We've heard a lot about freedom of speech and academic freedom from professors over the last couple of years as our nation has wrestled with the issue of political indoctrination in the classroom and hostility to Christian and conservative viewpoints at various schools around the country. Interestingly enough, the academics always are defending the Left to be heard, despite the fact that such views are teh dominant ones in the groves of academe. Conservative views, on the other hand, are almost always dismissed as irrelevant at best and intolerant at worst, and those expressing them usually find themselves fighting for the right to be heard (when there are not active attempt to suppress such views as intolerantbigottedracistsexistandhomophobic).

Which takes us now to Northern Kentucky University. (H/T Michelle Malkin)

A professor at Northern Kentucky University said she invited students in one of her classes to destroy an anti-abortion display on campus Wednesday evening.

NKU police are investigating the incident, in which 400 crosses were removed from the ground near University Center and thrown in trash cans. The crosses, meant to represent a cemetery for aborted fetuses, had been temporarily erected last weekend by a student Right to Life group with permission from NKU officials.

Public universities cannot ban such displays because they are a type of symbolic speech that has been protected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Witnesses reported "a group of females of various ages" committing the vandalism about 5:30 p.m., said Dave Tobertge, administrative sergeant with the campus police.

Sally Jacobsen, a longtime professor in NKU's literature and language department, said the display was dismantled by about nine students in one of her graduate-level classes.

"I did, outside of class during the break, invite students to express their freedom-of-speech rights to destroy the display if they wished to," Jacobsen said.

Asked whether she participated in pulling up the crosses, the professor said, "I have no comment."

Such courage on the part of this so-called educator -- inciting criminal activity (not free speech) by her students and then refusing to answer a simple question about the extent of her own involvement. And I would like to remind the professor that property destruction is not free speech -- and she would not consider it to be so if someone ransacked her office, broke her car windows, or torched her house in protest of her vile act of speech suppression.

Why encourage/participate in this anti-freedom activity? Jacobsen explains it this way.

She said she was infuriated by the display, which she saw as intimidating and a "slap in the face" to women who might be making "the agonizing and very private decision to have an abortion.'"

Jacobsen said it originally wasn't clear who had placed the crosses on campus.

She said that could make it appear that NKU endorsed the message.

Pulling up the crosses was similar to citizens taking down Nazi displays on Fountain Square, she said.

"Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it. Some of my students felt the same way, just outraged," Jacobsen said.

Let's break that down.

1) The display made her mad -- and her unstable emotional state trumps the rights of every other American.

2) Women are so emotionally delicate that they could be upset by the display's message and so the display needed togo -- but women have the strength of mind and will to be permitted to decide whether or not to take an inconvenient human life.

3) Right to life folks are Nazis and Nazis are entitled to no free speech rights (funny, that isn't what the First Amendment, the courts, and even the ACLU have to say on the matter).

4) The display's sponsorship was unclear, and someone might infer that private speech by students represented an official university position (this is false -- more on that in a moment).

Notice -- not a single legitimate justification for her violation of the rights of others. So much for freedom of speech and academic freedom!

And then there is that sponsorship issue.

In an e-mail sent to campus officials earlier this week and obtained by The Kentucky Post, Jacobsen demanded the display be removed immediately. She wrote that the crosses violated the separation of church and state because NKU is a state institution.

Jacobsen knew who had put up the display, and that the university had determined that the pro-life group had every right to do so under the laws and the Constitution of the United States. She further knew that the university could not legally censor the speech that offended her. So she took it upon herself to gather a group of vigilantes and engage in conduct which differed from that of a KKK lynch mob in degree but not in nature -- the violation of the civil rights of American citizens designed to intimidate others who might exercise those same rights.

Fortunately, NKU has a president and a dean who will not stand for such unAmerican conduct by a faculty member, tenured or not. Police are investigating, charges against those involved are promised, and support for the victims is being offered. Let's hope the result is the removal of this uncivil anti-libertarian from the faculty.

Oh, and to those who want to argue that the actions of Jacobsen and her band of anti-free-speech terrorists constitutes civil disobedience, I have one question -- would you consider it to be an act of free speech and civil disobedience if a group of men, hurt by their inability to stop the feticide of children they wanted, were to attack Sally Jacobsen with clubs in order to express their outrage at her activities and then justify it by claiming that "any violence perpetrated against that silly woman was minor compared to how we felt when we read of her actions"?

MORE AT: Texas Rainmaker, Flynn Files, Stop the ACLU, ATTOTWT, Where I Stand, Pollywog Creek, Darleen's Place, Bizzy Blog, Urban Grounds, Zero Point, Shock and Blog, Right Wing Nation, Freedom Folks, Expose the Left, Verum Serum, Pro-Life Blogs, Black Republican, Wizbang (twice), Mean Mr. Mustard, Jawa Report, Last Round, Right Minded, Yippee-Ki-Yay, Colossus of Rhodey

Posted by: Greg at 11:31 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 1043 words, total size 9 kb.