I had hoped to come right over to the computer after I left Mike Adams's lecture on MC's campus, but this is my parents' computer and the hour was late, so I gave the geezer and the old bat the respectful privacy they deserve, & went to my own home to watch tv & think (those 2 activities don't always go together, but they did last night).
I was very pleased to see that the message Dr. Adams brought was about positive actions and guaranteeing freedoms, just as he propounds in his regular column. His first message was, if your campus has pursued actions which go against the Constitution, then students, faculty, and community may pursue certain avenues to guarantee correction of the problems. In other words, if faculty/administration are violating your rights to free speech, free assembly, free expression of religion, or any other right listed in the Bill of Rights, you can fight back. Adams offered his 3-point method of shedding light on the fungus of oppression: (1) take it to the court of public opinion, (2) take it to a court of law, and as a last option, (3) work toward a donor boycot.
As a former faculty brat, and as a friend to several faculty and admin people today, I can attest to the fact that college administrators fear that last, nuclear option the most.
The second message was the harder one, for most people: he encouraged cooperation.
Apparently, one of the faculty members from the poli-sci department had a serious hearing problem, because she absolutely missed that message. She came to the speech with (it appeared) a prepared speech already in hand and her own soapbox under foot. Sadly, her diatribe lacked any bearing upon the issues Mike Adams had chosen for his speech, and also lacked coherence and civility. Most of us in the audience (and, it seems, Dr. Adams), were embarrassed by her display, and several people, unfortunately, lost patience with her and demanded that she ask her question instead of delivering a speech. Under their breaths, I heard a couple of people nearby refer to her conduct as a "tantrum", and Adams, too, compared it to the behavior of a six-year-old who wasn't getting her way. I was grateful when, just a little bit later, one of the students spoke up to say that he was a Democrat, and he greatly appreciated all of what Dr. Adams had said. I would not want to walk away thinking that the ravings of a spoiled elitist were supported by all Democrat students (I'd like to think that most of the students at my alma mater were bright enough to avoid being sucked in by that sort of thing, but I'd be delusional if I did. We're all naive, at one time or another. Even I once believed socialism could work).
I'd love to have Mike Adams return to campus in the near future, under greater financial support, as well as support from the townsfolk -- there was virtually NO advertising of this event, other than a handful of flyers posted on campus bulletin boards (which, I learned, were more than the Campus Republicans could afford, since they'd blown their entire budget just getting Adams here). I had to practically jump through hoops to find out time and place, once I saw mention at the end of his Town Hall column a month ago. Nobody seems to know why, exactly, there was nothing in any of the regional papers, and nothing on the home page of the campus website -- you had to scroll through the calendar to find the name, time, place... nothing more. I sent a query to the head of the Public Relations office, and will update when I learn more.
UPDATE, thursday 15.47 hrs: Jeff Rankin (head of MC's PR office) assures me that there is nothing nefarious about the lack of publicity. It was simply a case of not receiving useful information with enough time to release it to the waiting press. There **was** a sense of last-minute quality to much of the Campus Republicans work (it had, I am told by a faculty member, a lot to do with those unsure finances).
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