Freedom of speech and expression is once again under fire on university campuses.
According to Campus Reform, the University of Minnesota’s Student Service Fees Committee – the body responsible for allotting funding to various student organizations – is threatening to brandish the almighty censorship stick over an image that appeared in the university’s campus paper, the Minnesota Republic, four years ago.
The image features a “terrorist” burning a copy of the paper along with the caption, “The Minnesota Republic: Terrorists Hate It.”
According to the SSFC’s funding recommendation report, the image demonstrates an “overt lack of sensitivity to the portrayal of members of the Arab world.”
The report continues:
“When pressed for information on how this piece made it into print, representatives informed the committee that, based on the date of this particular publication, the members responsible for that work are no longer in the organization and that this particular piece is not representative of the work produced by the organization today.”
Even if those members were still with the Minnesota Republic and even if the piece were representative of the work produced today, what right does that give the SSFC to threaten the amount of funding to the paper.
Tellingly, the SSFC’s own guidelines state the following:
-
The University’s educational mission is well served when students have the means to engage in dynamic discussions of diverse topics in their extracurricular campus life;
-
Decisions regarding the allocation of fees among student groups shall be made in a viewpoint-neutral manner.
Is threatening the amount of funding based on an image that appeared four years ago “viewpoint-neutral”?
Presumably these guidelines are in place to protect freedom of speech and expression, but hey, who cares about that? As long as we can implement censorship on campus and erode the rights of students to engage people in open-minded, intellectual discourse, freedom of speech and expression is of little consequence.
The cornerstone of all academic institutions should be built on the First Amendment. Without it, are today’s students really learning anything or are they simply paying exorbitant tuition fees to be gagged, shackled, and ultimately controlled?
