I'm pretty tired of my friends and others like Barbara Streisand on the Left telling me that the Right stifles free speech and protest becuase Republicans don't allow liberals to disrupt their private events.

On a related note to prove the opposite, there's an undisputed trend on university campuses, the most influential centers of American teaching and thought, not to prevent free speech per se but by punishing speech they don't like and refusing to punish those who initimidate others.

Critical letter circulates among profs

Richetti sent the letter to express his discontent with statements made by the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, in an article in the New York Times this past Sunday.

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(I have posted the statements here)

"It is possible to be decisive and not sound decisive," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "People who speak in sentences that contain parenthetical phrases, people who begin a sentence and then deflect to add a series of illustrative examples before they end the sentences" do not seem authoritative, she said. "The language of decisiveness is subject, verb, object, end sentence."

Equally important to Mr. Kerry, she said, is to refrain from using words like "gilded" and "panoply" at the lectern, as he has on the stump.

"Words found on the SAT verbal exam," she added, "should not appear in candidate's speeches."

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"The theory of communication she enunciates is in my view nothing less than Hitlerian and [endorses] demagoguery of a pernicious kind with appalling complacency," his letter concluded.

While admitting that "there is some truth in what [Jamieson] is saying," Richetti warned that this type of analysis is "condescending not only to the electorate but to democracy."

Calling himself a "rabid anti-Bush Kerry supporter," Richetti acknowledges that he is hardly non-partisan.

"I think [George W.] Bush is the worst president the U.S. has ever had," he said, "and I've been through a lot of them."

Imagine despising a colleague so much that you felt you needed to send a note to everyone in your department criticizing them as basically Hitler's disciple. How dare she criticize John Kerry's speaking style. I bet she doesn't try that again!

I did not see anything in the article about a response from the University.