Stanley Fish, Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law, thinks that when Seton Hall “disinvited” him from speaking there he wasn’t being censored.
Fish’s headline, I Wasn’t Censored When I Was Disinvited, led off his claim. Then he contradicted himself with the opening sentence of his second paragraph:
My ideas were judged unworthy of being heard.
This is precisely what censorship is. Here is a legal definition of censorship:
The suppression or proscription of speech or writing that is deemed obscene, indecent, or unduly controversial.
Here’s a “civilian” definition of censor:
To examine and expurgate.
Near the end of his piece, Fish had this:
I have no right to speak at Seton Hall….
That’s a strawman argument. No one claiming he had a right to speak or that such a right was being blocked. Moreover, there’s nothing in either of those definitions about blocking a right to speak; censorship in the Seton Hall case was the blocking of speech itself, and the censors were precisely those managers of the school and the school’s pupils.
This is an example of how far left the Left has pushed what is permissible speech and how meekly folks who should know better have acquiesced in that push.