By James P. Tucker Jr.
A law passed in the 1970s and imposed on private colleges that was intended to ensure special trteatment for “minorities” and women is back in the news again today. This time it is being pushed by the Obama administration to restrict the free speech rights of college students.
Originally, Title IX was intended to require colleges to ensure equal treatment to women and minorities. It became famous though for promoting women’s sports teams, requiring colleges to spend big bucks on girls’ softball, basketball, track and tennis. In some cases, football and men’s basketball were cut back or eliminated. These were the money sports, where ticket-buying fans also provided the revenue to finance the other teams. Few people will spend money to watch women play field hockey. Even women will buy tickets to football and men’s basketball games, but will not attend the other sports, where admission is free.
Athletic directors and coaches, including women, had to go before Congress to get the law changed so college athletics, both male and female, could survive. Congress fixed the law then, but now the Department of Education wants to unfix Title IX by keeping today’s students silent and ignorant.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) conducts a comprehensive annual study of college speech codes. FIRE found that 65 percent of nearly 400 colleges impose controls that prohibited substantial amounts of clearly protected speech. The victims were patriotic students, who, among other things, often oppose Israel and world government pushed by the likes of the secretive Bilderberg group, which meets annually behind locked and guarded doors to discuss how its members can profit from the manipulation of events across the globe.
“Overly broad harassment codes remain the weapon of choice on campus to punish speech administrators dislike,” FIRE president Greg Lukianoff wrote Jan. 6 in The Washington Post. “In a decade of fighting campus censorship, I have seen harassment defined as expressions as mild as ‘inappropriately directed laughter’ and used to police students for references to a student government candidate as a ‘jerk and a fool’ at the University of Florida in 2006. . . . Such illiberal lessons on how to live in a free society are poison to freewheeling debate and thought experimentation and, therefore, to the innovative thinking that both higher education and our democracy need.”
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Since 1975 AFP editor emeritus James P. Tucker Jr. has won widespread recognition for his reports on the intrigues of global power blocs such as the Bilderberg group. Tucker is the author of Bilderberg Diary. Containing 272 pages, loaded with photos, the book recounts Tucker’s experiences over the last quarter century at Bilderberg meetings. $25 from AFP plus $4 S&H inside U.S.
