On the stupid side, consider this quote: "It is affecting students, students who are undocumented on campus. It is referring to them as 'illegal,'"

Um, if they are in the country without documentation, then they are here illegally. Really, there's not a lot of room for disagreement here.

On the other hand, if you read the article itself, you will note that the University is actually being run by adults:

"UNM Dean of Students Tomas Aguirre...said that although the group’s usage of “illegal immigrant” is not hate speech, he thinks both sides have acted in a civil manner."

No prohibitions, no bans, no university police. The film was shown; those who disagreed protested. The university didn't intervene. That's how it is supposed to work.

More proof that the Left was never, ever opposed to authoritarianism per se. They were only opposed to someone other than themselves being the authority. They didn't want to bring down The Man, they wanted to be The Man. Any libertarian philosophy that they may ever have spouted was strictly for consumption by the useful idiots.

Amy, you are reading meaning into that quote that just isn't there. The dean specifically said (see my quote) that this is not hate speech.

In your quote, the dean says that the student government should consider the matter, and also that the term is considered hate speech on other campuses. This says nothing about his personal stand, or the university's stand on the matter.

As I said, it seems to me that the university behaved entirely appropriately in this situation. With any luck, the student government will take the issue up, and will come down on the side of free speech.

More attempts by our liberal administration to infringe on our rights... Sarcasm on: if we start getting our educational institutions "in line," the behavior will carry over to the corporate world as these students graduate so we can ensure every organization, group and individual, will continue vote for us and our behavior modification will be complete: Sarcasm OFF.

I'd tweeted you about this before, but I recently completed my MA program in Boston in Political Science. While I didn't see or experience much de jure (gotta show that education some how) speech suppression there were lots of pressures on a de facto level.

I've been a libertarian since about the second year of college and before that I was a conservative, not a comfortable one, but I've always been argumentative. When I got to the graduate level I decided to pretty much never let anyone know my actual opinion unless it agreed with theirs, or play it off as playing devil's advocate.

The requirements getting into a PhD program are actually pretty stiff right no, there's a simple supply and demand problem going on. Class sizes are shrinking but grad applications are rising, fewer students can be funded and more are applying. This means almost anything can bar you from advancement and plenty of good and smart students won't go onto the next level. If you have higher ambitions you need to toe the party line to a certain extent. There's a very common perception in academia where there are normal people, who are the people your professors agree with, and idiots and whack jobs.

The professor's aren't cackling or intentional in their bias, it's mostly an unintentional thing and off-spring of spending time with people they agree with, and only people they agree with. After a while you tend to forget your own position relative to the national center.

Professors I respected deeply and worked closely with probably didn't know my attitudes on economic issues. It was better that way, perhaps they'd sneak through, and one professor I spent extensive time with most likely picked up that I quoted Milton Friedman more than Keynes, but out of a desire to continue and co-exist I basically had to shut up. Is there a simple policy problem here? not really, and to be honest I'm not sure how to fix the one sided nature of academic culture.

Edit-

Not proof of anything nefarious but the one outspoken MA student who was a libertarian and applied to the PhD program had her application get lost and she was given misinformation about what was required for an in-program application.

From what I've observed, having worked on campuses and with several family members in academia, political activism on campus is often surreptitiously coordinated among administrators, faculty, and student groups. Many times administration and faculty will use student activists to advance their own agendas, while pretending that the initiatives are actually a response to the desires and needs of students. They can do this by cherry picking which agendas to respond to, and by selectively encouraging certain groups.

One area where this is very common is in the advancement of diversity programs. Diversity officers are often provided resources with the explicit purpose of organizing student activists to support diversity. They can then direct these students to lobby the administration and engage in protests to demand more resources for the diversity office. It's essentially a form of self dealing.

"and to be honest I'm not sure how to fix the one sided nature of academic culture."

As I see it, there are only two ways: (1) blow it up, or (2) abandon the academy. Blowing it up is unlikely to happen because the entrenched culture has too many friends in high places, who will shield it from any budgetary or political pressure. Abandoning the academy may happen, though. With Internet education and other alternative forms of higher education, it's possible that the traditional university will eventually be reduced to a sort of rump royalty, something that everyone keeps around for pomp and circumstance, but with little influence on the real world.