Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog, [3]
Students and faculty at Smith College apparently didn’t want a repeat of that ugly episode at the University of Missouri, where a communications professor was filmed calling for the forcible removal of a journalist from an on-campus demonstration earlier this month.
So when they held a sit-in Wednesday to protest racial discrimination, their solution was to not let in members of the media in the first place — unless said media members pledged allegiance to the cause.
– From the Washington Post article: These College Protesters are Demanding the Media Who Cover Them Support Their Cause [4]
In yesterday’s post, Not a Safe Space – Canadian University Suspends Yoga Class After Students Become Offended [5], I explained how those most responsible for the almost inconceivable authoritarian idiocy spreading across college campuses are not the students themselves, but their spineless and inept administrators.
These kids are more or less acting like Wall Street financiers after the bailouts. After the bankers were provided with trillions of dollars in backstops and no one went to jail for destroying the economy, they immediately paid themselves record bonuses a year after the worst of the crisis, and are now once again thieving and pillaging at will.
Why? Because no one is held accountable, the incentives are in place to steal. Similarly, no adults are holding these out of control child-fascists accountable for their despicable behavior. As such, these tyrants-in-training are getting more out of control every day, and getting away with it. Thank you college administrators.
In the latest example of the above, I present to you the stupidity of Smith College.
From the Washington Post [4]:
Students and faculty at Smith College apparently didn’t want a repeat of that ugly episode at the University of Missouri, where a communications professor was filmed calling for the forcible removal of a journalist [6] from an on-campus demonstration earlier this month.
So when they held a sit-in Wednesday to protest racial discrimination, their solution was to not let in members of the media in the first place — unless said media members pledged allegiance to the cause.
To be fair, it seems they’ve simply learned a lesson from the U.S. military when it comes to propaganda “reporting” from war zones. This remarkable passage comes from MassLive.com [7], whose reporter was turned away:
Alyssa Mata-Flores, a 21-year-old Smith College senior and one of the sit-in’s organizers, explained that the rule was born from “the way that media has historically painted radical black movements as violent and aggressive.”
“We are asking that any journalists or press that cover our story participate and articulate their solidarity with black students and students of color,” she told MassLive in the Student Center Wednesday. “By taking a neutral stance, journalists and media are being complacent in our fight.”
Smith organizers said journalists were welcome to cover the event if they agreed to explicitly state they supported the movement in their articles.
Wait, it gets better/worse:
Stacey Schmeidel, Smith College director of media relations, said the college supports the activists’ ban on media.
“It’s a student event, and we respect their right to do that, although it poses problems for the traditional media,” Shmeidel said.
Schmeidel went on to say that the college reserves the right to remove reporters from the Student Center because it’s a private campus.
Smith is, indeed, a private school — $63,950 per year [8] worth of private school — which is a relevant differentiator from the state-run University of Missouri. And if students and faculty need to discuss sensitive issues behind closed doors, they’re certainly entitled to do so.
But to welcome some reporters [9] and not others — and to make support for the cause the price of admission — is to disregard not only the fundamental principles of journalism but also the school itself (though Smith is the place where the student newspaper censored “crazy” [10] in a published transcript last year, calling it an “ableist slur”).
Incredibly, the only lesson college students and administrators learned from the Mizzou incident [11] where a faculty member asked for “muscle” to remove a reporter from public space, was to ban neutral reporters altogether.
Meanwhile, we recently learned that 40% of millennials are in favor [12] of discarding free speech. If these kids represent the future of America, we are in deep, deep trouble.
