Irony Much? School Encouraging Censorship In “Free Expression Tunnel”
Robert Gehl
April 1, 2015
Because they have no sense of irony, officials at North Carolina State University are encouraging students to censor speech they find offensive at a site dedicated to freedom of speech.
Campus Reform is reporting that an e-mail sent out by Eileen Coombes, the school’s director of “student involvement,” students are encouraged to paint over any speech they find offensive with some nice new stencils the school has made available.
Students can fight “social injustice and other forms of hate by simply censoring it.
“One way to do so is through the new ‘State not Hate’ stencils now available in Student Involvement,” Coombes said. “If you see hate speech or offensive language in the Free Expression Tunnel, cover that speech with the stencil, indicating that you, as a member of this community of scholars, will not stand for any form of hate at NC State.”
Of course, students have the right to paint over anything they find offensive … and sometimes there are some pretty offensive things.free expression tunnel shoot that bleep
But the notion that the school would actively create a mechanism for censoring other students and prompt them to action is an entirely different matter.
“This is a blatant attack by [the Office of] Student Involvement instructing students to censors others’ speech on campus,” Ross Bradley, a senior at the university and the leader of NC State’s Young Americans for Liberty chapter, said. “In a spot where free speech is supposed to be respected, our school is suppressing our rights.”
After Campus Reform’s article, Coombes responded to them via e-mail. She claimed students, not the university, will decide what’s offensive.
“At the end of the day, we want our students to feel empowered to set the standard for our Wolfpack community and the stencil is just another method we’ve provided to combat speech with another form of expression,” Coombes wrote.
Got that, students? Here are the weapons of censorship, there’s what we want to censor, now go do our bidding.
http://downtrend.com/robertgehl/irony-much-school-encouraging-censorship-in-free-expression-tunnel
