TO THE EDITOR:
I am surprised by your editorial Was No One Else Free? on Nov. 10.
You seem to distinguish among speakers on the basis of their associations and “expertise.”
You conclude, with baffling circularity, that campus speakers should be held “to the same standard as our university.”
What is that recommended standard if, as you seem to imply, it may be rationed according to a capricious measure of worthiness?
Your masthead boasts “125 years of editorial freedom,” but you hint at a standard that narrows freedom if and when we dislike or deplore its origins and content.
The current editors of the DTH are too young to recall the long, dreary battle of the 1960s against a restrictive law banning “known communists” from the UNC campus.
It was almost certainly conceived by the late Jesse Helms to punish student and faculty civil rights demonstrators.
The nominal protection of students from communism was a mere smokescreen and the law was correctly identified as a gross abridgment of academic freedom.
