https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/suppressing-academic-freedom-name-inclusion-mcgill-richard-l-cravatts/
In what has become an increasingly frequent and troubling occurrence on campuses, a McGill University emeritus professor of anthropology, Philip C. Salzman, is under fire by pretentious, virtue-signaling students who wish to hear only viewpoints that conform with their own and who, in attempting to shield others from ideas that might make them uncomfortable, want to suppress the ideas of their ideological opponents.
The notion that a vocal minority of self-important ideologues can determine what views may or may not be expressed on a particular campus is not only antithetical to the purpose of a university, of course, but is vaguely fascistic by purposely or carelessly relinquishing power to a few to decide what can be said and what speech is allowed and what must be suppressed; it is what former Yale University president Bartlett Giamatti characterized as the “tyranny of group self-righteousness.”
In a November 20th “Open Letter Demanding the Overhaul of McGill’s Statement of Academic Freedom,” eight McGill student organizations not only attacked Professor Salzman and demanded that he be stripped of his academic credentials, it also critiqued the University’s stated policies on academic freedom. In their letter they suggested that if members of the McGill community are able to express any of their views without restraint—and without considering how this expression may negatively affect victim groups and individuals on the McGill campus—then academic freedom should therefore be contained, restricted to avoid “harming” these alleged victims. “Scholars have abused their right of free speech and academic freedom,” the letter contended, “to defend acts of rhetorical violence against marginalized communities on campus, shielding racist, sexist, and transphobic speech . . . .”
