Harvard Prof Says Students in the Military Keep Silent About Service to Avoid Backlash From Classmates
“they think it’s better if they don’t tell their classmates or their faculty members before that they are members of the military”
Why would students in the military need to keep quiet about it? Democrat leaders like Biden always claim to support our military.
FOX News reports:
Harvard professor says military members keep service quiet to avoid backlash from classmates
A Harvard professor warned Thursday that service members feel hesitant to disclose their military status to their classmates, bolstering the institution’s “abysmal” free speech ranking recently handed over by a First Amendment nonprofit.
“I’ve had military veterans that are enrolled here at Harvard College tell me that they think it’s better if they don’t tell their classmates or their faculty members before that they are members of the military,” Kit Parker, a bioengineering professor, told “Fox & Friends First.”
“Obviously, it’s impacting the way we design and deliver courses to our students. I think it’s up to the faculty member ultimately as to how much risk they want to assume when they teach a course, or they make a public statement.”
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a group supporting free speech and religious liberty, recently gave Harvard an “Abysmal” speech climate rating with, in the group’s words, a “generous” 0.00 score.
“[The] actual score is -10.69,” FIRE said.
Parker, meanwhile, said some students are concerned about speaking out in class and feeling others’ wrath on social media later, while adding that, despite the ranking, conditions at the university “ultimately support free speech or academic freedom” and it’s up to faculty members to decide if they want to take the risk of exercising that freedom.
“Academic freedom is one of the most important supporting values of the pursuit of excellence. If you think about colleges, the goal here is not really a state of accomplishment when you go to college, as indicated by a diploma. It’s about a state of mind that’s demonstrated by an openness to novel ideas and their supporting arguments,” said Parker, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who served in Afghanistan.
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Comments
Nothing all that new. Post Vietnam, many of us kept quiet about being either in the military, or being veterans or members of the Reserves. I heard many disgusting comments from faculty and classmates about those who were “outed.”
Right. In all fairness, even in the late ’60s and early ’70s, many ROTC students even at MIT chose to minimize peer knowledge of that association. It was a college thing, and it never really went away after Vietnam.
No surprise that Harvard received the lowest score for free speech. Their admissions people select the most woke and verbal applicants who have learned that speaking out and complaining will be rewarded.
Does anybody know whether this phenomenon exist in any other nation in the world? Now ,or in past history?
Until the 20th Century, in many nations a young man “gently born” could go straight into the military as a junior officer without a college degree or any training beyond the three R’s (what my father considered a solid 8th-grade education), and it was unheard of for a veteran to go back to school with boys several years younger than him.
In some communist societies, veterans of the defeated order didn’t have much time to suffer public disapprobation, as they were disposed of directly. It’s definitely a commie thing.