It doesn’t happen very much any more, but stories used to surface about some isolated school or school district, usually in the South, conducting formal collective prayers. Usually, some small town, where everyone attends a few local churches, doesn’t see the harm in a modest measure of collective religious instruction and ceremony, even in a public school context. Inevitably, a newcomer moves in and complains. If a school does not adjust its policies, the courts instruct the offending school to cease conducting prayers. While it is not possible to peer with a high degree of certainty into people’s hearts, it is usually the case that these small town schools did not deliberately set out to offend anyone. It is just by living in a religiously uniform environment they had not developed the habits of recognizing that others might believe differently.
By contrast, the last place one would expect to see intolerance and the inability to recognize the peaceful existence of alternative ideas ought to be a modern university. A college or university ought to be an intellectual free-fire zone. While all ideas may not be universally accepted and certainly do not all have the same merit, they all have the right to be expressed and examined in the crucible of thoughtful debate. Furthermore, one would expect that the administration of any university would be particularly careful to insure that the ethos of open inquiry is maintained, free of intimidation. Lately it appears that at some universities an environment of intimidation prevails for ideas that are not in current favor. One such place is California Polytechnic State University.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), on November 12, 2002, Steve Hinkle, a member of the Cal Poly College Republicans (CPCP) was going around campus posting fliers inviting students and faculty to a speech by the author of It’s OK to Leave the Plantation, by Mason Weaver. Mr. Weaver is a black man whose thesis is that the reliance of black Americans on government programs creates a dependency broadly analogous to slavery. Mr. Weaver’s speech was an officially sponsored campus activity.
Apparently, Hinkle committed the unforgivable sin of attempting to post a flier on a public bulletin board in an open student lounge in the Cal Poly Multicultural Center. Other students objected to the posting finding the flier (the flier listed the name of the speaker, the title of his book and the time and location of the speech) offensive. Intimidated, Hinkle left without posting the flier. This did not stop students from calling the campus police about “a suspicious white male passing out literature of an offensive racial nature.” The police arrived, but by that time Hinkle had left.
Now it is clear that Cal Poly could not sanction Hinkle for posting a flier, first it was perfectly appropriate and second he was prevented from posting it. Instead, the university out of fear of offending students at the Multicultural Center charged Hinkle with disrupting a college activity. The campus police did not report a disruption and there was not any official activity going on in the open student lounge. After the fact, students at the Multicultural Center said Hinkle was disrupting student Bible study. Everyone admits that Hinkle did not approach any students, but that students approached Hinkle. Further there was no sign indicating that a meeting was being conducted in the lounge. To all outward appearances, there were just some students in the lounge eating pizza.
Rather than sanctioning students for preventing someone from engaging in protected speech, the Cal Poly Administration held a hearing on whether to punish Hinkle. Though Hinkle had a faculty advisor, he was specifically forbidden from being represented by a private attorney at the hearing. At the hearing, Cornel Morton, vice president of student affairs said to Mr. Hinkle, “You are a white member of CPCR. To students of color, this may be a collision of experience. The chemistry has racial implications, and you are naïve not to acknowledge those.” In other words, there are certain places on campus where conservative whites should know better than to visit.
Imagine the opposite, though analogous situation. Imagine if a black student sought to post a flier for a campus-sponsored speech and if some white students had intimidated him into not posting the flier and called the campus police about a “suspicious black male.” Imagine further a college administrator who would condescendingly lecture the black student that he should know better than to post such a flier in an area frequented by white students. Everyone would be rightly indignant and my guess is that Mr. Morton would have led the charge to protect the rights of a student to post a flier on a public bulletin board.
Nonetheless, Hinkle has been found guilty of disrupting a student meeting and instructed to write an apology letter or face the possibility of expulsion. Hinkle has refused and no additional punishment has been meted out. The case has received national attention and the university is obviously not comfortable defending its actions. It is quietly hoping the issue will fade away. If not for the embarrassment of the public exposure of its attempt to permit and implicitly condone the intimidation of students, Hinkle would likely have received additional punishment. It is clear that the students at the Cal Poly Multicultural Center have won. It will take a very courageous student to again attempt to post a flier at the Multicultural Center for a conservative speaker.
In many ways, some colleges have become the most intolerant places to be. One would hate to live in a world ruled with the same arbitrary iron fists that some modern college campuses are governed. Unlike small town elementary schools, universities can not claim lack of sophistication as an excuse.
