A play that Santa Monica College Theatre Arts Department students and faculty worked on since early in the semester was called off in a single day following campus outrage and administrative interference.
An “academic freedom” forum at Hamline provoked significant backlash for the selection of panelists who were almost uniformly not in favor of robust academic freedom.
‘It’s too easy to define yourself by what outrages you,’ said author Salman Rushdie at the event. ‘It’s necessary for us to understand that you have to allow the speech of those you don’t like.’
We often talk about discourse in terms of whether specific ideas should be “platformed” — in college lecture halls, entertainment venues, or on social media timelines.
The troubling decision says faculty speech about institutional governance doesn’t get First Amendment protection, giving public universities broad power to oust faculty whistleblowers, dissenters.
On June 18, psychologist Jordan Peterson and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted that YouTube removed an hour-and-a-half long conversation between them from Peterson’s channel.
