Cat sends in this very detailed letter from Emory President James Wagner concerning the eight individuals who were arrested on the Emory quad on April 20th.  I’ll post the full letter after the jump, but I want to highlight a portion of it here.

What is at stake is the right of members of our academic community to hear from each other, determine the validity of what they hear, and then respond in a way that guarantees that their own response will be respected. That right to come to a conclusion and live by it, even when differences cannot be fully resolved, is violated when one side in an argument insists that only its perspective is correct, and that it is worth disrupting the life of the community in an attempt for its perspective to win out. That represents its own form of coercion, which shouts down every reasonable counter-argument rather than allowing room for either debate or the resolution of debate–even if the resolution is to agree to disagree. Those who employ such coercive practices deny to others the privileges of engagement in the academic community and risk the consequences of losing those privileges for themselves.

I don’t pretend to know many of the details surrounding these protests and the arrests, but you’ll never see me argue with the point made above.  To again quote Thomas Carlyle, “The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.”.

Full letter below. Read the rest of this entry »