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Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Another Nice Mess

You may recall the Laurel and Hardy films in which Hardy would complain:
Seems like that is what happened to the the tolerance/intolerance discussion coming up at the Regents. The whole idea seemed to be to water down the antisemitism resolution (a narrow issue) into something broad and thus vague - everyone play nice! Instead, the effort has resulted in considerable opposition to idea of a general speech restriction. The LA Times has an editorial today against the resolution as currently worded:
...Before the regents adopt any policies inspired by the Statement of Principles Against Intolerance, they should reject its overly broad language and draw a clearer distinction between acts of intolerance and the expression of opinions that might potentially offend some students...  
There have been a lot of such critiques in the past few days in the news media.
The problem seems to be one of treating students and everyone else in the university community as if they were children. Actually, if they were children, the model for tolerance "training" has been around for a long time:

and

Best guess: The Regents will discuss the resolution and then ask for some kind of redraft.

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