A Law Prof Rationalizes a Campus Attack on Free Speech - The Wall Street Journal
While it’s understandable that Rory Little wants to defend his students at UC Hastings (“Open Minds, Loud Voices and Cancel Culture,” Letters, March 28), he ends up twisted in logical knots. If an event that can’t be conducted because of incessant disruption doesn’t count as a cancellation, nothing does. It may well be that, “after the intermittent chanting and speaking, everyone quietly and peacefully left the room,” but that was only after I had departed—because the room’s lunch-hour reservation expired ahead of an afternoon class.
That’s the crux of the matter: This was not some speaker’s corner where opposing activists face off, but a space duly reserved by a student organization for an invited speaker (and faculty commentator) to discuss issues that are plainly germane to a law school’s mission. Constitutional law may well be “murky, inconsistent and unsettled” in many areas, but neither the First Amendment nor UC Hastings’s policies countenance a heckler’s veto. And if shouting down were protected speech, opponents of critical race theory and other progressive causes could likewise cancel events.
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source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/free-speech-ilya-shapiro-uc-hastings-law-campus-protest-cancel-professor-11648498711
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