Captain's Quarters -

This is where the student should hire a team of lawyers and sue the university for 20 million dollars. Such occasions where a student is not given the right to speak out or write a letter are ripe for a lawsuit.

It must be noted that this just goes to prove that the Left does not like to be challenged in their illogical way of thinking. Some examples: Where has Marxism been effective? Yet the Left continues to push for Marxism. Right to carry laws have proven that guns in the hands of the law abiding actually decrease crime. Yet the left wants to ban them from legal purchase. High taxation actually hurts the poor, since Communist countries generally have the poorest people around, and in the highest numbers. Yet the Left asks to squash wealth at every turn.

The Left simply cannot deal with the fact that we will not be silenced, certainly not without a fight, and fight we shall.

As God doesn't exist in their minds, They assume, in their own minds Godliness. To disagree is Heresy. Your post is an offense against their Godhood. I like it.

Masculinity combined with bravery, is SO FOREIGN to some people that they get nervous when they encounter it. It's part of a general anti-male bigotry, with a strong bias against associating superiority with the physical. Men win the physical contest, so the concept of winning by force is just repulsive to some. Winning by force: obviously unfair to women. I don't know why they can't see that firearms make women more equal, not less equal, but they don't. Firearms are just too associated with maleness, I guess.

This is a sad (and not the only) byproduct of the academia at our Universities being uniformly “Leftistos” and “Democratos”, no diversity here. In fact many Universities become nothing more, than some little Socialistic Republic of This, or That, poisoning minds of young generation in the process.
As I said before, these Augean Stables should be cleaned out, but this one is also a Herculean task...

Mr. Scheffler challenged the authoritarian nature of the school's administration. He wasn't obsequious enough when he offered his unsolicited thoughts on the subject of campus security, twice. Such insensitivity to the signal sent by the administration (silence in response to his first email) was enough to convince the weaklings in the administration that he must be culled from the herd.

Too often today so called liberals are demanding "re-education" for any who oppose them. They will admit to no rational ground to stand against their wishes. To oppose their agenda is, they feel, evidence of an "unbalanced" mind.

It is a short step from here to the psychopharmalogical "neutralization" of dissent.

A thought criminal, and a hate criminal to boot! Speech criminal, too...

Seriously, it seems outrageous. If he said something more threatening elsewhere in his letter, some kind of response was perhaps warranted (like, how about an interview with someone in the administration to discuss the substance of the letters? Would that be such a bad idea?)

"Insanity offense" captures it masterfully. This is largely about the use of "psychological concerns" about an individual as a pretext to disappear them and pre-empt a true debate. Psychology has such potential (e.g., it could have detected the intentions of any number of mass murderers in time) but is also a malleable tool of the state (and to a lesser degree private institutions) and, if used as such, can be used to shut virtually anyone down based on an elastic interpretation of certain speech or certain conduct.

Viewed through the right lens, most if not all) of us will satisfy some DSM criteria for some recognized form of pathology. As such, psychology is an easy way to hurdle due process and individual rights under the pretense of "protection". It is all too easy (and common) to smear your political detractors as deranged when you've got governmental or institutional clout behind you.

Also, notice that no psychological professional seems to have signed off on the threat posed by the student here. They just needed to invoke the "concern" and use the right language. This is an extremely dangerous game and it is played everywhere in our society.

I wonder if we're hearing all of this story. It could be that the email he sent had some threats in it, in which case the school was being cautious. But in that case, you'd expect the school to be making noise about that.

It will be interesting to see this one play out.

Certainly a private institution has the right to set its own rules subject to legal restraints. That said, the university and the student have a contractual agreement: you pay the tuition and we provide the education. The arbitrary breach of this agreement is, I believe, a tort.

I thought a tort was a sort of layer cake...

I strongly object to placing an armed police officer on the campus. What if he should go mad? Or decide to play Marshall Dillon? What if he's drunk? The students and faculty would in jeopardy!

I mean, isn't this what we're told when somebody suggests allowing airline pilots to be armed? Or, God forbid, common citizens?

Cap'n Ed wrote:

What happened to all of that caring and coping? Hamline stood ready to treat its entire student body as victims, offering all sorts of free and presumably anonymous counseling and "coping" assistance. When one of them challenged that status, they use the same mechanism to humiliate and punish him. Either Stern has never read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or he has only done so as a do-it-yourself guide to political correctness and punishment for its violators.

Given the libs' collective admiration for communist thugs like Che, Castro, Mugabe, Mao and Stalin, I'd say it's more likely the latter than the former.

He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.

He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed - would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper - the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

It was always at night - the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vapourized was the usual word.

George Orwell
1984

Isn't it ironic that the lefties who go into hysterics over the Patriot Act have no problem using stalinist tactics against people who disagree with them?

Sounds like Scheffler needs to contact www.thefire.org and have Hamine seriously smacked-down.