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Andrew Sullivan Highlights Greg's 'Reason' Article in 'The Atlantic'

Popular political blogger Andrew Sullivan, proprietor of The Daily Dish, a widely read blog at The Atlantic, has chimed in on the will to censor on campus after reading Greg's current article in Reason. As any reader of the article (or any daily reader of The Torch, for that matter) should be, Sullivan is appalled, titling the blog entry "PC Hell In The New Century." Sullivan writes:

Greg Lukianoff examines the enduring pattern of censorship on college campuses, beginning with this egregious example:

In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book's cover, which included pictures of men in white robes and peaked hoods along with the tome's title, Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The student desperately explained that it was an ordinary history book, not a racist tract, and that it in fact celebrated the defeat of the Klan in a 1924 street fight. Nonetheless, the school, without even bothering to hold a hearing, found the student guilty of "openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject."

Other egregious examples of campus censorship to be found in Greg's article include:

  • Valdosta State University's expulsion of student Hayden Barnes for posting a satirical collage on his Facebook page.
  • The University of Delaware's attempts to intimidate and coerce the 7,000 students in its residence halls to accept a very particular and highly politicized set of values, a program UD itself referred to as a "treatment."
  • Brandeis University's punishment of a professor for trying to explain and critique the term "wetback" in a class on Latin American politics.

Many thanks to Andrew Sullivan for his attention to Greg's article and the problem of censorship on campus, and be sure to read Greg's Reason article if you haven't yet.

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