No More Dems @ Liberty U & Washington State U’s Dilemma
Liberty University, the conservative Christian institution founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, has revoked its recognition of the student Democratic Party club, reports The News & Advance, in Lynchburg, Va. The university had officially recognized the group in October.
The club’s president, Brian Diaz, received an e-mail message last week from the university’s vice president for student affairs, telling him that the club must stop using Liberty’s name and holding or advertising events on its campus, the newspaper reports.
The message said, in part, “The Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine (supports abortion, federal funding of abortion, advocates repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, promotes the ‘LGBT’ agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.),” according to the newspaper. The Democratic group at Liberty has expressed opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage.
Liberty’s not alone. But at least Brigham Young University-Idaho (Idaho?) dissolved both its College Democrats and its College Republicans.
In other Free Speech U news, from behind their paywall, The Chronicle reports:
When a committee at Washington State University picked The Omnivore’s Dilemma as this year’s “common reading” selection for all incoming freshmen, faculty members effusively praised the award-winning book and hoped that people at the land-grant university were ready to have a serious debate about the practice of agriculture in America.
“Because this book deals with the food we eat today, it is likely to engender lively discussion and even disagreement,” wrote one professor who had recommended it to the committee. “But discussion and disagreement are the bread and butter of academic discourse.”
But it seems that discussion will not happen—at least not over The Omnivore’s Dilemma as a common-reading selection. Michael Pollan’s hard-hitting examination of industrial agriculture and the American diet has been dropped as the program’s text.
The university’s website hints at the budget. Critics guess its pressure from agribusiness interests.
6 Responses to “No More Dems @ Liberty U & Washington State U’s Dilemma”
This has been happening to Republican and conservative clubs for years now. Why is it that only now you and the Chronicle suddenly notice the problem?
@gadfly: [citation needed]
http://badgerherald.com/news/2004/03/24/ny_stud…
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/5592.html
http://www.academia.org/campus_reports/2001/sum…
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/9033.html
These are just a few examples I found with a quick Google search. There are many, many more examples, most of which can be found on the web site for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
There are also many examples you can easily find of conservative speakers being shouted down or assaulted on campus as well as conservative student groups being charged prohibitive “security fees” to address the threats of violence from leftist campus groups while the leftist campus groups doing the actual threatening suffer zero consequences.
To my recollection, neither this site nor the Chronicle has ever shown any interest in those stories of ideological discrimination on college campuses until suddenly now. Coincidence? I think not.
I find institutions like this horribly represive so I wouldn't even think of going. That said it's private and they are up front about it. So who cares?
Anyone who cares about higher principles of freedom of conscience and expression and open debate in higher education should care, regardless of whether it is Liberty or any of the many other colleges, public and private, that have been condoning censorship and ideological harassment for a long time.
Unfortunately, it appears that the authors here and elsewhere in the liberal blogosphere are only interested in it when it serves their particular ideological ends. When it involves liberals doing the censoring/harassing, they are not interested.
Where are the crickets, the Dutch lad and the Proffessor on this one…