At Judeoscope, a Canadian website, there is a story about a Canadian professor who has been ordered to remove the 12 cartoons from his office door:
Philosophy professor Peter March was ordered by the administration of St. Mary’s University in Halifax, to take down cartoons from his office door. The cartoons in question are copies of the 12 Danish drawings of Mohammed manipulated by Muslim Brotherhood clerics and embattled regimes to whip up Muslim anger at the West and send infuriated Muslims on a path of death and destruction for the last few days.
The Canadian Press reports that “the administration told March to take down the cartoons because the space outside his door is considered a public place and caricatures are considered very disrespectful by many members of the Muslim community”.
That these doors are considered “public space” will come as a novelty to anyone who’s ever set foot in a university building; it has become a university tradition for professors to post on their office doors political cartoons dealing with the hot issues of the day or questions their research examinates. As to the question of disrespect, universities should not even go near there, if they want to remain, as they should, to uphold the principles of freedom of thought and free debate.
In response to this nonsense, Professor March argues he should be allowed to show the drawings to his students and added he would probably show them in his class on Thursday. “There’s a great deal in my collective agreement that says that what I am doing, which is engaging public discussion using my skills as a philosopher, is part of my job description,” he said. Indeed it is!
Judeoscope also reports that the student newspaper of another Canadian university, the University of Prince Edward Island, printed the cartoons, an offense that prompted the university administration there to “pull the paper out of circulation.”
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