Idiots at Georgia Tech

It's difficult to convey sufficient disgust with the morons at Georgia Tech, not just the idiotic administrators who haven't peered at the First Amendment, but also the dumb pseudo-leftists who think issuing death and rape threats against right-wing student Ruth Malhotra is a cute idea. We can only hope these morons will be expelled and find themselves in front of a criminal jury soon.

Yet we must reject David Horowitz's bizarre logic that "Her story refutes the mendacious and cynical claims of the opponents of academic freedom for students -- the American Federation of Teachers, the AAUP, InsideHigherEd.com, the Democrats in the Pennsylvania legislature and others -- who have denied and sought to discredit every claim of abuses on college campuses...." None of these groups has denied every claim of abuse, just many of those that on closer scrutiny turn out to be different from how Horowitz portrays them. There are plenty of abuses on college campuses, but Horowitz curiously seems to focus almost exclusively on those that happen to conservatives. At Horowitz's 2nd Student Academic Freedom conference earlier this month, Malhotra case stood out dramatically from the numerous other students who spoke, only one of whom seemed to have a plausible case of abuse of rights by the administration (not the faculty).

Actually, Malhotra's earlier complaints (about a professor who told her in class that George W. Bush was "pimping for the Christian Coalition" fall into the typical category of conservatives whining about professors expressing perfectly legitimate views that do not harm student rights. Sadly, the nitwits at Georgia Tech have turned Malhotra's case into one of very real victimization by physical threats.

However, many left-wingers from Ward Churchill to Sami Al-Arian and beyond have received death threats and direct suppression of their free speech. Does that prove a vast right-wing conspiracy by conservative faculty to repress free expression? Of course not. And an apparently true claim of victimization doesn't justify dubious claims of victimization, nor does one case of misconduct by students and administrators justify taking away freedoms from faculty and others on campus.