A few readers add some perspective to this controversy:
I am sure I won’t be the first to point out the brutal irony that a university named after Justice Louis Brandeis would seek to limit “insensitive” discourse. Perhaps Brandeis’ most famous opinion was his concurrence in Whitney v. California (1927), wherein he emphasized that disturbing debates epitomized American democracy:
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means… They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.
Ultimately, Brandeis stressed that “[T]he fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”
Another reader:
To put this in some perspective, when I was an underclassman at Brandeis in the mid-’70s, the university awarded an honorary degree to Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse Magazine.
Rumor was that he had given $1 or $2 million to the university which, in those days, was a lot of money, and that was why they were doing it. The student body and faculty, especially feminists (who were numerous), were outraged, and many noted the irony of a university whose seal, translated into English, meant “Truth unto its innermost parts,” giving an honorary doctorate to the publisher of a sexually oriented magazine featuring naked women. The protests did nothing. Guccione got his honorary degree.
The Internet is a blessing and a curse. Forty years ago, a loser like Bob Guccione got his honorary degree at Brandeis over the loud protests of students and faculty because nobody beyond the university could hear them. The critics of Ms. Ali were able to twist a single interview into a major controversy using the Internet. I think the Internet is as much to blame as the “hard left'” as such.
Political correctness and orthodoxy cut both ways. Just ask “moderate” Republicans. One of the prime organizing elements of the Tea Party and the hard right has been the Internet. Like it or not, that’s where future battles over our intellectual future will be waged. Scares the shit out of me.
The Dish 