A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes
Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.
Giamatti, A. Bartlett. "A Liberal Education and the New Coercion." 31 Aug. 1981. Published in A Free and Ordered Space: The Real World of the University, W. W. Norton & Company, 1988.
She was dealing with a serious campus situation where an invited speaker, Chief of Police Kelly of New York City was prevented from giving his p resentation on the controversial “Stop and Frisk” rules by student protesters who opposed the practice. Brown’s tradition of hearing anyone on the campus regardless of point of view had been broken to the distress of most students, faculty and alumni.
At the time of this quotation, Dr. Rice was the Provost of Stanford University and did not imagine that she would represent an ultra conservative administration that opposed affirmative action of all types. She was then a leader in handling the compromises necessary to manage “hate speech” and the doctrines of political correctness.
In 2005 an Egyptian writer, Usama Anwar Ukasha, criticized one of the Prophet’s companion’s role for causing dissention and divisiveness in Islamic history. Some called for his legal punishment for slandering a holy figure (see {588714}) and a law case was brought to force him to divorce his wife—so that she would not be “contaminated by his heretical thoughts. Al-Bana argued for freedom of thought and speech on such subjects. His view was particularly important since he was the brother of Hassan Al-Bana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful fundamentalist organization. Note that Al-Bana’s call for intellectual freedom does not go so far as to say that it should be legal to criticize The Prophet Muhammad and it illustrates how far even modern Islam has to go to meet reasonable standards of freedom of thought and speech.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus
Angelo Bartlett Giamatti was an American professor of English Renaissance literature, the president of Yale University, and the seventh Commissioner of Major League Baseball.
