Featured Post

How To Deal With Gaza After Hamas

Showing posts with label academic freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academic freedom. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Canada's version of academic freedom: Queen's University cancels free speech

On the night of April 2, 2013 Queen's University administration and student union officials ordered the removal of a free speech display at the university. However, they did not only remove the canvas upon which students expressed their opinions. Campus security took the canvas and refused to return it to its owners, members of the Queen's Students for Liberty. This video shows the sequence of events.




Queen's Students for Liberty had booked a space in the John Deutsch University Centre for its "wall" - a blank space upon which students were encouraged to express themselves. 
Some of the roughly 50 entries on the canvas, however, were deemed offensive by the school's Alma Mater Society, according to the student group, and school security removed the exhibit Tuesday evening.
University officials are expected to comment on the details later this afternoon, but have so far not said what on the wall was found to be offensive.

The Students for Liberty argued that nothing there violated Canadian law, and that the act of dismantling the exhibit is the worse crime.

"I am dismayed with the gross violation of free speech that we saw committed by Queen's last night" Jeffrey Waligun, president of the group, said in a release Wednesday. "It is one thing for a lone hooligan to vandalize a display ... It is far more disturbing when the university itself becomes the hooligan."

Friday, March 8, 2013

Critique of Women's Studies goes on at U of Toronto despite threats


I didn't make it to the Fiamengo speech at the University of Toronto last night, but expected it would be well covered.
Josh Dehaas from Macleans On Campus was there and wrote up a good report:
Only one person really lost her temper, after making a thought-provoking query about the impact of Fiamengo’s assertion that “children need their fathers” on lesbian parents. Fiamengo responded by suggesting there’s research that children do better in two-parent households. She didn’t like the answer. “That’s heteronormative bullshit,” the woman screamed, before a dramatic exit.

I don’t know that Fiamengo made a sound academic case. What I do know is that she deserves respect for gathering evidence and calmly presenting it. She also offered advice all students should heed. “Educate yourselves so you can challenge [each other],” and, “do it will style, not hatred.”

She’s right on that. The freedom to debate unpopular ideas is something universities have a duty to protect. On Thursday night at the University of Toronto, that ideal was challenged but prevailed.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Hypocrites, censors and idiots assailing silly U of Toronto Men's Rights group

Finding someone with a perceptive, analytical, intelligent mind in a university Women's Studies course, either as a student or instructor,  is possibly a greater challenge than finding a Rabbi in Mecca during the Haj.

Their classes are filled with bitter women carrying more chips on their shoulders than you'd find at a lumberjack contest. They are punctuated by a few spotty, desperate males hoping to ooze into some action by demonstrating their subservience to dominant womankind. These classes are filled with facial piercings and tattoos aplenty, and you'll never see less than half a dozen of those miserable creatures draped with kefiyehs as a radical fashion statement, regardless of the time of year. These are the types of students who want a degree, but lack the brains to qualify for medicine, or physics, or engineering, or law, or English Literature, or remedial basket weaving.

Of course there are some who register just to find a date, since being an unattractive, overweight lesbian presents a number of practical obstacles to finding romance in the outside world.

One of the strange phenomenons that the idiocy of Women's and Gender Studies courses has given rise to is the reactionary Men's Rights Movement. The participants in Men's Rights groups are not, despite claims of moronic Women's Studies students, "rape and incest apologists" but a bunch of dorky guys who want some "man time."  As they want it in wonky university environments, they have to give it some sort of academic and `social justice`pretense for official recognition.

It wouldn't bother the Women's Studies thugettes as much if these men wanted gender segregation for the purpose of a big, sweaty Gay orgy of invasions which would undoubtedly increase their empathy with the female experience. But as they are mostly heterosexual males who really just want to be able to drink beer and play video games without some chick making them talk about their feelings, feminist outrage has understandably ensued.

Part of the problem is that the men in "Men's Rights" groups must spend too much time in university classes where Women's Studies students are picking up other credits, or in government-funded workplaces that employ too many people with sociology degrees. Aside from the idiocy those environments present, and assuming you're never litigated in Family Court, men's rights aren't being assailed too vigorously and anyone who thinks otherwise is probably living in an insular bubble.

At least it seemed that way until Feminazis helped by making the Men`s Rights groups' points for them.

Radical feminists deplore the term `Feminazi.`They see themselves as social justice martyrs, and how dare anyone compare their heroic, hairy-armpitted activism with Hitlerism!?!

But what else can you call violent, hateful fanatics who use thuggish tactics and intimidation (see video below)  to try to suppress something as benign as a conversation about male suicide rates and the (alleged) difficulty of being a male in the modern world. And all because it offends their hysterical sensibilities.



There is a laughable irony to a group of people who, as a whole are enthusiastic supporters of the anti-Semitic Israeli Apartheid Week and call mere condemnation of it "an attack on free speech" while they violently try to prevent points of view other than their own from being expressed.

Following the violent melee and attempted censorship of a Warren Farrell  lecture on "Men's Rights"  at the University of Toronto (along with gross misrepresentations of his statements and writing) by that university's Women's Studies students last November, they are now enraged that another lecture criticizing the idiocy of their field of "study" is allowed to be taking place at the same school.

