You Can't Say That In College Anymore

Here’s two otherwise unrelated posts which demonstrated how limited speech can be these days on campus. First up, Stefan Beck looks at “God and Man at Dartmouth“:

Yesterday I wrote on NRO about a recent (actually, ongoing) dust-up at Dartmouth College. The short form is this: Noah Riner, the president of the student body, gave a convocation speech to the class of ’09. The speech mentioned Jesus–and all hell broke loose:

Surely nothing as banal, as reliably soporific, as Riner’s address could rankle anyone. Surely people didn’t even listen to these things. As it happens, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The bored work in mysterious ways, and a number of Dartmouth students saw the speech as a fine occasion for an attention-grabbing moral tantrum. The Daily Dartmouth’s “Verbum Ultimum” allowed that “Riner had every right, as a member of a community that values the freedom of speech, to speak freely about what matters to him.” But he chose an “inappropriate forum”