Philosophy Department Censorship in the Marquette Tribune

The Marquette Tribune, which didn’t see fit to treat the censorship of a Philosophy graduate student’s door posting as a news story, did run our Op-Ed piece today.

We first covered the story on September 8.

In the Op-Ed piece, we discussed what we think is most relevant about this, which is the replacement of traditional liberals with 60s leftists in faculty positions.

Academia has long leaned to the left politically, but until the last generation or so, it was dominated by traditional liberals. These liberals prided themselves on “tolerance.”

Of course, liberals can be as intolerant as anybody else, but traditional liberals claimed to be tolerant, tried to be tolerant, and when cornered often would be tolerant.

But this has changed. Increasingly, during the last generation, academia has seen the rise of ‘60s leftism as the dominant ideology.

Marquette has been, happily, “behind the times” on this, but unfortunately, we are catching up.

The problem is not so much the children of the ‘60s (few in number at Marquette and well into their 50s) as the grandchildren of the ‘60s — trained by children of the ‘60s in Ph.D. programs and coming to constitute a critical mass in several Marquette departments.

We then recounted the details of the case, and concluded.

Thus ‘60s leftists and their spiritual children (and grandchildren) think themselves free to ban any sort of speech they think “offensive” or “hate speech” or “against human rights.”

And of course, they think they are the ones who get to define what is “offensive” or “hate speech” or “against human rights.”

Traditional liberals are people you can talk to and disagree with. ‘60s leftists are people convinced that no discussion is needed, indeed that discussion is dangerous, and that if you disagree with them you should be shut up.

We didn’t add, due to space limitations, the fact that this culture has penetrated into student organizations such as the Marquette Gay/Straight Alliance.

It’s a bitter irony, really: universities have become islands of intolerance in the sea of a generally tolerant American society.