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Why Everyone Is Wrong about the Censorship Fight at Universities

Barrett, Paul
http://thewalrus.ca/why-everyone-is-wrong-about-the-censorship-fight-at-universities

Publisher:  The Walrus
Date Written:  11/05/2018
Year Published:  2018  
Resource Type:  Article

The silencing of part-time instructors is the real free speech crisis

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Suzette Mayr's new novel, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, features an English professor who realizes early in her semester that something is amiss at her institution. It isn't just the indifferent students, her Kafkaesque administration, or the general sense of being stuck on the hamster wheel of publishing and grant applications. Rather, the very buildings of the university are possessed by a malevolent spirit that stalks and devours the instructors one by one.

While Mayr's novel is satire, it taps into the general feeling that something horrific has taken over higher learning. For the political right, those sinister workings take the form of university campuses increasingly hostile to any type of "viewpoint diversity." For progressives and the left, the classrooms are haunted by a misplaced concept of free speech that allows reprehensible ideas to breach their safe spaces. Taken together, these two forces have created a simplistic and clichéd narrative about the crisis in academia. This drama typically involves a lecture from a controversial conservative figure, defended loudly by a group of online supporters and opposed just as loudly by a community of critics.

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