True North

Amy Ledig, a sophomore at Mac, won an award this past weekend (as King relates) at the Minnesota Association of Scholars annual fete.

She won it for writing a piece in the Macalester student paper that, to the outside observer who’s heard enough stories about academic intolerance, makes me worried that she might get herself “managed” by Mac’s administration, or the monocognitive droogs that run so many campuses.

The piece concludes:

All of that, though, is beside the point. We need to either strive toward actually creating an environment where free and open discourse can exist, or we need to accept that if things continue the way they are now, we have become the liberal counterpart to Liberty University and the like. Forcing everyone to stay on the liberal straight-and-narrow path is just as much intellectual censorship and repression as what Conservatives practice.

The difference, of course, is that nobody attends Liberty for an open, unbiased discussion of, say, homosexuality. Whatever Liberty’s pros and cons (I’m not impressed with the up-front approach, but I’ve also known some very sharp, well-educated Liberty grads).

Read the whole thing, of course; Ms. Ledig provides a sobering view of intolerance in academia, in the event you haven’t been sobered enough already.

Mac sells itself as a place where a student can get exposed to a wide variety of points of view, though - even moreso today than when I was college shopping.

Cross-posted at Shot in the Dark. Comments welcome.