Image provided courtesy of Campus Reform
Faculty at Cornell’s ILR School are really flexing their spin-doctor muscle here.
In a Cornell Sun article published Monday about the cartoons displayed in the ILR School depicting the GOP as ISIS terrorists and molesters, and one featuring a swastika, an ILR professors was quoted saying Republicans, and the Tea Party specifically, are at fault for infringing on freedom of speech because some students of unknown political leanings voiced complaints about the cartoons. The cartoon featuring the swastika was also ripped off the wall by an unknown person of unknown political leanings.
“We’ve invited people who’ve been much more provocative than the two we invited this time, but I think the times have changed so that people on the right are emboldened, because of perhaps by the Tea Party or others,” said ILR professor Kate Bronfenbrenner according to the Cornell Sun.
Bronfenbrenner also said, “[T]here’s a sense that the First Amendment doesn’t apply.”
The cartoonists, Gary Huck and Mike Konopacki, were also quoted in the Cornell Sun article. Huck said that students at Cornell had treated their cartoons “with pronounced disrespect.”
One can only imagine what would have happened had Cornell displayed a cartoon of a burning cross—no matter the political statement—or a caricature of a Democrat performing an abortion. Faculty and students would have gone into crisis mode, drafting long letters demanding the president’s resignation, mandatory diversity training, increased hiring of psychologists for those traumatized by the cartoons, and formal apologies from every administrator sitting in Day Hall.
Yet, it is amazing how, in light of the month-long assault on campus free speech emanating from leftist students and faculty at colleges across the country, a Cornell faculty member is blaming conservative students—backed by the Tea Party, of course—for clamping down on free speech. Conservative students at those various campuses have been the only force visibly fighting back in defense of free speech.
It is unknown who ripped the cartoon down, and it’s unknown why students complained about any of cartoons—that is, their political leanings are unknown and might not be relevant (e.g. in the case of the swastika).
In fact, in The Cornell Review’s previous coverage of the situation, it was pointed out that no Republicans or conservatives on campus had publicly called the cartoons offensive or wanted them taken down. That article explicitly defended the cartoonists’ and the ILR school faculty’s right to free speech.
