Eugenics promoter William Shockley was shouted down at a 1974 Yale speech, prompting a new university policy that upheld "the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable."
“Yale was founded in 1701 on the denial of free expression,” historian Gaddis Smith ’54, ’61PhD, writes in the latest issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine: "Faculty had to swear allegiance to a strict code of Connecticut theology. The only president ever fired was Timothy Cutler (then called rector), found guilty in 1722 of using an Anglican phrase during a commencement service."
Smith, the Larned Professor Emeritus of History at Yale, takes a look at some of the university’s free-speech controversies through the centuries. Official censorship didn’t die out with the Puritans: "James Rowland Angell, president from 1921 to 1937, believed there were 'social values of greater consequence than the license of every lunatic to mount a soapbox and froth at the mouth.' He blocked proposed speakers whose views offended him."
Smith’s essay concludes with last year’s “no means yes; yes means anal” chant by fraternity pledges, which he believes “went too far.”
“If words could rape,” he concludes, “here they were.”
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http://gawker.com/5826052/all-your-white-supremacist-yale-classmates-say-hi
All Your White Supremacist Yale Classmates Say Hi [by John Cook]
The July/August issue of Yale's alumni magazine had an alumni note—one of those little message-board-style missives that lets all your classmates know what you've been up to—that caught Ben Smith's eye. It's from Sam Taylor, class of '73:
"Did you know that one of your classmates is officially considered a "hate-monger" by the Southern Poverty Law Center? I believe this is a first for Yale. You can judge for yourself whether I am a "hater" if you read my just-released book, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century."
Yet another first for a world-class university. Did you hear Chad won a Pulitzer? Buffy's in the Speaker's office and has two darling little girls. And Sam is a very prominent white supremacist!
Taylor, who writes under the name Jared Taylor, is the editor of American Renaissance magazine and has indeed been labeled a "racist colonialist" by the SPLC because he runs a racist magazine, hosts racist conferences, and argued that Hurricane Katrina exposed the "Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that [we] thought could never wash up on our shores."
An inquiry to Yale Alumni Magazine as to why it's letting a racist flog his racist book in its pages hasn't been returned.