Minority Tyranny

For John, BLUF:  We need to respect the rights of minorities, but to expect perfection from the individual members of the majority is to expect perfection in an imperfect world.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Court Rules Free Speech Must Yield to ‘Woke’ Speech

From Minding the Camnpus, by Mr George Leef, 23 March 2020.

Here is the lede plus one:

Shawnee State University in southern Ohio (cross the bridge and you’re in Kentucky) is an open-admissions school that opened in 1986.  It’s very little known, but the school’s administrators are as politically attuned to progressive sensibilities as any across the nation.  A case that has arisen at Shawnee threatens to set a terrible precedent for the suppression of speech that any “woke” student claims to find harassing.

Nicholas Meriwether has been on the Shawnee faculty since 1996, teaching political science.  He has risen to the rank of full professor with the equivalent of tenure.  In a course on political philosophy he was teaching in 2018, he called upon an obviously male student and after the student (registered in class under the name Alena Breuning, but referred to as “Doe” in the court documents) replied, Meriwether said, “Yes, sir.”  That’s all it took to set off a federal case.

Doe approached Meriwether after the class and told him that he was transgender and insisted upon being referred to with female titles and pronouns.  “Miss” would be proper, not “Mister.”  Meriwether was taken aback and replied that he didn’t think students could dictate to professors how to address them, at which point Doe became belligerent, declaring that Meriwether could either comply or be fired.

And it goes from there, with a Federal Court ruling that due to a previous decision (a 1989 Sixth Circuit case) the bureaucratic rules trump the Professor's Free Speech rights.  The good news is the it is on appeal.

I try to give every name, every time used, a title or pronoun.  Unless I know the person well enough to use a first name.  But, in a more formal setting, some prefix is in order, up until now.  Now I may just drop all that falderal and go with the last name, or a first and last name.  Sadly.  A coarsening of discourse.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff