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posted by FatPhil on Tuesday January 09 2018, @07:27AM   Printer-friendly
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)]


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:11PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:11PM (#620188)

    Marriage was between a man and a woman, for the (primary) purpose of procreation.

    Assertion without historical citations.

    Heterosexual sex is what drives procreation, not marriage. Procreation does not need to be tied to monogamous relationships. Someone needs to burst their idealogical bubble.

    Marriage is a social construct, and history shows it is more to do with cementing social contracts between families, clans, or other power structures. Ever heard of arranged marriages? Dowries? Marriages to form alliances by feudal leaders? et.al.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:47PM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:47PM (#620202) Journal

    He doesn't give a shit. By his own admission he's "asocial" and proud of it, and one of the knock-on effects of that is that, much like our demented Oompa-Loompa in Chief, he trusts his own "expertise" (aaaaaahahahahahaha) above such irrelevant mundanities as truth, history, facts, and logic.

    Please understand that we are dealing with basically an angry solipsist here. Because hard solipsism is only one short step away from the kind of self-referential worldview he embraces.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...