PUBLIC MARKS from McDonna with tag censorship

These self-perpetuating closed ideological shops are -- to Canada's enormous moral and cultural cost --churning out highly politicized graduates incapable of autonomous thought, and ignorant of other perspectives. But all the king's horses and all the king's men won't fix the academy without a paradigm shift in the larger culture. Apart from a small contingency of embattled conservative and libertarian academics within the universities, along with the lonely gadfly Society for Academic Freedom in Scholarship ( www.safs.ca) and a modest phalanx of media contrarians, few Canadians (certainly not parents, donors and trustees) seem to understand that the civilizational self-doubt flowing from the degradation of a classic liberal education is the plaque in our national arteries.

UPEI President Wade MacLaughlan says publishing the cartoons is "an invitation to trouble. "We still run the property," MacLaughlan says, "and we're not in the business of deliberately inviting people to be insulted to the point of causing an outrage." This has to be one of the most pathetic examples of craven capitulation I have ever heard of. What a great way to tell Islamists that rioting and murder get results. Unbelievable! The only reason I'm aware of this blatant instance of fear induced censorship is because of an anonymous blog named DontAxe. The site contains a number of readings and background documents on the UPEI cartoon issue, and is well worth a look.