Atheist group slams university in Alabama because its chancellor recommended a video

Last updated on: January 3, 2015 at 12:31 pm by Dan Peterson

Atheist group slams university in Alabama because its chancellor recommended a video 2015-01-03T12:31:52-07:00 Dan Peterson

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On the campus at Harvard Business School
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The video in question is focused on Clayton Christensen, a very well known Latter-day Saint professor at Harvard Business School. A link to it can be found in the article to which I provide a link below.

One can debate, of course, whether an official at this particular university should have said the things that Chancellor Jack Hawkins said.

But I think it quite unjust to say that, in the video, Professor Christensen (whom, for what it’s worth, I’ve known for very nearly 45 years) “disparaged atheists and non-religious people as a menace to American society.” In my view, that’s a substantial distortion of what he actually said — though it’s a distortion of a particular kind with which I’m personally all-too-familiar. (One makes a point about ideas, and certain people, zealously eager to claim victimhood for themselves and/or others and, thereby, to demonstrate one’s viciousness and depravity, transmogrify it into a mean-spirited personal attack. It’s a tiresome and disingenuous technique, but some plainly never tire of it.)

Moreover, I think we could do with fewer claims of being “offended and alarmed” — “alarmed”? really? — when ideas are uttered with which we disagree. Accusations of “intolerance” shouldn’t, in my judgment, be tossed around so lightly. There’s a solid and time-honored way of dealing with opinions different from our own: Contest them. Or, failing that, move on.

In that spirit, please read this horrifying story of how free speech is being monitored for rudeness and offensiveness, and, in some cases, punished . . . in Scotland. (But it can’t happen here, right?) And consider the case of the president of Smith College, who had to apologize publicly after issuing a statement in which she sought to signal her support for demonstrations protesting the recent killings, by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. “All lives matter,” she had said. But that was racially insensitive, because the demonstrators had been carrying placards proclaiming that “Black lives matter.” (Emphasis mine.) Accordingly, she was soon obliged to beg forgiveness for her offensive remark. Which led the famous black conservative economist Thomas Sowell to observe that, if you cross a jellyfish with a parrot, you get a college administrator.

(Thanks to Jabra Ghneim for calling the Alabama story to my notice.)

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