dee@cca.UUCP (Donald Eastlake) (03/18/86)
I was wondering when MIT was going to tear down the shanties.
Divestment of South African holdings is by no means a clear cut issue in
my mind no matter how much you oppose the apartheid system. This is
despite the fact that many people with supreme confidence in their own
virtue have decided that divestment is good.
All rights are limited if you believe in rights for more than one person
and/or more than one right as the rights of different people and
organizations frequently conflict as do various different rights.
Whether you consider the shanties "symbolic speech" or whatever I don't
see any overwhelming right for them to stay there forever. There were
there for quite a few days. I saw them as did plenty of other people.
Any point that was supposed to have been made by physical shanties has
been made.
Academic freedom and tolerance have to do with diversity of *ideas*.
For example, allowing people to speak in favor of aparteid, slavery,
anarchy, unilateral disarmament, legalizing all drugs (including
chemical warfare?), etc., etc., despite the fact that you may (as I do)
disagree with these ideas. The gross intolerance of Dartmouth towards
its conservative students is pretty disgracful in my mind.
--
+1 617-492-8860 Donald E. Eastlake, III
ARPA: dee@CCA-UNIX usenet: {decvax,linus}!cca!deelkk@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU (Larry Kolodney) (03/25/86)
In article <6728@cca.UUCP> dee@cca.UUCP (Donald Eastlake) writes: > >I was wondering when MIT was going to tear down the shanties. > >They were >there for quite a few days. > +1 617-492-8860 Donald E. Eastlake, III They were up for 10 days. At Princeton and Dartmouth, they were up for months. The point is, the shanties consisted of a non-violent non-obstructive protest that was being run in a responsible manner, and in such a way as to provide educational benefit to the community. Similar shantytowns at Darmouth and Princeton stayed up for months before being removed. Certainly MIT had a legal right to do what it did. But Universities are bound by a higher standard of behavior. They are supposed to be places where new ideas ferment and can be expressed freely, where students are exposed to the fullest possible range of information and experience, and where dissent is not only tolerated butt encouraged. The question to be asked is: Is MIT a University, or a Factory? If MIT is a factory, whose primary purpose is the efficient production of amoral technocrats, then it certainly would be expected to have little tolerance for protests such as a shantytown. If, however, MIT thinks it is a University, it damn well better start acting like one. -- larry kolodney (The Devil's Advocate) UUCP: ...{ihnp4, decvax!genrad}!mit-eddie!lkk ARPA: lkk@mit-mc