RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/29/princeton-students-beg-university-to-buck-the-mob-and-defend-free-speech/

Eva Duffy is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at the University of Chicago where she studies American history.

After the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs published a list of demands for “anti-racist” policies, the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, a bipartisan student group dedicated to the “robust protection of important values such as free speech, free thought, and bold and fearless truth-seeking” issued a rebuttal letter. 

The School of Public and International Affairs’ demands included purging the university of any references to President Woodrow Wilson, hiring more black faculty, requiring antiracist training once per semester for all faculty, staff, preceptors, and administrators, and divesting from the “prison-industrial complex.”

Princeton University has already capitulated to one of the demands, purging Wilson’s name from its public policy school, saying it was “an inappropriate name sake.”

In a Fox News interview with Akhil Rajasekar, a member of the Open Campus Coalition, Rajasekar expressed deep concern for the name removal, explaining that Wilson transformed Princeton into a world-class university. He suggested that the university honor Wilson’s good deeds. He explained that in 2016, Princeton trustees voted to keep Wilson’s name on the school, but in 2020, Princeton has “buckled under the pressure.”   

The Open Campus Coalition letter to Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber states: “[T]he vast majority of claims and demands made by these students amounts to a concerted siege of free thought at Princeton, which they seek to effect by hijacking the University bureaucracy to create a monopoly for their beliefs on deeply controversial and contentious issues.” 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/29/three_ideas_to_end_the_rot_on_college_campuses_143564.htm

In the early 1950s, at the nadir of McCarthyism, the Cincinnati Reds baseball team was so fearful of anti-communist crusaders that it actually changed the team’s name. Overnight, they reverted to their original name, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, and then for several years became the Redlegs. The anti-communism was justified; the mob mentality was not. Today, we are all Redlegs. This time, the repression is coming from the left.

It’s not just that a careless word can cost your job, it’s that people tremble in fear that they might say the wrong word. Today, as in the past, the loudest, most extreme voices claim the right to control speech and judge whether it is worthy of being heard at all. The giants of technology and media have either bowed to these demands or embraced them enthusiastically. The result, as in the early 1950s, is a shriveled, impoverished public square. Genuine debate is suppressed, even in classrooms, which should nurture informed discussion with multiple viewpoints. All too often they have become pipelines for indoctrination.

What’s wrong with this rigid groupthink? First, it takes real problems, such as police misconduct or Confederate statues, and inflates them for political purposes. It vastly exaggerates their extent and gravity, mistakenly generalizes them (Ulysses Grant is not Stonewall Jackson), ignores significant progress in correcting old errors, calls any disagreement “racist,” and relies on intimidation and sometimes violence, not democratic procedures, to get their way. The loudest voices say America and its history are fundamentally evil, that its institutions need to be smashed so they can be reestablished on “socially just” foundations. The mob and their fellow travelers will determine what is just. Who gives them that right? This arrogation of power and attack on public order will not end well.