[WeeklyStandard] Students at Princeton learn a lesson about how free speech works at the modern university.
Anthropology 212, Cultural Freedoms; Speech, Blasphemy, and Pornography cancelled for the term.
Last week Prof. Rosen received national attention for using the N-word in this class on freedom of expression. Some students walked out and protested the term’s use. One report, cited in Princeton’s main campus newspaper, says that Rosen asked, "What is worse, a white man punching a black man, or a white man calling a black man a n****r?" And when Rosen was met with disagreement of his use of the N-word, and on his continued use of the term in the academic setting, he said, he would use it, "if I think it’s necessary."
The course’s objectives, as Carolyn Rouse, chair of Princeton’s Department of Anthropology explained in defense of Rosen, was to have students, "be able to argue why hate speech should or should not be protected using an argument other than ’because it made me feel bad.’" Now that Anthropology 212 has been cancelled, Princeton students have learned a powerful lesson about free speech, though perhaps not the one Rosen intended. |