Democrats have been attacking academic freedom
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In response to Gary Stout’s column, “Republicans are attacking academic freedom” in the Sunday edition, Stout could use a new Rx for his “Democrat until I die” lenses.
The comparison of the anti-Vietnam War protests on college campuses with the protests we all just witnessed is naive. In 1972, shortly after my Army discharge, I was in my senior year at University of California-Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement.. Those protesters, mostly peaceful, were speaking out on America’s involvement in an unpopular war, which the public had increasingly soured on. Although I never agreed with their positions, I was never in fear or felt intimidated.
Stout takes great pains to blame Republicans for attacking academic freedom when it is his party that has been attacking it for decades. From the teachers unions fighting school choice, destroying parental rights and forcing a propaganda blitz of Marxist ideologies, the Democratic Party cannot show any improvement in any metric of education for the last 40 or 50 years. Other countries teach their kids, reading, writing, science, and math, while we teach our kids about “social justice” and transgenderism.
Stout writes that he has been paying close attention to attacks against academic freedom since the MAGA movement consumed the Republican Party. To Stout, the word MAGA is used to evoke a sense of abhorrence. The excesses produced by the Democrats’ lust for power and control actually created Ronald Reagan’s MAGA movement, the Moral Majority, The Tea Party, and the current MAGA.
MAGA is a reaction to Democratic failings: open borders and illegal immigration; rampant crime and unsafe cities; mass addiction and fentanyl; election interference; the weaponization of the Justice Department and other investigative agencies; inflation and debt; vaccine propaganda and disinformation and more.
As Stout said, “for the principle of academic freedom to be meaningful, most forms of campus expression must be tolerated and defended.” It is up to the universities to do the job. But when they refuse they must be held accountable. Civil, property, and human rights trump Stout’s idea of academic freedom.
John Moore
Canonsburg