Situated in New York City’s famously bohemian West Village, NYU has long been regarded as a mecca of open discussion and free-wheeling debate. But the times, they are a changin’. In a betrayal of its own stated commitment to free speech, the university has decided to censor a public panel discussion of the Muhammad cartoons controversy, scheduled for this evening. FIRE reports:
In violation of its own policies, New York University (NYU) is refusing to allow a student group to show the Danish cartoons of Mohammed at a public event tonight. Even though the purpose of the event is to show and discuss the cartoons, an administrator has suddenly ordered the students either not to display them or to exclude 150 off-campus guests from attending.
FIRE’s president, Greg Lukianoff, is set to participate in the panel tonight. Which should have stimulated some flicker of activity inside the skulls of NYU’s administrators: When the head of a national civil-liberties watchdog group comes to your campus, it’s probably not the smartest PR move to say to hell with free speech by locking down the event at which he is speaking. That sort of thing tends to be . . . counterproductive.