Showing posts with label speaker disinvitations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speaker disinvitations. Show all posts

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Obama Thinks Students Should Stop Stifling Debate On Campus; HuffingtonPost.com, 9/15/15

Tyler Kingkade, HuffingtonPost.com; Obama Thinks Students Should Stop Stifling Debate On Campus:
"President Barack Obama wants college students to hear the arguments of people they disagree with, not try to block them from speaking...
"I've heard some college campuses where they don't want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don't want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women," Obama said. "I gotta tell you I don't agree with that either. I don't agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view."
The president said that when he was in school, listening to people he disagreed with helped to test his own assumptions and sometimes led him to change his mind.
"Sometimes I realized maybe I've been too narrow-minded, maybe I didn't take this into account, maybe I should see this person's perspective," Obama said. "That's what college, in part, is all about...""
"Part of what a college education is for is to be real people, to be citizens -- not to protect them from discomforts of life," Stone told The Huffington Post...
The professor theorized that students have been "indoctrinated" by their parents that they are "entitled to be safe and comfortable."
"The consequence, I guess, of parents that are hovering all the time and telling everyone they're the best," Stone said."