Fighting for Free Speech on America’s Campuses; New York Times, 8/1/16

Cecilia Capuzzi Simon, New York Times; Fighting for Free Speech on America’s Campuses:

"The free-speech watchdog FIRE is a familiar irritant to college administrators, but until this past year, the rest of the country wasn’t paying much attention. An “epic” year is what Greg Lukianoff, president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, calls it. Colleges and universities were forced to publicly and painfully deal with a confluence of national issues — race, sexual assault, gay rights, politically correct speech — mirrored and magnified in the microcosm of campus life.

Finally, FIRE’s activism was syncing with the zeitgeist, in part because of Mr. Lukianoff’s role in framing the public interpretation of the campus turmoil. It was Mr. Lukianoff who made the argument, in a widely read opinion piece in The Atlantic, that today’s students are “coddled” and demanding protections against offensive words and ideas at the expense of intellectual rigor and the First Amendment. It was also Mr. Lukianoff who happened to be at Yale during the infamous Halloween costume shout-down of Prof. Nicholas Christakis, and whose viral video of it appeared to vividly illustrate his observations that many college students don’t understand what freedom of speech is, and who it applies to.

Freedom of speech, he said, is not an “intuitive” concept, and Americans take its benefits for granted. “I think everyone understands that they have a free-speech right, but they don’t necessarily understand why you should have one,” he said, sitting in his eighth-floor office in FIRE’s satellite space in Washington."

Obama Blasts Trump at Rutgers University: “Ignorance Is Not a Virtue”; Slate, 5/15/16

Daniel Politi, Slate; Obama Blasts Trump at Rutgers University: “Ignorance Is Not a Virtue” :

"Obama also told graduates that “when you hear someone longing for the good old days, take it with a grain of salt” in what sounded like a meticulous takedown of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign motto. "I guess it's part of human nature—especially in times of change and uncertainty—to want to look backward and long for some imaginary past when everything worked, and the economy hummed and all politicians were wise and every child was well-mannered and America pretty much did whatever it wanted around the world," Obama said. "Guess what? It ain't so. The good old days weren't all that good.”"

Pearls Before Swine; GoComics.com, 4/15/16

Stephan Pastis, GoComics.com; Pearls Before Swine