If You Paid $63,916 Per Year To Attend Wellesley And You Write Like This, You Got Ripped Off

Ace mocked the Wellesley News editorial already, as have the Folks over at Heat Street, but it's important to appreciate it for more than its anti-freedom tone and the writers' total, complete, abject ignorance of what free speech means.

They can't write. At all. It's awful. And chaotic. And overwrought. And, ultimately, meaningless.

Wellesley students are generally correct in their attempts to differentiate what is viable discourse from what is just hate speech. Wellesley is certainly not a place for racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech. Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech. The founding fathers put free speech in the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of the government. The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.

Awesome! They get it completely wrong, and they write so badly that they accuse themselves of "hate speech." And then they say that the "spirit" of free speech is to protect the "suppressed," which is obviously the speech that they are...um...suppressing. So which is it?

Oh, it's a staff editorial, which presumably means that more than one person was involved in the writing of this middle-school-quality piece.

Mom and Dad must be so proud.

posted by CBD at 12:00 PM

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