Posted on 10/09/2007 4:15:18 AM PDT by Kaslin
On Sept. 21, 2007, the editorial board of the Colorado State University student newspaper decided to publish a four-word editorial. Apparently finding the traditional mode of expressing ideas -- arguing a case in a few hundred words -- too demanding, they instead wrote four words: "Taser this … F--- Bush." Needless to say, they spelled out the F word.
The "Taser" referred to the police using a stun gun on a student at the University of Florida who refused to relinquish the microphone to other students at a speech at the university given by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. (How George Bush is connected to the use of a Taser on a left-wing student interrupting a speech by a left-wing anti-Bush senator was never explained by the editor.)
In light of the feelings-based anti-intellectualism that permeates the left, it is surreal that the left routinely accuses those who criticize the low state of our universities as "anti-intellectual." It is so clearly a form of projection. Those of us who lament the state of our universities are protectors of the intellect; it is the feelings-based "F--- Bush"-"Buck Fush" left that is the anti-intellectual part of the political spectrum. That is why Colorado State University, while mildly criticizing the editor -- for using an expletive -- would not remove him, let alone the whole editorial board.
Read this report from CNN, and then weep for our society:
"Speaking for the board that oversees student media, CSU faculty member Jim Landers read a prepared statement and refused to comment further. 'We see the editorial as an opinion which is protected by the First Amendment,' Landers read."
Two sentences that say so much. The misunderstanding of freedom of speech is breathtaking. Retaining or firing the CSU editor had nothing to do with freedom of speech. It had to do with whether someone who abuses the editorial space of a major university newspaper is fit to be its editor. But the left confuses freedom with license (just as it confuses tolerance with acceptance). And so, in the name of protecting freedom, an obscene violation of elementary standards of intellectual coherence and decency went unpunished.
The other illuminating aspect of those two CNN sentences was that professor Landers "refused to comment further." Why? The reason is apparent to anyone familiar with our universities: Liberal professors are unused to being challenged. They are not challenged by other professors, and they hardly are challenged by 19- or 20-year-old students. Professor Landers was not about to open himself to intellectual challenges now.
Likewise, the child-editor himself, "refused to comment," according to CNN. When you retain your job as editor-in-chief of a university newspaper after writing a four-word editorial consisting solely of "'F---' the President of the United States," why would you feel it necessary to explain yourself? Like his mentor, professor Landers, McSwane is aware on some level that he has no intellectual or moral defense for what he did. And like the professor, he feels no obligation to the society-at-large whose mores he so offended.
As for the other students on the newspaper's editorial board, The New York Times reported: "Hailey McDonald, The Collegian's managing editor, said Mr. McSwane had the full support of the newspaper's student leadership." And CNN reports that Sean Star, another member of The Collegian's editorial board, "expressed his admiration for McSwane."
Finally, let it be noted that the CSU faculty apparently has said next to nothing about the four-word large-font "editorial." Why not? Because, as the Talmud said 1,600 years ago, "Silence is agreement." If questioned, one suspects that nearly all the silent professors of Colorado State University would respond that this was a freedom of speech issue.
Of course, it is not. And that is proved easily: What if an editor had published a four-word large-font editorial that read "F--- Martin Luther King Jr."? Would the professors have kept silent because they deemed the issue one of freedom of speech? Would The New York Times and virtually every other liberal editorial page in America have said nothing about that editorial, as they have said nothing about the "F--- Bush" editorial?
CSU's retaining an editor who wrote four words, including the F word, in a huge font instead of an editorial is one more reason I have come to believe that, with regard to universities, no society has ever paid so much to so many to have its children so alienated from it.
In each case, just as in the disastrous invitation to Ahmadinejad, liberals feel good about their intentions and therefore about their decisions. But few, if any, of those decisions are wise. This is not surprising. A generation whose primary goals have included overthrowing Judeo-Christian values, which once said, "Don't trust anyone older than 30," and which has rejected external moral authority (God, parents, teachers, religion) is not going to be wise. And absence of wisdom is why Columbia University and The New York Times thought inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a good idea.
Our acadamies continue to lose the battle of higher learning.
