@MyOdyssey – I don’t even know where to start. You seem particularly hung up on what you see as the vandalism aspect of this affair. But the protests and Wagner’s statement had everything to do with political speech, and were only parenthetically about the chalking/vandalism. Do you think that the protesters would have been any less strident if some Emory students had organized a pro-Trump rally on campus? If pro-Trump students had handed out pro-Trump leaflets? The claim would be that by allowing a rally or leaflets the university had caused fear and pain to be felt by their most vulnerable students. Etc., etc. It’s not about the chalkings. It’s about the expression of opinions.
Free speech means that the university shouldn’t regulate political speech based on the content. The protesters want certain forms of political speech to be banned. Speakers who think that ‘rape culture’ is baloney and that men should get due process in ‘rape’ accusations should be banned because their speech causes pain to ‘victims.’ Pro-Israel speakers must be banned because their speech threatens Palestinian students. It goes on and on. They ARE trying to censor speech. In this case @krzysmis (and I) think that the protesters are a bunch of idiots and babies, but we’re not saying they don’t have the right to protest. We’re saying that their protests should be ignored by the administration. We’re not denying their right to protest, although I’m not sure what gives them the right to storm into the president’s office like a bunch of unhappy two-year olds.
As many of the articles I’ve posted point out, lots of folks on the left side of the political spectrum have ridiculed Wagner for his position in this fiasco. This one is pretty clear.