This time the lecturer is a woman; a professor from that bastion of neo-Conservative ideology, the University of Ottawa, by the name of Janice Fiamengo.

Professor Fiamengo's speech will, in the word of the event's organizers, discuss  "the problems of academic feminism at Canadian universities: dubious scholarship, indoctrination, dogmatic teaching approaches, limitations on free speech, effects of “equity hiring,” and the consequences for men in the humanities "

A worthwhile subject, totally within the purview of academic discourse, and so naturally, Women's Studies Feminazis and the totalitarians at the socialist, regressive NDP and Union-controlled website rabble.ca want it shut down.

One of the outcomes of the violent protest at the Farrell lecture was that some of the protest leaders were named and shamed by a US-based "Men's Rights" website. That tactic may be the best way of dealing with those who would like to hide in a mob while trying to take away other people's rights.

According to an article in Metro News:
Heather, a feminist and social justice advocate, says at least one of those young women has been exposed to online bullying and harassment. For that reason, she doesn’t want to see the Janice Fiamengo talk go forward. However, she doesn’t know if she will take place in any kind of protest because she fears the backlash.

Heather, who asked her last name be withheld because she doesn’t want to become a target for harassment, said she doesn’t think a talk criticizing women’s studies belongs at the University of Toronto.

“That in itself is disrespectful to all of the female students and staff at U of T,” she said.

A bully who complains about not participating in an attempt to bully others because she is afraid of being bullied is just one of the astounding ironies you can chalk up to the hypocritical idiots populating Women's Studies courses.  Extrapolating academic criticism of Women's Studies programs to being "disrespectful to all of the female students and staff at U of T" is another.  But that is to be expected from people in an academic field that endeavors to restrict academic expression it finds offensive.

The lecture by Janice Fiamengo will occur Thursday, March 7 at 7 pm in the University of Toronto's George Ignatieff Theatre. The talk itself should prove interesting, but there is every possibility the real excitement will take place on the way in.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

This ain't Naomi Klien's idea of Israeli Apartheid Week!

Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center presents a panel at York University on Monday March 5th featuring Rights and Democracy Chairman Professor Aurel Braun and Professor Salim Mansur, the author of Delectable Lie: A liberal repudiation of multiculturalism speaking about the obsessive focus on Israel in academia, the media and in politics.

It's a rare chance to hear these Canadian intellectual innovators together and it's free!

7 pm to 9 pm, Room 135 - Vanier College, at York's Keele Campus.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Jihad at Canadian Campuses

Rather than heed the warnings of our parliamentarians and the government, it appears universities have entrenched their position, resulting in an increased assault on tolerance, justice, and human rights. The universities profess to be the guardians of free speech and, in so doing, are aiding and abetting the increasingly toxic environment on campuses by providing public space to speakers who are divisive and hateful.

Of course, we are all advocates of unfettered speech. It is one of the cornerstones of a free and democratic society. But when one group is consistently targeted by hate campaigns, something is clearly wrong.

More of Avi Benlolo's column at The Huffington Post

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

The strange case of Baylor U's Marc Ellis

An odd professor by the name of Marc Ellis is the Director of Baylor University’s Center for American and Jewish Studies in Texas. To get an idea of where Ellis' head is at, one need only read his recent quote extolling the vapid Occupy Movement:  "Think Karl Marx, the great exemplar of social justice."

This idolizer of the creator of a form of social justice that murdered 100 million people in the last century is an anti-Israel professor prone to weird statements like, "Put simply, "Jewish" has taken on an imperial and colonial flavor."

Baylor is trying to get rid of Ellis but no one outside the university administration, Ellis and his lawyers seems to know why, and no one is talking.

Ellis blames Baylor University's president Ken Starr for his woes. (Yes, that Ken Starr, the prosecutor who went after Bill Clinton for lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky) .

All parties agree that charges had been filed against Ellis, who said, "Former Baylor University presidents Herbert Reynolds, Robert Sloan, John Lilley and Bill Underwood were protective of me against tides of criticism which powerful others swept to my feet through the years..Thus, I wondered when Kenneth Starr became president if the protections would change.”

Ellis' supporters are centred at the group Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization made up largely of Reconstructionist Jews, a sect whose religious leaders seemingly get their divinity degrees from ads at the back of comic books. They contend that Ellis is being dismissed for his anti-Israel opinions.

They have started a petition which has anti-Zionist denizens like Desmond Tutu and Cornel West helming it, claiming, "Marc Ellis is under internal investigation in what looks more and more like a persecution to silence a Jewish voice of dissent. In short, Baylor is re-writing its rules to dismiss Marc Ellis from the faculty."

Yeah, except according to the Baylor Lariat, the Baptist university's student newspaper, neither Ellis nor his lawyers nor supporters will divulge which rules are allegedly being rewritten and what the charges are against him. The university can only disclose them with Ellis' consent and he has so far refused to give it. He appears to be alleging the university is selectively enforcing rules, but he won't say which ones.

Make of that what you will, but here is a man who wants people to rush to his defence, and won't tell them from what they are supposed to be defending him. That's just the sort of logic one could reasonably expect from the head of a Jewish studies department who seeks to cripple the country created as a Jewish refuge.