And never hire their graduates.
Not that CNN doesn't clearly condone the sentences, but this sentence is a bit misleading. Indeed CNN chose the interview and the story, but these are not CNN's words. I am not so sure that using the MSM's own tactics about which we complain so often is the right strategy to establish legitimacy.
I am not criticizing the content of this article, but this kind of stuff always rubs me the wrong way when in the same breath we complain about the left doing it.
I love it when the left demonstrates for all to see their complete lack of restraint. I’ve met 2 year olds with more emotional control than punks like this writer and his editorial board.
This is so true, as I gear up to put two thru college over the next few years. The criteria is academic and not political. Nevertheless, I'm trying to prep my kids as best I can - that they WILL turn left during college years, and their challenge is to see their best beyond this leftist crap, and come back to the rational fold upon or as quickly as possible, after their exit from college.
One of the great virtues of FR’s anti-profanity rule is that it forces all posters to come up with intellectually coherent criticisms of individuals like the Witch. Hence, we have to think and produce something that’s coherent, instead of just mindlessly screaming profanities, which eventually become meaningless anyway.
Colorado State had been seen as more conservative than the University of Colorado but now we see the complete leftist fortress that Colorado State University has become. Sad and something that should not be allowed by the taxpayers of my home State. These people have assumed the arrogance of no confrontational speech allowed. This goes unchallenged by elected officials in Denver’s legislation and the leftist attitudes espoused by an increasing number of leftists in our great State. How and when America starts taking back our colleges and universities is the question, the left runs most of them now and no criticism is coming from the Republicans. We stand back and watch the destruction of our youth, shame on all of us.
More proof that the inmates run the asylum with the tacit approval of their “leaders”. University professors once provided learning and guidance to the budding young minds in their care. Today they support the juvenile, immature actions of their students as partners in crime.
But, Colorado is emerging as a source of national, headline-grabbing phonies. First, we had phony “scholar” and Native American, Ward Churchill. Now we have this phony journalism student paper “editor”.
Must be something in the rarified air in Colorado.
It’s really not a “leftist fortress”. No more liberal than most schools. I would guess most people just think it’s totally a stupid waste of time, don’t read the school paper (I never did) and figure that stupid kids are going to be stupid kids.
Yeah, the idiot should have been fired. However that’s hardly a “Ward Churchill” level incident. I bet he’s not allowed back next semester and they’ll watch what they say. Or they’ll lose all their advertising revenue and fold.
I went to CSU for two years (graduate level) and the people I knew there were all great people. Don’t let one idiot color your view of the place.
Don’t wish to defend the article or its author blaming Bush for the incident. To show the reasoning though I think the point they were trying to make was that tasering has become more common place now. Unfortunately by blaming Bush for the incident and stooping to profanity they take away from what would be a righteous cause, protesting that tasering. The student shouldn’t have been tasered. Lastly the student was asking Kerry about his membership in Skull and Bones and how Bush Jr. is a member too when the security stepped in and tasered him. Makes it look like this is why we don’t hear more questions about the Skull and Bones Society.
I don't. Not at all.
What colors my view of Colorado State University is the reaction of faculty and administration to this idiot. THAT speaks volumes about the institution, not the numbnuts editor.
Couldn’t agree more!
While I agree with many of his assessments of our universities, I have to disagree with the call to sack the student editor.
On the contrary, I think we should allow such off-kilter rants to be published un-hampered (but not un-criticized).
Maybe I’m a hopeless optimist, but the I believe most people can see the through to the kind of anti-intellectual bias they represent. As such, I’m a member of the ‘give them enough rope’ camp.
Unfortunately it is the increasing numbers of rich lefties moving into Colorado from California, New York and Massachusetts that is polluting the political climate there.
I don't know. I briefly lived in the Boulder/Denver area in the mid-70s and the underpinnings of liberal extremism were already under way at that time. I think we're just seeing the current state of the movement 30+ years later!
I graduated from CU in 1964. At the time CU was filled with the spawn of rich Californians and New Englanders. While many of those were party types, many the others became devout lefties. Unfortunately many of them stayed in the Denver/Boulder area.
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