Quote:
Originally Posted by Makarov
My first thought: judicial and quasi-judicial forums in Canada have a lot of rules that have developed (over hundreds of years) for the sole purposes of fairness and truth-seeking. Therefore, these forums (hopefully) provide a relatively even battleground for ideas and arguments to fight it out. I'm not sure that these ad hoc guest speaker lectures provide the same.
Not saying that I disagree with your underlying point but I think there are some legitimate challenges in this area.
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I get your point for sure. But I guess what I am advocating is universities should not find themselves looking back on hundreds of years of a developed practice of 'he who screams with the most approved voices wins'. I fear state-approved thought and belief systems far more than I fear legitimizing a racist or a bigot by letting them speak.
(Noting by the way, if they do not speak at a college forum they are still racist bigots just less non-racist non-bigots know about them).
Instead we need to openly embrace these controversial debates. Add some rules and procedures if you need to, but why are we teaching an entire generation of people to fear words?
And in this particular case, there was a professor prepared and loaded to try to dismantle the so-called bad-guy. It sounded to me like a major missed opportunity and speaking personally I am only more interested now in what the bad-guy was supposed to say that was so evil it could apparently not be allowed to be spoken even with a vocal opponent being part of the discussion.