Richard Dawkins: College Students Are Betraying The Free Speech Movement

[rug]

Universities are supposed to expose you to ideas you disagree with, he declared.

Tyler Kingkade
Senior Editor/Reporter, The Huffington Post
Posted: 10/03/2015 05:10 PM EDT

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a famously outspoken atheist, said Friday the trend of students pushing to disinvite speakers on college campuses is a "betrayal" of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.

Dawkins, speaking with Bill Maher on HBO's "Real Time," discussed the idea of "regressive leftism" and how typically liberal crowds -- like college students -- have acted in non-liberal ways. Dawkins drew on the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, a famous protest by students demanding academic freedom and for the school to lift restrictions on political activity on campus.

"What a betrayal we're seeing now with campuses all over the Western world over -- America and Britain -- are denying people the right to come and speak on campuses. If you can't speak your mind on a university campus, where can you? I mean, that's what universities are about," Dawkins declared.

Students at UC Berkeley, Dawkins' alma mater, attempted to disinvite Maher from speaking at their winter commencement in 2014 over his comments about Islam. University officials rebuffed their students, and Maher spoke there in December.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/richard-dawkins-free-speech_561038c4e4b0af3706e11397

[onager]

1. Berkeley isn't his "alma mater."

Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at Berkeley from 1967-69. His alma mater is Oxford, where he graduated in 1962.

[rug]

2. Your statement is correct.

Maybe the writer is a regressive journalist.

[beam me up scottie]

3. Way to ruin a perfectly good DAKWINZ!!1! bashing thread, onager!

[rug]

4. You read this as bashing Dawkins?

Does the article offend you?

[MisterP]

5. so he's raised all the money Dieudonne needs for his fines and court fees?

[rug]

6. Dieudonné M'bala M'bala?

Point well taken.

[MisterP]

7. that wasn't to twit Dawkins, but he's using commencement speeches as where

campus free speech is being quashed, which is an odd thing to say--so if freedom of thought is being burned down because some warmongers get disinvited from a very special and mandatory (and often plushly-paid) speech, then singlehandedly paying Dieudo's €150,000 in fines is also going out of the way just as far