Education and Free Speech

Friday 3 February 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

I was under the impression that universities in the west were considered beacons of enlightenment at which reason and argumentation were the tools with which to combat unreasoned squalls of ignorance. But why appeal to reason when you can just use administrative fiat to declare certain forms of speech unacceptable?

Anyone who is under the impression that universities are concerned with free speech is a fool. They will claim to be champions of free speech until someone wants to say something with which The Enlightened Ones™ have philosophical issues. Then they simply create “free speech zones”, areas, generally tucked away where few people pass, reserved for people to speak their mind to their heart’s content. And here I was thinking that the whole breadth of this great country was a free speech zone.

It all goes back to the leftist mistrust of the free market. Though generally associated with economic transactions, the “market” is much larger than that. It affects everything, and everything that happens in society happens within the market. What is and what isn’t acceptable speech is also something that is ultimately determined by the market over time. What rules like anti-free speech rules demonstrate is that some are unable to accept that people in society are perfectly capable of coming to conclusions about the acceptability of speech, and the social punishments that result from engaging in such speech, in a far more comprehensive manner than some committee bent on forming their perfect little utopia. If the university is doing its job, and by looking at what universities have often produced I have my doubts, students would slam the fuck out of anyone who would dare say that the holocaust is made up by a conspiracy of Jews determined to rule the world, using their intellect, without need of administrative rule making. I myself, during my duties as a composition professor at the University of Kentucky, saw students effectively beating down nonsense without the need for any outside direction. When a student would interject in to a conversation something idiotic, such as the idea that homosexuals ought not be able to get married because the government would be deprived of tax money due to their newfound ability to file as married, other students stepped in without so much as a giggle from me or anyone else who knows the utter stupidity in that idea. But leftists don’t believe in the wisdom of the market, and think themselves, or those they appoint for the task, more capable of defining good and bad than an entire society of people who wish nothing more than to go about their day, politely engaging others without outside interference to tell them exactly how they can and cannot do it.

2012-02-03  »  madlibertarianguy