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A professor at my old school got in trouble for a guest speaker last month
They had a former journalist come talk about media bias, but the administration canceled it the day before. The official reason was a 'scheduling conflict', but the professor told our alumni group it was over content concerns. Has anyone else seen a talk get pulled like that recently?
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the_uma1mo ago
Yeah, that's a tough spot. I get what @casey909 is saying about trust, but I don't think it's always about being scared of debate. Sometimes it's messy internal politics, like a dean getting pressure from a big donor who saw the speaker's name on a list. I saw a talk on campus free speech, of all things, get quietly "postponed" because a trustee hated the host group. It's less about the topic and more about avoiding any headache from above, which is just as bad.
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My cousin's engineering school in Ohio pulled a climate science talk last fall. The speaker was a former EPA official and they canceled it over "funding issues" that were clearly made up. It feels like schools are scared of any real debate now. They want to control the message completely. This just makes students trust the institution less, not more. It's a really short sighted way to handle things.
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emerycarr10h ago
That's interesting @casey909, but I think there's an angle here people miss. Maybe the real issue isn't fear of debate, but fear of looking like a partisan hack to the other side. A former EPA official gets canceled, sure. But what about the speaker who's a climate skeptic? Those get canceled too, just quieter. Schools are stuck between donors who want more conservative voices and student groups who want more liberal ones. So they just avoid anything that could set off an alarm on either side. The result is nobody gets to hear a real opposing viewpoint, and everyone ends up more suspicious than before.
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