Columnist's 'Sheldon Award' Spotlights Campus Leaders Squelching Free Speech
by Jim Brown
May 3, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A conservative columnist has announced the latest winner of an annual mock award conferred upon "the university president who does the most to look the other way when free speech is under assault on campus." U.S. News & World Report columnist John Leo has declared a tie in this year's Sheldon Award competition. The top prize in 2006 goes to Washington State University president Lane Rawlins, who financed and organized an attempt to shut down a student play, and who also threatened to expel a student from the school's teacher education program because of his conservative religious and political views. However, Rawlins must share the honor with the other award winner this year, DePaul University president Thomas Holtschneider.
This top "honor" was conferred upon Holschneider for, among other things, having censored a campus protest against affirmative action and having suspended a teacher without a hearing for debating pro-Palestinian students on campus. Leo calls Rawlins and Holtschneider "the Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig of Sheldonism" this year.
The dubious award is named after former University of Pennsylvania president Sheldon Hackney, who did nothing about a major theft of student newspapers on his campus. In that incident, Leo points out, "minority students got so angry at an editorial in their paper [that] they stole 15,000 copies, and Hackney let them go, but he reprimanded the guard who caught them. I thought that was an amazing touch."
Now, the U.S. News & World Report editorialist notes, "every time a university president exceeds all boundaries by allowing unconstitutional speech codes or theft of newspapers, I give an annual award -- a mock honor -- to the failing university president."
According to Leo, the conservative viewpoint is nearly always the one that gets punished, censored, or silenced on campuses across the U.S. "Every year," he says, "I look for liberal and moderate victims of this, and they're very hard to find because, as you probably know, the university has been taken over by the 60s radicals, and they don't like dissent on the right."
Both of the latest Sheldon Award "winners" have repeatedly attempted to censor the expression of conservative students, Leo asserts, and both have failed to stand up for the constitutional rights of members of their campus communities. For that reason, he contends, both Holtschneider and Rawlins are equally worthy of the award for this year's most "spineless" university president.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
