College: Where Up Is Now Down And "Shut Up" Is The Status Quo
*The thing about this post is, even though it seems there are mitigating details that make the Buzzfeed story questionable, the reason the story seemed plausible is that speech is being shut down on campuses all over the country, to a horrifying degree.

Campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org are busier than ever.

UPDATE: Via Abersouth, Robby Soave writes at reason, under the headline, "Did a Student's Non-PC Views on Rape Statistics Get Him Banned from Class? Maybe, Maybe Not."

Soave reports that Savery, the professor, " is known for being an ardent defender of free speech, which makes his apparent decision to remove True from class all the more baffling."

Savery declined comment to BuzzFeed, but I was able to reach him via email. He confirmed that he was a "strong believer in the First Amendment," and maintained that the student's views were not the issue.

"He was not banned because of what he said but because of a series of disruptive behaviors," Savery told Reason.

I also reached True via email, and asked him whether he had been rowdy or disruptive in class. He responded by making a bizarre request. This was his email back to me:

Before I interview with you, you must agree to make "nigger" be the first word in your article.

I declined this ultimatum, and he declined to answer my questions. Needless to say, I've grown a lot more skeptical of True's side of the story. If I find out anything more that backs up either person's assertions about what happened, I'll update this story.

My earlier blog post below:

Katie J.M. Baker writes at BuzzFeed that a student was -- yes -- banned from the discussion portion of his humanities class for engaging in what college used to be about: free inquiry:

Reed College, a small liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, attracts students who want to speak their mind.

But when Jeremiah True wouldn't stop talking about his controversial opinions on sexual assault in his required freshman humanities course, his professor banned him from the discussion segment of the class for the remainder of the semester.

Controversial because they don't toe the line of the bullshit rape stats, for one:

True said he sparred with classmates over discussion topics related to ancient Greece and Rome, such as the "patriarchal" belief that logic is more important than emotion and his analysis of Lucretia's rape. But it was his questioning of the widely shared and often debated statistic that 1 in 5 women in college are sexually assaulted -- it doesn't serve "actual rape victims" to "overinflate" numbers, he said -- and his rejection of the term "rape culture" that led to him being banned, he said.

"I am critical of the idea of a rape culture because it does not exist," he wrote in a lengthy email to Savery explaining his perspectives that he has also posted online. "We live in a society that hates rape, but also hasn't optimized the best way to handle rape. Changing the legal definition of rape is a slippery slope. If sexual assault becomes qualified as rape, what happens next? What else can we legally redefine to become rape? Why would we want to inflate the numbers of rape in our society?"

Rape culture does exist -- in Muslim majority countries. But complaining about that or even pointing it out wouldn't be multi-culti and PC.

As for the reality of campus rape stats, a better estimate comes from the DOJ, from this blog post:

Rather than one in five female college students becoming victims of sexual assault, the actual rate is 6.1 per 1,000 students, or 0.61 percent (instead of 1-in-5, the real number is 0.03-in-5). For non-students, the rate of sexual assault is 7.6 per 1,000 people.

So...he's being punished for giving his opinion and for being right.

If you're wrong but politically correct do you get an A and a cookie? Just like nursery school, which is what college is strongly starting to resemble.

Greg Lukianoff, of campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org, writes about the comfort problem at HuffPo:

Simply put, I believe that we can expect threats to freedom of speech to get worse as human beings are likely to expect not just greater physical comfort as time goes by, but greater "intellectual comfort" as well. That is, students increasingly not only feel that they have a "right not to be offended," but rather have something more akin to a "right to be confirmed," or at minimum, not disagreed with too harshly. This "expectation of confirmation," I conclude, is intellectually unhealthy and a major threat to freedom of speech, as you can't have serious discussions and at the same time have a blanket rule against saying anything that could make any listener uncomfortable. Important discussions are often inherently uncomfortable.

It's a facet of grownup discussions, too.

But a generation of grownups is not what we're raising.

Sorry, did I trigger you?