Desmond Tutu didn’t win the Nobel Prize for saying things that people wanted to hear; he won for saying things people needed to hear.

Suppressing free speech is not a virtue for a university, it is a characteristic of authoritarian governments.

Some of the more strident Jewish-lobby activists I know seem unable to fathom the actual relationship between the U.S. and Israel: allies. Our nations are not identical. They are not even “siblings” in a metaphorical sense. It is most certainly possible for the interests of Israel and the interests of the U.S. to diverge. But for a Catholic university to tweak its speaker schedule to omit one of the great human rights figures of our time, and to punish a professor for communicating with him, in the name of some assumed offense taken by the Jewish community, seems quite extreme to me. It certainly defies any notion of academic freedom I can imagine.

I suppose there is a constitutional right to be a fool, even a damned fool. But I wish fewer people… and institutions… would exercise that right.

justice and peace studies, eh? i see they recently hosted a workshop [conversational judo? really?] on non-violent communication, in which they were supposed to learn “how to communicate across polarized differences gracefully.”