and the miscarriage of justice evident in the grand jury’s decision
not to indict, Will wrote, “Overcriminalization has become a
national plague.” He explicitly described solitary confinement as
“torture.”

(Perhaps he should have just written #BlackLivesMatter and
stopped at that—the
only parlance deemed acceptable by campus crusaders.)

Of course, whether one agrees with an invited speaker entirely,
partly, or not at all is beside the point. In fact, a strong case
can be made that it is even more important to hear from
notable people whose views differ from one’s own—especially on
campuses, where opportunities to hear opinions critical of
liberalism are in short supply.

Some students, however, took a different view, according to

Bloomberg:

About 30 protestors gathered in the administration building and
delivered a petition calling for Will’s invitation to be rescinded,
said Jason Cody, a spokesman for the university in East
Lansing.

MSU President Lou Anna Simon said in astatement yesterday that Will was picked
because he would offer a different viewpoint from another speaker,
documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, and that Will was chosen long
before his controversialcolumn was published
on June 6. Will wrote then that colleges are learning “that when
they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges,
victims proliferate.”

“We refuse to be silent,” said Emily Kollaritsch, 21, one of
about six or seven of the protestors who went into Simon’s office.
“We’re going to have our voices heard.”

More than 70,000 people signed the petition, started by the
women’s rights advocacy group UltraViolet, which has called Will a
“rape apologist.”

MSU President Lou Anna Simon, at least, has refused to disinvite
Will, noting that “Great universities are committed to serving the
public good by creating space for discourse and exchange of ideas,
though that exchange may be uncomfortable and will sometimes
challenge values and beliefs.” This sets her apart from some other
university presidents who caved under pressure to disinvite
controversial speakers.

Indeed, “disinvitation
season,” as Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
President Greg Lukianoff calls it, shows no sign of winding down.
The problem of universities cancelling speakers on behalf of
censorship-inclined students may even be
worsening.

If a liberal arts education has any purpose, it is to teach
students the importance of Enlightenment values like free speech,
tolerance, and rational debate. When students demand that
authorities silence dissenting views, they unintentionally
demonstrate that they don’t deserve the diplomas they are about to
receive.

Related:
As I argued yesterday, college has become bumper bowling and
degrees are participant ribbons.

Via Raw Story comes this pretty amazing colloquy from a couple
of days back on Fox News Channel’s Outnumbered. That’s

the daytime show in which four lovely ladies and “one lucky
guy” chew over the news of the moment like a pitbull on a raw
steak.

The topic is the Senate torture report and
the guy is Jesse Watters, the Fox News contributor best known for
his reports on The O’Reilly Factor. Watters pronounces
that he doesn’t even want to know what’s in the report because
“people do nasty things in the dark.” And besides, what is it that
Bill Clinton used to say? Oh yeah: There’s nothing new here:

“They Senate Democrats, they’re just trying to get one last shot
in at Bush before they go into the minority!” the correspondent
opined. “And they didn’t even interview any of the CIA
interrogators to do the report.”

“It’s kind of like how Rolling Stone does
their reporting, they only get one side,” he added, referring to a
controversial report about an alleged gang rape at the University
of Virginia. “You know, the Democrats didn’t care about
transparency when they were destroying hard drives at the IRS.”

Watters’ whinging is outdone by Outnumbered and Five co-host
Andrea Tantaros, who pulls out all the patriotic stops short of
singing the national anthem:

“The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome,” she
said. “But we’ve had this discussion. We’ve closed the book on it,
and we’ve stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this
discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration
wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not
awesome.”

The lone voice of reason and skepticism toward unchecked
government power? That would be The Independent‘s Kennedy,
who pushes back on the pro-torture, pro-opaque members of the
panel. She’s the real patriot in my book.

The whole segment is worth watching but the fireworks begin
around 2.14.

Related:
“After torture report, our moral authority as a nation is
gone.”

And hell, it’s awards season, so take a minute to enjoy “Which
President Bombed Iraq Best?”:

New York’s Attorney General Eric
Schneiderman, a Democrat, was first elected in 2010 and the grand
jury in the Eric Garner case wasn’t the first to fail to indict a
New York City police officer accused of killing someone they had
targeted. Nevertheless, with the right amount of mainstream media
attention, some politicians are willing to jump.

Schneiderman now wants Gov. Andrew Cuomo, another Democrat first
elected in 2010, to give him the power to oversee all prosecutions
of police officers accused of killing “civilians.” In a
letter to Cuomo, Schneiderman argues the governor is permitted
by state law to place any kind of criminal prosecution under the
purview of the Attorney General, bypassing local District
Attorneys, and that bills to that effect have been introduced in
the state legislature since as early as 1999, to no avail.

“The crisis of confidence is long in the making and has deep
roots,” wrote Schneiderman, identifying a large part of the
problem: “A common thread in many of these cases is the belief of
the victim’s family and others that the investigation of the death,
and the decision whether to prosecute, have been improperly and
unfairly influenced by the close working relationship between the
county District Attorney and the police officers he or she works
with and depends on every day.”

The attorney general stressed that the “majority” of prosecutors
are fair in their disposition of such cases and that instead it’s
the lack of public confidence that’s the problem. He therefore
asked Cuomo for authority:

to (1) investigate the circumstances surrounding the commission
or alleged commission by any police officer or peace officer in the
State of any act or acts, committed while the officer is engaged in
the performance of his or her official duties, that result in the
death of any unarmed person other than a fellow law enforcement
officer so engaged: and (2) where warranted, criminally prosecute
the officer for such acts as provided in those subdivisions.

Schneiderman writes that he doesn’t want to “compromise” any
ongoing investigations and so only wants the authority for new
cases, and only until the legislature acts on the issue.

No word yet from Cuomo on whether he’ll act on Schneiderman’s
request. A Republican state legislator in Missouri wants to

introduce similar legislation which would transfer the power to
prosecute cops for on-duty deaths to the attorney general. Cuomo,
meanwhile, is
also considering a bill that passed the Democrat-controlled
legislature handily earlier this year that would give police unions
more power to determine the disciplinary regime under which cops
fall.