Liberals Won’t Tolerate Campus Anti-Abortion Speech

Via Sykes Writes, the story of how a feminist professor encouraged her feminist students to vandalize a display of which she disapproved:

HIGHLAND HEIGHTS — A professor at Northern Kentucky University said she invited students in one of her classes to destroy an anti-abortion display on campus Wednesday evening.

NKU police are investigating the incident, in which 400 crosses were removed from the ground near University Center and thrown in trash cans. The crosses, meant to represent a cemetery for aborted fetuses, had been temporarily erected last weekend by a student Right to Life group with permission from NKU officials.

Public universities cannot ban such displays because they are a type of symbolic speech that has been protected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Witnesses reported “a group of females of various ages” committing the vandalism about 5:30 p.m., said Dave Tobertge, administrative sergeant with the campus police.

Sally Jacobsen, a longtime professor in NKU’s literature and language department, said the display was dismantled by about nine students in one of her graduate-level classes.

“I did, outside of class during the break, invite students to express their freedom-of-speech rights to destroy the display if they wished to,” Jacobsen said.

Asked whether she participated in pulling up the crosses, the professor said, “I have no comment.”

She said she was infuriated by the display, which she saw as intimidating and a “slap in the face” to women who might be making “the agonizing and very private decision to have an abortion.”

Jacobsen said it originally wasn’t clear who had placed the crosses on campus.

She said that could make it appear that NKU endorsed the message.

Pulling up the crosses was similar to citizens taking down Nazi displays on Fountain Square, she said.

“Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it. Some of my students felt the same way, just outraged,” Jacobsen said.

The point about this is not that here are intolerant people — we have long known that.

The point is that it is especially on college campuses where intolerance flourishes.

And the appalling thing is that Prof. Jacobson felt that her subjective reaction to other peoples’ act of free speech was a sufficient reason to shut it up.

She was “outraged.” Nobody has a right to outrage feminists.

When a similar display was mounted here at Marquette, it went unmolested.

But make no mistake, the feminist intolerance that would destroy such a display is present here too.