News from Birkenstockia

For those in California, here are your tax dollars at work.
For those outside the People's Republic, here's more of what we expect:

Steve Hinkle, a student at California Polytechnic State University, was posting fliers around campus last November 12 that advertised a speech to be given the next evening. The fliers contained a phoato of the speaker, black conservative Mason Weaver, and the words "It's OK to Leave the Plantation," the name of a book in which Weaver likens African-American dependence on government programs to slavery.

When Hinkle approached a public bulletin board in the lounge of the campus Multicultural Center, some African-American students who were sharing pizzas nearby objected. They told Hinkle not to post the flier because they found it "offensive" and "disrespectful." By all accounts, his response was something like, "How do you know it's offensive? Why can't we talk about it?" The offended students then said that the flier violated the Multicultural Center's "posting policy," and threatened to call the campus police. Hinkle left, without posting the flier.

That was not the end of the matter, however. One black student did call campus police, with what was recorded as a report of "a suspicious white male passing out literature of an offensive racial nature." She and others also urged university authorities to discipline Hinkle, a member of the Cal Poly College Republicans, for what she called "hate speech" (i.e., the flier).

Incredibly, university authorities did just that, under the pretext of punishing Hinkle for "disruption" of what complaining students later claimed to have been a Bible study dinner and meeting. (Nobody had told Hinkle that this was a "meeting" at all, and he saw no Bibles.)

This episode provides a window into the politically correct censorship that pollutes so many of our nation's campuses. For seeking peacefully and politely to exercise his First Amendment rights, Hinkle was subjected to a seven-hour disciplinary hearing, from which his lawyer was barred. He was found guilty of "disruption" of the "meeting." And he was ordered to apologize to the offended students, in writing, or face much stiffer penalties, possibly including expulsion. All of this is to go on Hinkle's permanent record, perhaps hurting his chances of getting into graduate school.
....
Campus censorship lives on, often justified under the guise of enforcing vague rules against racial or sexual "harassment." Administrators typically interpret these rules to encompass any speech that offends nonwhite students or insults the left-liberal-radical-feminist-postmodernist orthodoxies of the academic class. The rules are typically enforced by campus kangaroo courts with no semblance of fairness.

Monk