Academia in Wonderland

There is an increasing sense of our universities as being some form of alternate reality, some sort of Bizarro World where logic, evidence and reason no longer function. I mentioned some time back the rather astonishing case of Jan Boxhill, an administrator at UNC who had spent several years manufacturing false course credits and fake courses for athletes before being transferred to become director of the UNC Parr Center for Ethics.

We are now accustomed to callow university students taking a casual approach to tolerance and free speech. In response to a professor writing an editorial condemning the terrorist attacks in Paris, one student argued:

Yamin, who is the publicity chair for Vanderbilt’s Muslim Student Association, told the audience in no uncertain terms that a black female professor’s speech must be restricted if she says “these kinds of things” in the future.

“What I’m really trying to show her is that she can’t continue to say these kinds of things on a campus that’s so liberal and diverse and tolerant,” Yamin declared.

"Liberal and diverse and tolerant." I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.

Callow students are one thing. But professors? Professors of journalism calling for the restriction of free speech? Behold, DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication. In 'Charlie Hebdo' crosses the line he argues that free speech "has its limits." What might those limits be? He doesn't demark those limits particularly well but they at least include the "irreverent portrayal of Mohammed." That slope seems to have an exceedingly low coefficient of friction that takes you from egalitarian democracy to despotic tyranny in no time flat.

You can't help but sense DeWayne Wickham has been cast as Meek Michael in the old adage:

Meek Michael thought it wrong to fight.
Bully Bill, who killed him, thought it right.

Rudyard Kipling might be too strong tea for Wickham but I'll take Kipling over Wickham any day. From Kipling's Dane-Geld, there is this diagnosis:

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

And Kipling has good advice for the Meek Michaels of the world.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!"

Wickham appears happy to pay the Dane the geld of free speech. Shame on him.