Written by Robert Spencer

I spoke to a packed house of over 300 students at Brown in October 2007; there were a few louts in the back trying to shout me down, and the question period was full of the usual self-righteous and ignorant Leftist rants that one expects on college campuses these days, but I was able to make myself heard. Now it looks as if things have gotten much worse at Brown -- and, I suspect, at campuses all over the country. Leftist and Islamic supremacist students imitate the Nazi brownshirts of the early 1930s, who would show up at lectures by anti-Nazi professors and shout them down, sometimes roughing them up as well. Instead of standing up to this, then as now university officials let it happen. In this case, Brown professor Marion Orr even asked the thuggish neo-brownshirts for a list of speakers who would be acceptable to them, after wistfully saying: "I thought that you all, my Brown students, would challenge him in a fundamental kind of way. I don’t think he could’ve withstood it if you guys had challenged him in that kind of way. There’s no way he could have stood up to it. That’s what I wanted you all to do.”

Orr is out of sync with the times. University students don't challenge opinions with which they disagree anymore. They don't engage rationally. Nor do Leftists and Islamic supremacists in general. Instead, they just shout down their opponents, or get their events shut down, while smearing them with all manner of ad hominems. If Orr wants a rational debate, he will have to leave academia.

"Brown Prof apologizes for inviting Ray Kelly," by William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, October 31 (thanks to Anne Crockett):

We previously have reported... http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/11/brown-university-prof-apologizes-for-i...