Feminist Professor Sally Jacobson Redefines Free Speech

Some of the feminists at the Northern Kentucky University have been acting a bit goofy of late, even by leftist standards. When a pro-life group on the campus erected a field of crosses as a memorial to aborted fetuses, English professor Sally Jacobsen encouraged the women in one of her graduate classes to take action. About ten students led by Dr. Jacobsen proceeded to rip up all of the offending crosses and dump them in various trashcans around campus. The act was caught on tape, and Jacobsen was quickly identified. What’s really bizarre here is not just that this event occurred, but the justification offered by Jacobsen:

“I did, outside of class during the break, invite students to express their freedom-of-speech rights to destroy the display if they wished to.”

OK. But didn’t she feel bad in retrospect, considering that the pro-life group had gone through the long process of getting university approval for the display, and then devoted considerable amounts of time and money to erecting it?

“Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it. Some of my students felt the same way, just outraged.”

So when someone feels outraged, it gives them the right to destroy property. Sounds like the basis for a stable society to me.

When it became clear that the authorities were planning on pressing charges against Dr. Jacobsen, and that the pro-life student group intended to sue her, the offending professor did an about face and offered an apology. The apology seems rather disingenuous when one considers that around the same time Jacobsen sent off an e-mail to the students involved in the vandalism urging them to avoid talking to the police, saying “If you have not yet been interrogated, you do not have to talk to them without an attorney. You can make it hard to find you.” She also incorrectly advised them that "The well-funded Right to Life groups that are pushing for this need felony convictions, I believe, in order to file civil suits for damages." Unfortunately for her, no criminal conviction is needed for a person or group to file a civil suit.

As you might expect, the right-wing blogs have been having a field day with this. Dr. Jacobson’s name and phone number have been removed from the campus directory, probably as the result of the harassment and threats she no doubt received from all the pro-life fanatics out there. The school administration handled the situation surprisingly responsibly, removing Dr. Jacobsen from the classroom and declaring that she will retire at the end of this semester (though whether she had already planned her retirement or had it pushed on her by the administration is unclear).

The interesting thing to note here is that in America, the only places you will find lefties displaying this level of complete craziness are the San Francisco bay area and college campuses. Were it not for academia, ideological freaks like Sally Jacobsen, Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky would probably only be able to find gainful employment as the conspiracy-spouting weirdo at your local head shop.