Distinguished Dartmouth Alum a Proponent of Campus Free Speech
by Jim Brown
May 14, 2004
(AgapePress) - A famous alumnus of Dartmouth College wants to end free-speech restrictions at the New Hampshire school.T.J. Rodgers (Class of 1970) is a candidate for the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, and also president, CEO, and director of Cypress Semiconductor Corporation, a California-based company that reported $836 million in revenues last year. He says free speech is limited on the Dartmouth campus in multiple ways.
For example, Rodgers notes that members of the school's Board of Trustees -- with the exception of the chairman -- are not allowed to express their dissenting opinions. He says he would like to see that change.
"The first thing I'd be interested in is simply [allowing] all views to be brought to bear and discussed in the campus, and not have fear that there would be some sort of problem if your view is unpopular with the current administration," Rodgers says.
The school alumnus says one of the reasons he became a trustee candidate was to fight against multi-culturalism and phony diversity on a campus with faculty and staff that are overwhelmingly liberal.
"At the other side of the spectrum, there's a conservative newspaper on campus -- and that newspaper has been attacked for years by the administration," Rogers shares. "The most recent attack [prevented the newspaper] from being delivered to the dormitories by declaring it to be an advertisement rather than a newspaper."
The Cypress CEO says when he was at Dartmouth, there were fairly conservative-reigning views on campus, and Vietnam War demonstrators were in the minority. But now, he says, there are "all kinds of attacks" on dissenting views -- "and in today's world, they happen to be conservative dissenting views against liberal, majority views," he says.
Rodgers says a Dartmouth students was recently subjected to a lecture in English class on the so-called "racism" inherent in BandAids. The student, he says, was given the choice of disagreeing or being graded by someone who thinks he is a racist.
