A Stitch in Haste

The Objectivist Club at New York University, in cooperation with the Ayn Rand Institute, had planned to hold a panel discussion tonight about the Muslim anti-cartoon riots.

However, when the NYU administration learned that the panelists intended to display the cartoons, they abruptly informed the Objectivist Club that the event would have to be closed to the public. About 150 people had registered to attend the event.

So much for academic freedom and the omnipresent lie that NYU is somehow an "elite" institution.

There's nothing elite about cowards.

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Here is ARI's statement on the incident (sent by email):

"In a seemingly mundane decision, New York University has sacrificed the principle underlying the survival of civilization -- free speech," said Dr. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute. NYU is refusing to protect a student group's right to display the Danish cartoons of Mohammad at a panel discussion on free speech on March 29.

The group's event was to be open to the public, but at the last minute NYU retreated. Under the pretense of maintaining campus security, the administration contradicted its own stated policy on free speech by requiring that, if the cartoons are displayed, the event be limited only to "members of the NYU community." The student group now must turn away more than 150 members of the public who had planned to attend the panel.

"The university's shameful appeasement of Muslim and anti-free-speech groups -- which have vowed to protest the event -- underscores the urgent need to display the cartoons in defense of freedom of speech," said Dr. Brook.

"Free speech protects the rational mind: it is the freedom to think, to reach conclusions and express one's views without fear of coercion of any kind. And it must include the right to express unpopular and offensive views, including outright criticism of religion. NYU -- which like other universities grants tenure to protect intellectual freedom -- ought to recognize the crucial importance of this principle and defend it.

"If intimidation and threats are allowed to compel writers, cartoonists, thinkers and institutions of learning into self-censorship, the right to free speech is lost. If Muslims are allowed to pressure critics of Islam into silence, critics of religion will be next. And then everyone else."

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Here is a press release from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. More thoughts from Joanne Jacobs, Charles Mitchell.