At a 2015 town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, President Barack Obama offered an impassioned defense of college as a place where open debate and free speech should be treasured.
Fast forward to this year at UC San Diego, where theater major Savanah Lyon has created an online petition campaign--with 20,000-plus signatures so far--to get UC San Diego to cancel a class devoted to the films of Woody Allen.
This is not a defense of Allen, but it's unfortunate no UC San Diego official is ready to echo Obama, or go where UC Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky went when he observed, "it would be frightening if campuses were making decisions based on the personalities and wrongdoings of people rather than the academic merit of the course."
The university should be able to offer the course, just as students have a right not to enroll in it. Let the debate over this course take place on campus.
Editorial on 02/23/2018