The Cost of War

I was inspired by our conversation to look for soldiers' points of views. This is a selection from a film produced by New Spark Media, which according to their website was formed "in response to the increasing consolidation and conglomeration of media outlets and the marginalization of independent media." What do you think?

An interesting example...

I regularly browse higher education blogs to keep abreast of things happening on other campuses and I came across this story about how Georgetown Law School (a Jesuit school) would not support a student's internship with Planned Parenthood because it did not want to fund advocacy for abortion rights. What is interesting to me was how the student raised the question of inconsistency at the university. Here's a quote from her:

“If Georgetown wants to be a Catholic University it has the freedom to identify as such,” she said. “If the school wants to abide by Catholic doctrine it should do so consistently and prevent all activities the Church disagrees with. This includes prosecutors’ offices that impose the death penalty, gay rights organizations, political candidates and judges that hold positions that disagree with the Catholic church, military law organizations and human rights organizations (the majority of which support reproductive rights, as well).

“When we apply to Georgetown Law, the most you hear about the Jesuit tradition is that [the school] supports students doing work in the public interest,” she added. “If I ever knew that taking part in women’s rights issues would lead to a chilling effect, I don’t know if I would have ever considered coming here"

This really got me thinking about the public/private divide we have been discussing this semester. I guess if you pay to go to a private school you need to accept some "chilling" of speech. Does that mean you have to agree with everything the institution holds dear? Where is the room for dissent and development of new ideas? Now I attended a Catholic law school as well and I remember two things about that experience related to this student's experience. There were crosses in some of the classrooms and I had one law professor who was a priest. He did not wear clerical garb to teach, but I often wondered whether he did elsewhere. I don't recall feeling like I could not speak about certain issues because it was a Catholic school but I do recall how some Jewish colleagues did notice things more than I did at the time.

Even though the Georgetown example is about a private school--and there have been private schools around a long time, I come back to the idea of whether illustrates what can happen when speech becomes more "privatized." If you control (or own) the space where speech/expression can occur, you have much more power to control what expression happens there (or is promoted off campus!) Yet, there are limits. While we all make choices where to go to school or where to work, isn't there some danger here that the fewer public spaces we have the less speech we may see? What do others think about this?