pressure in Colorado (#6399)
by Paul Harvey on December 30, 2002 at 4:41 PM

Professors Foner and Gilmore are absolutely correct about the effect of such pressure in Colorado, where it is indeed the case that "many institutions are less financially secure and more dependent on the good will of private donors and state legislatures."

Earlier this semester, the private college in my city (Colorado College, in Colorado Springs), and a student group at the University of Colorado, Boulder, invited in the well-known Palestinian Hanan Ashrawi to speak. The governor of the state as well as the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority leader (Bill Owens, Lola Spradley, and Mike Andrews, respectively)--politicians not normally known to express any opinion about higher education save that higher ed. is "flush" and needs no more state funding--severely chastised the college and CU-Boulder for their "inappropriate" invitation to a woman the governor all but called a terrorist. The ensuing controversy received coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere. Many public figures in the state publicly demanded that the college and university rescind their invitations. They made no such demand that the collge rescind its invitation to Daniel Pipes, who also appeared as part of the same symposium as Ashrawi, nor of its invitation to the writer Robert Kaplan or any number of other participants. As for CU-Boulder, where Ashrawi's appearance was funded as part of the student-funded speaker series, the governor and others insisted that this use of student funds (voted on by the CU-Boulder student representative assembly) was "inappropriate."

This particular controversy is part of a growing and very visible trend in my state for politicans and self-appointed arbiters of correct thought to demand control over what is and is not appropriate at both private and public universities. Shortly before Ashrawi appeared here, I heard the students in my classroom, before class, discussing whether they were going to appear at the protest over "that Muslim terrorist," referring there to Ashrawi's speech. Clearly the intimidation of Pipes and politicians is having its effect at places which are more vulnerable to outside pressure and punishment from the hands of state legislators than Yale and Columbia.