Friday, November 20, 2015

Common sense isn't quite dead.

Ashland University's student government bucks the trend of the autodemolition of higher education: 
The student government at Ashland University voted unanimously Tuesday to pass a resolution supporting free expression in response to speech restrictions imposed by student protesters at campuses across the country.
“I was seeing a trend of colleges across the country having protests where free speech was under attack,” student senator Josh Frey, who introduced the resolution, told Campus Reform. “And we thought, as college students, that there weren’t a lot of people coming to defend free speech among students.”

Frey said there were no votes against the resolution, and only three abstentions, when it came before the full 37-member Senate Tuesday evening.

The “Resolution Denouncing the Anti-Free Speech Actions of the Students at Various Colleges Across the Nation,” as the measure is titled, begins by asserting that the free exchange of ideas is essential to the educational mission of any university, even when “some of these differing opinions are contrary to Truth.”
Confronting offensive ideas, the resolution elaborates, “is the only way for students to disprove them and, in the process, develop into free thinking individuals.”

In support of that claim, the document includes two quotations from Thomas Jefferson’s bill establishing religious freedom in Virginia.
Now, I have two motives in posting this. First, to support it--the spectacle of our colleges embracing injustice to fight injustice is a horror which, if embraced generally, will shatter our nation. 

Second, because I happen to know Josh Frey--the very-together son of our dear friends, Zach and Nancy Frey. Bravo, Zach and Nancy: if there were more like Josh, I'd be less pessimistic about the future.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks, Dale. I'm quite pleased with how he's turning out. Wish I had been that together at his age.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's how I feel about Madeleine, Zach. --Heather

    ReplyDelete
  3. When I was in college in the early 60's liberals called out Malcolm X for his advocacy of separation of blacks and whites. I think today liberals would not do this. That is the difference between liberals then and people who call themselves liberals now. People who call themselves progressive today are not anything like liberals 50 years ago. I don't even know what you would call the prevailing sentiment on many college campuses today. It seems to be a kind of hypersensitivity similar those who suffer from environmental allergies.

    ReplyDelete

Be reasonably civil. Ire alloyed with reason is fine. But slagging the host gets you the banhammer.

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