2019 Silent Ideas

How do college students mentally “wrestle with a wide range of ideas” when they prevent those ideas from being expressed? This is not a rhetorical question. It is spawned by remarks made by a dean of a prestigious American college.

That dean stated, “education requires them (students) to wrestle with a wide range of ideas which sometimes means engaging speakers with controversial messages, and sometimes, it means making use of their own free speech to combat objectionable ideas.”

This dean — Michele Murray, dean of students at Holy Cross – failed at both logic and leadership with this one statement. Why?

How can students wrestle with a wide range of ideas if they refuse to hear those ideas? One can neither agree nor disagree with that which one has not heard.

Dean Murray says her students were “making use of their own free speech to combat objectionable ideas.” But the students had not heard the “objectionable ideas” when they, in a premeditated action BEFORE THE LECTURE, blocked many others who wanted to listen to the talk by filling up the venue’s seats. This, the Dean fails to notice, is not a response!

No, this was no “unruly student protest” during a talk at College of the Holy Cross. It was premeditated, planned, and executed with chants of “my oppression is not a delusion” and “your racism is not welcome.” The target of this action was Conservative scholar Heather Mac Donald, an American political commentator, essayist, and attorney. She is a Thomas W. Smith Fellow of the Manhattan Institute.

But the students knew all this beforehand. So did Dean Murray.

And the college? College of the Holy Cross is a highly respected college of Jesuit Catholic tradition in Worcester, Mass.

Two of my neighbors are Holy Cross alumni. They are among the smartest people I know. And yet?

Wouldn’t we expect such deny-first-amendment antics from Stanford or U. Cal Berkeley? Anti-intellectualism seems to be contagious! Perhaps Dean Murray might wish a transfer.