Posted on 07/22/2006 9:39:02 PM PDT by neverdem
KEVIN BARRETT, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has now taken his place alongside Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado as a college teacher whose views on 9/11 have led politicians and ordinary citizens to demand that he be fired.
Mr. Barrett, who has a one-semester contract to teach a course titled “Islam: Religion and Culture,” acknowledged on a radio talk show that he has shared with students his strong conviction that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job perpetrated by the American government. The predictable uproar ensued, and the equally predictable battle lines were drawn between those who disagree about what the doctrine of academic freedom does and does not allow.
Mr. Barrett’s critics argue that academic freedom has limits and should not be invoked to justify the dissemination of lies and fantasies. Mr. Barrett’s supporters (most of whom are not partisans of his conspiracy theory) insist that it is the very point of an academic institution to entertain all points of view, however unpopular. (This was the position taken by the university’s provost, Patrick Farrell, when he ruled on July 10 that Mr. Barrett would be retained: “We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.”)
Both sides get it wrong. The problem is that each assumes that academic freedom is about protecting the content of a professor’s speech; one side thinks that no content should be ruled out in advance; while the other would draw the line at propositions (like the denial of the Holocaust or the flatness of the world) considered by almost everyone to be crazy or dangerous.
But in fact, academic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ping
Similar in substance to being so open-minded that your brains fall out.
Keven Barrett thinks that freemasons and the Illumaniti run the government, and that those organizations get their orders from aliens in outer space.
/via a commenter at Ann Althouse:
"Enough. I've read and re-read all the material on the Barrett case and then discussed, thought some more, and discussed again. In the end, we're going to act locally because our unease coming out of this just won't ease. As the father of an inbound freshman who completed SOAR and is a month away from moving into the dorm, we're pulling the plug on UW here, and actively calling back some of the schools we turned down. Yes, it is because of this Barrett class, not this one nut alone, but of the even scarier indifference and lack of systemic accountability involved throughout this process. It really is a truth teller as to what is in store for us the next 4 years, and so, we are opting out. My wife and I are both highly educated and of a fairly liberal bent ourselves, but clearly this 9/11 incident has legs and is indicative of a deeper core cancer at this institution."
/freedom of speech is a two-way street. You are free to hire & support Moonbat Professors; we are likewise free to vote with our feet.
He means, I guess certain ideas. I doubt he'd be this hard-headed if the prof was advocating intelligent design. There is such a thing as "peer review" in these places, which is supposed to weed out idiots.
This just made me laugh:
"Not because he would be teaching the “wrong” things, but because he would have abandoned teaching for indoctrination."
Has this dear author stepped foot in a classroom in the past 2 decades??
True.
Fish deserves to be highly respected for his scholarly work (say on Milton) which is quite brilliant.
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