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Intolerance at LSU
In the face of intense public pressure, the University of North Carolina has begun taking steps to bring some of its unconstitutionally repressive policies in line with the Bill of Rights. Most dramatically, FIRE announced earlier this week, UNC Greensboro has agreed both to respect the associative rights of conservative students and to end its practice of requiring student protestors to confine their activities to the campus' designated "free speech zone."
But other schools have not been so responsive to such pressure, and seem almost to revel in the bad press they make for themselves when they flagrantly disrespect the principle of free expression. Depaul University is a case in point. In the past year alone, Depaul has suspended and defamed a professor for offending a group of students, punished a conservative student group for protesting Ward Churchill's visit, and shut down an affirmative action bake sale because it was deemed to be "harassment." FIRE recently put the screws on the UNC system with a report documenting rampant disregard for the First Amendment across its several campuses; Depaul could use a similar wakeup call.
So, it seems, could Louisiana State University, which is presently punishing a student--even threatening him with expulsion--for daring to suggest that LSU could do a better job of living up to its stated commitment to multiculturalism. Collin Phillips is being defended by the ACLU--and by a lone and outspoken LSU administrator, Angeletta Gourdine, who directs LSU's African and African American studies program. While the university's position is that Phillips violated the student code of conduct when he criticized LSU, Gourdine's position is that LSU "should be a laboratory of democracy where students not only learn about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but where they get to fully exercise and try it out. ... a free market for the exchange of ideas." Gourdine is on record as remarking that "This situation appears to challenge that larger institutional history of what universities are for and mark LSU as hostile to the idea that students should be able to participate in the university marketplace free from coercion and intimidation." She's right.
Posted by acta online on February 03, 2006 at February 3, 2006 08:17 AM
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