It doesn't happen very much any more, but stories used to surface about some isolated school or school district, usually in the South, conducting formal collective prayers. Usually, some small town, where everyone attends a few local churches, doesn't see the harm in a modest measure of collective religious instruction and ceremony, even in a public school context. Inevitably, a newcomer moves in and complains. If a school does not adjust its policies, the courts instruct the offending school to cease conducting prayers. While it is not possible to peer with a high degree of certainty into people's hearts, it is usually the case that these small town schools did not deliberately set out to offend anyone. It is just by living in a religiously uniform environment they had not developed the habits of recognizing that others might believe differently.
By contrast, the last place one would expect to see intolerance and the inability to recognize the peaceful existence of alternative ideas ought to be a modern university. A college or university ought to be an intellectual free-fire zone. While all ideas may not be universally accepted and certainly do not all have the same merit, they all have the right to be expressed and examined in the crucible of thoughtful debate. Furthermore, one would expect that the administration of any university would be particularly careful to insure that the ethos of open inquiry is maintained, free of intimidation. Lately it appears that at some universities an environment of intimidation prevails for ideas that are not in current favor. One such place is California Polytechnic State University.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), on November 12, 2002, Steve Hinkle, a member of the Cal Poly College Republicans (CPCP) was going around campus posting fliers inviting students and faculty to a speech by the author of It's OK to Leave the Plantation, by Mason Weaver. Mr. Weaver is a black man whose thesis is that the reliance of black Americans on government programs creates a dependency broadly analogous to slavery. Mr. Weaver's speech was an officially sponsored campus activity.
Apparently, Hinkle committed the unforgivable sin of attempting to post a flier on a public bulletin board in an open student lounge in the Cal Poly Multicultural Center. Other students objected to the posting finding the flier (the flier listed the name of the speaker, the title of his book and the time and location of the speech) offensive. Intimidated, Hinkle left without posting the flier. This did not stop students from calling the campus police about ``a suspicious white male passing out literature of an offensive racial nature.'' The police arrived, but by that time Hinkle had left.