Great To Be Home Again
Sunday, July 27th, 2003One of the joys and pleasures of foreign travel is experiencing different ways of living and sharing different viewpoints. Such exchanges can grant greater perspective on typically American ways of doing things; what things can be improved upon and what things we should be grateful for. By and large, especially when visiting Europe, it is amazing to see how broadly and remarkably similar Western cultures are. The range of cultural differences between the US and among the countries of Europe is certainly smaller than it was a century ago. How different can places be when globalization permits us to watch the same movies, buy the same cars, and even eat at the same restaurant chains. However, it is still not clear whether the ability to buy beer at a McDonald’s in Europe compensates for the fact that in Europe McDonald’s charges for each individual package of ketchup.
Some of this homogenization is resented. France, ever desperate and fearful of its loss of cultural distinctiveness, recently decided that the term “e-mail” cannot be used in official French documents. The official term is “courrier electronique,” literally “electronic mail” or “courriel” for short. But we live in a democratic age. What is right is not is determined by linguistic heritage or consistency but by popular usage. The use of “courriel” will likely only remain a monument, as if another is needed, to French snobbishness.
Despite the fact that people will determine their own practices and ideas, popular perception can be driven by media coverage and this coverage seems to differ between the US and Europe more than cuisine. It is, therefore, particularly disheartening, after a week in France, to see the persistent and almost maliciously negative coverage of the United States in the foreign press. In fairness, my French is not good enough to listen to French coverage with an ear attuned to subtleties, so my perceptions apply only to watching CNN (directed from their British offices) and the BBC.
Of course, all news is slanted by decisions on what to cover. The pursuit of those stories that editors and producers consider important can definitely affect the overall perspective the public receives. Within this context, CNN-Europe and the BCC do a credible job covering the straight news at the top of the hour. They report the latest news from Iraq and other news centers, the current levels of the stock market indices, and the worldwide weather.
However, during the intervening times, the news hosts discuss the news with guests and it is here than biases become even more apparent. Last week, the major news surrounded the killing of Saddam Hussein’s cruel and brutal sons Uday and Qusay, after a shoot out with American troops. On the first day of coverage, even before the details of the shoot out became clear, there was rather idle speculation about why the sons were not captured rather than killed. All this speculation came before it was known whether such a capture was even possible. It only came out later, that at least one of the sons probably committed suicide. Of course, if a delay in the siege of the building holding Uday and Ousay allowed the sons to escape, that too would have been viewed as an American failure.
The day after Uday and Qusay died, BBC rattled on about Iraqi incredulity about the deaths and how the US would have to provide proof that the sons were dead. As some have suggested, Iraqis were in the same positions as the Munchkins in the movie the Wizard of Oz, incredulous as to whether the their tormentor, was “morally, ethically … spiritually, physically … positively, absolutely … undeniably and reliably dead!” The BBC assured us that photographs confirming the death of the sons were necessary to assuage the Iraqi fear of retribution from the former regime.
The next day, CNN and BBC waited breathlessly for the release of photographs of Uday and Ousay and broadcast them as soon as they possibly could. Although the photographs were not particularly appealing, they were not in my judgment, as gruesome as CNN and BBC warned us. However, not twenty-four hours later CNN and the BCC were prattling on about how the US was violating its own rules in releasing the photographs. If there was something unethical or inhuman about showing those photographs, surely CNN and the BBC were complicit since they showed little reticence is displaying and regularly re-displaying those images.
Liberia was also an issue during the past week. CNN and the BBC relentlessly warned of the chaos and the need for US military intervention. One can be sure that following any such intervention CNN and BBC will be at the forefront showing problems with such an intervention without ever returning to the original context that they helped provide.
Finally, the BBC interviewed Senator Bob Graham from Florida, the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry on the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks who made some very critical remarks about the Bush Administration. While Graham is certainly a reasonable person with important contributions to make on issues of security, not bothering to mention that Graham was also running for the Democratic presidential nomination withheld from the viewers important if not crucial context for weighing Graham’s remarks.
In short, foreign news coverage made the US’s PBS look like Pat Robertson’s CBN. The only unifying theme of the foreign coverage was whatever the US government (and in particular the Bush Administration) did was wrong; even if the news coverage previously encouraged it. It was nice to return back to the US and watch Fox News coverage. I can now even appreciate CNN-US and MSNBC coverage. There is nothing like a trip to a foreign country to make one grateful for what one has at home.
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