Tuesday, October 21, 2008

BS, But Not For The Reason You Might Think

The University of Nebraska has dis-invited Bill Ayers from giving a talk at a student research conference in November. Specifically, the university sited their "threat assessment group" which they claimed "monitored e-mails and other information UNL received regarding Ayers' scheduled Nov. 15 visit, and identified safety concerns which resulted in the university canceling the event."

Oh, really. Are you sure that was a "threat assessment group" and not a CYA group? Because as FIRE points out the real difficulty was not safety - quick! name me a single incident in the last 10 years where those radical right wingers on college campuses physically harmed an invited speaker. No, the real "threat" wasn't that someone would strike Ayers; the threat was going to be to the university's bottom line.

Perhaps even more troubling, however, is the distinct possibility that UNL is citing security concerns as pretext for cancelling Ayers' speech under political pressure. As InsideHigherEd.com reports today, Ayers' planned appearance had been criticized earlier last Friday by Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman, a Republican, as well as Attorney General Jon Bruning. In a statement issued Friday afternoon, Governor Heineman called the invitation to Ayers an "embarrassment to the University of Nebraska and the State of Nebraska." Attorney General Bruning also called Ayers' speech an "embarrassment," stating further that "[a]cademic freedom doesn't require us to lose our good judgment and common sense." According to InsideHigherEd.com, alumni and donors echoed these sentiments, and the Chair of Nebraska's Board of Regents also called for Ayers to be disinvited. Hours later, UNL cancelled the speech.

As Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist and devoted enemy of the United State whose major lament has been that he didn't set enough bombs back in the day, it is a legitimate question to ask if he's really the most appropriate "teacher" to put before your undergraduates. However, if you are only going to exercise belated oversight on such matters, and only after it becomes a matter of public controversy, you should have the guts to own up to it. To invent an imaginary "threat" to Ayers is laughable.

FIRE continues:

If UNL decided that hosting Ayers' speech was simply too politically unpalatable a choice to defend, it should have said as much. UNL would have been forced to endure the shame that it rightfully would have earned by allowing political pressure to dictate who may speak on campus, but at least the school would have retained its intellectual honesty and avoided playing politics with school safety. In contrast, if UNL is citing "safety concerns" simply to avoid criticism for caving to political considerations, it is setting a dangerous precedent. Invoking the threat of violence as justification where it does not actually exist serves to trivialize the necessary gravity of real security concerns, and grants far too much power to administrators to cite vague and unverifiable threats any time the university wants to shut down an event with which it is merely uncomfortable. The safety of a university community should not be cited to provide cover for purely political decisions.

Note: I am making a distinction here between the university's role as an educator and its role as being a venue where students and faculty can engage at the level of ideas. Had Ayers been invited to speak by some student Democratic group, it would be totally illegitimate for the university to cancel such a talk or to interfere with it in any other manner.

However, this isn't the case here. For example, had someone under the auspices of the university invited a Holocaust denier, or some other type of vicious anti-semite, to give the keynote address at a conference being hosted by the university, it would be certainly in the school's purview to rectify such an outrage. Even then, however, you have to own up to it.

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