Students Shout Down Speaker at Portland State
This sort of thing has become an epidemic on college campuses. When is someone going to tell kids who do this to sit down and shut up or leave?
Hat tip to Instapundit. Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed reports.
Shouted Down at Portland State
Portland State University students hold an annual forum with the theme “Law and Disorder” at which they critique police conduct. Speakers tend to be people from the left who have a history of speaking out against police brutality.
This year, the forum couldn’t get started because one of the speakers — who has published numerous books and articles about the subject — was shouted down by audience members who objected to some of his recent writing about sexual violence.
Kristian Williams, the panelist who was interrupted, was shouted at because of an essay he wrote last year in which he criticized what he saw as a pattern where those who are survivors of sexual violence are presumed to be the only ones who can talk about any conflict over a given incident.
His piece did not deny that sexual violence is real, but he questioned the way some people have been attacked as perpetrators. “Under this theory, the survivor, and the survivor alone, has the right to make demands, while the rest of us are duty-bound to enact sanctions without question,” he wrote…
At last week’s event, video of which appears on YouTube, Williams was shouted down and prevented from even getting a sentence out. Audience members repeatedly shouted: “We will not be silenced in the face of your violence.” (Caution: Those offended by expletives may not want to watch the video of the event below.)
Speaker shouted down at Portland State University (Inside Higher Ed | News)
Comments
Good things:
1. The other speakers did not continue.
2. Higher Ed actually reported it.
The rest of the stuff is pretty horrifying, including the statement by the other participants, and the very fact that a person asking for fair treatment of the accused is even controversial at all, let alone too controversial to speak.
Shall we just conclude that left-wing (anti-nationalist) fascism has taken over our universities, and that perhaps it would behoove all moral institutions (government, foundations, professional organizations) to cut off all funding, co-operation, recognition, etc.
I’m talking BDS. Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against all such colleges and Universities, of whatever country.
(And, by the say, the title of that video is the best one I have ever seen.)
When did this really start? In the 1960’s when the students held sit-ins and protests? When the US “lost” in Vietnam, and people started to become more “politically correct”? Or when those students became the professors and administrators? Regardless of when, it is fascist tyranny, stifling free speech, and allowing the bullies to have de-facto censorship control!
It is beyond me. Civility, civil liberty is gone, at least on many college campuses.
Nazis.