Left-Right

FIRE’s Harvey Silverglate on policing speech and the redefinition of “liberal”:

The thing that makes me laugh the most is that I am considered a right-winger by people on the academic left. Only people on the academic left are sufficiently narrow-minded to call me a right-winger. In fact, I’m a liberal, but I’m a civil libertarian liberal, an old-fashioned liberal, who not only believes in the decent society that helps its most unfortunate members survive, but who also happens to believe in freedom. So much of the left today doesn’t believe in liberty, especially the academic left. There’s something wrong with calling the academic left liberalism – they’re not liberals at all. They’re really leftist totalitarians.

If that last line strikes you as unfair, you may want to revisit this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or… hell, just click the tag marked academia.