She has a lot to say about Galileo and Charles Darwin, and what she calls “Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of people for their political beliefs.” This is ahistorical — McCarthy was investigating security risks in the U.S. government, not pro-Communist professors.
As for science denialism, it still exists at Brown U, shutting down research on gender dysphoria:
Free speech vs. science denialism at Brown: "In a letter to the faculty, Provost Richard M. Locke, President Christina Paxson and Executive Vice President Russell Carey said “many members” of the university community found the columns “deeply offensive.”https://t.co/KDlopzYRwN
Racial differences in lactose intolerence are as well established as racial differences in skin color, but at Brown, the university paper retracted this column saying “said “’The white privilege of cows,’ published Oct. 5, relied on the incorrect notion that biological differences exist between races.”
What caught my attention was the idea that all the students are doing is “yelling.”
Fantastic editorial by President Paxson (Brown University): "[I]t is ludicrous to claim that state-sponsored censorship — which carries the full force of the government and can even entail criminal penalties" is equivalent to students yelling at speakers https://t.co/p8GUBIP3rZ
Proponents of these laws attempt to justify them by repeating claims that universities are places where political correctness runs rampant and students are intolerant of alternative viewpoints. In my experience, these problems are much less pervasive than media coverage suggests, but they do exist. Students should not violate university policies and shout down speakers they don’t agree with. And peer pressure, like cancel culture in the larger world, is unfortunate and sometimes suppresses debate. Universities work hard to prevent and address these problems. We need to support open inquiry and debate both inside and outside of classrooms.
But it is ludicrous to claim that state-sponsored censorship — which carries the full force of the government and can even entail criminal penalties — is justified by student misconduct or peer pressure.
The problem at universities isn’t shouting, it’s antifa violence, and the reason that they’re passing state laws to deal with it is because the universities won’t enforce the law, protect conservatives, prosecute criminal offenses, or do the minimum of expelling a student who commits violence against a wrongthinker.
There are also Federal Civil Rights laws that could be used to prosecute the attackers — those aren’t being enforced either.
Here’s half a dozen posts from 2017 on the Battle of Berkeley:
