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from the debating-whether-something's-debatable dept.
It looks like anybody can be against academic censorship, as this opinion piece in the Washington Post shows:
Wisconsin's Supreme Court can soon right a flagrant wrong stemming from events set in motion in 2014 at Milwaukee's Marquette University by Cheryl Abbate. Although just a graduate student, she already had a precocious aptitude for academic nastiness.
On Oct. 28, in an undergraduate course she was teaching on ethics, when the subject of same-sex marriage arose, there was no debate, because, a student said, Abbate insisted that there could be no defensible opposition to this. (Marquette is a Jesuit school.) After class, the student told her that he opposed same-sex marriage and her discouraging of debate about it. She replied (he recorded their interaction) that "there are some opinions that are not appropriate that are harmful [...]
[...] McAdams, a tenured professor then in his 41st year at Marquette and a conservative who blogs about the school's news, emailed Abbate seeking her version of the episode. Without responding to him, she immediately forwarded his email to some professors. She has called McAdams "the ringleader" of "extreme white [sic] wing, hateful people," a "moron," "a flaming bigot, sexist and homophobic idiot" and a "creepy homophobic person with bad argumentation skills."
Because there is almost no Wisconsin case law concerning academic freedom that could have guided the circuit court, McAdams is asking the state supreme court to bypass the appeals court and perform its function as the state's "law-developing court." He is also asking the court to be cognizant of the cultural context: Nationwide, colleges and universities "are under pressure" — all of it from within the institutions — "to enact or implement speech codes or otherwise restrict speech in various ways."
[Post-publishing edit: An A/C below helpfully provides the following far more neutral reportage by Inside higher Ed titled Ethics Lesson which explains the situation with more light and less head. Thanks A/C - Ed. (FP)]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 09 2018, @04:28PM (1 child)
That all sounds good to me. If a Catholic university is going to promote those standards, they might as well do it wholeheartedly. They should go even further IMO: not only should they require attendance at mass, they should monitor students to make sure they're attending, and that they're going to confession. They should also have cameras in their dorm rooms to make sure they're not committing any sins there. The bit about requiring marriage or holy orders by age 25 is good too. No exceptions should be allowed. And there should be regular checks of all students' personal belongings, both in the dorms and back at their parents' homes, to make sure they don't have any contraceptives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:11PM
You forgot the cameras in the confessional.