The College Fix . . . "In fact, Riley has spoken at dozens of colleges over the years. Here’s Mr. Riley — author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed — in his own words in The Wall Street Journal about the disinvitation:"
Students who disagree with my lectures don’t hesitate to speak out during the Q&A. The back-and-forth is spirited but civil, and I have never been shouted down or physically threatened. Still, a disinvitation at some point may have been inevitable. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which fights campus censorship, has compiled a “disinvitation database” that dates to 2000 and today includes nearly 300 incidents. According to FIRE, the “number of ‘disinvitation incidents’—i.e., efforts to prevent invited speakers from conveying their message on campus—has risen dramatically.” I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been approached by conservative students after a lecture to a mostly liberal audience and thanked, almost surreptitiously, for coming to speak. They often offer an explanation for their relative silence during question periods when liberal students and faculty are firing away. “Being too outspoken would just make it more difficult,” a Wellesley student once told me. “You get to leave when you’re done. We have to live with these people until we graduate.”
"The disinvitation problem is one symptom of a larger disease eating away at the heart of higher education. And the patient? America itself."
Jennifer Kabbany is editor of The College Fix. She previously worked as a daily newspaper reporter and columnist for a decade in Southern California, and prior to that held editorial positions at The Weekly Standard, Washington Times andFrontPageMagazine. She received a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship in 2002 and currently contributes to National Review Online's Phi Beta Cons section.
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