Which is true?

1. Universities are a haven for free exchange of ideas where unpopular opinions should be celebrated.
2. university students are at a fragile age and need to be protected from speech that affects their self-esteem.

Defenders of Ward Churchill say that #1 is correct. Churchill's opinion that the 9-11 victims deserved death is excused as just another viewpoint.

Critics of Larry Summers go with #2. Summers is the president of Harvard who crossed a line when he suggested that some men might have inborn advantages when competing for science positions at the top of their field. An examination of what Summers said can be found here.

We like to think that #1 is the correct choice but most colleges and universities have instituted speech codes. If you use a racially charged term, or even one that is perceived to be racially charged regardless of common usage, you are subject to disciplinary action.

I suspect that the actual choice is

3. Universities have become polarized and are only open to politically correct opinions.

Consider this - Summers was suggesting possibilities. He never said that he believed that ability is gender-specific, he only threw it out as one of three points of discussion. Never the less, there is some scientific justification for this statement. The article I linked above points out that, when you chart intelligence, women tend to be clustered near the mean and men have a slightly higher number of people at the fringes - both at the high and low. If you are talking about top positions that require the top .1% of ability then men are more likely than women to qualify.

Contrast that with Churchill's ideas. There is no science involved here, only raw politics. He believes that globalization and international trade are evil. This means that anyone involved in world trade deserves to die (apparently even the maids changing sheets in the hotel in the World Trade Center).

If Churchill's statements are ok then so are Summers'. If Summers crossed a line then so did Churchill. But Churchill is the only one being defended by liberals. The only reason I can see for this is that they agree with Churchill but not Summers.

The test of free speech is not how strongly you defend the people you agree with, it is how you defend the people you don't agree with.

I think that there should be some limits on academic freedom and that Churchill is skating on the edge but Summers should be on protected grounds. My reasoning is that Summers has a basis for the ideas he threw out.

The left-wing blogs have been buzzing over a reporter named Jeff Gannon whose real name is James Guckert. This leaked into the MSM with Maureen Dowd writing a column about it.

There are several facets to the story. The first is that Gannon got admission to White House press briefings. Both Dowd and the Daily Kos had been turned down and complained loudly. What they didn't acknowledge and might not have realized is that Gannon only got day passes for specific events while they had been turned down for "hard passes" which are much harder to get.

There has also been some confusion about Gannon's first pass. He currently works for Talon News but previously worked for GOPUSA. Both news services are owned by the same person. The fact that Gannon's first pass was issued before Talon was formed has been given as an indication that something is not right. In fact, he was working for GOPUSA at the time which qualified him as a reporter.

BTW, GOPUSA has a conservative slant but no affiliation with the GOP.

The next thing was the discovery that Gannon was a pen name for James Guckert and that Guckert has some gay-oriented adult content web sites registered under his name. Dowd spent most of her column complaining about not getting a press pass while someone with gay adult web sites did. I think that there is an assumption that all Republicans hate all gays. The same attitude came through when they outed Cheney's daughter. Yes, some Republicans are intolerant of gays but I don't think that most are and Kerry admitted that his positions on gay were about the same as Bush's.

The final thing was the suggestion that Gannon/Guckert was responsible for leaking Valerie Plame's name. As it turned out, her name had already been in the press before Gannon/Guckert wrote about it.

For a complete summary of the whole affair, see here. JustOneMinute examines all of the twists and turns and shows how little there is to the story.

My favorite whipping boy Keith Olbermann also wrote about it a couple of times, most recently here. Olbermann picked up the DailyKos viewpoint that Guckert is a Karl Rove plant.

As long as I'm ragging on Olbermann, I'd like to point out his more recent column. It seems that back in December he quoted Kerry's head lawyer in Ohio as saying that Bush won. A conspiracy-minded woman took Olbermann to task for repeating such a wild accusation.

This wasn’t the first complaint email I’d ever gotten, but it was the first out of hundreds of similar tone that actually reminded me of the late Senator Moynihan’s observation that we can all have our own opinions, but we can’t all have our own facts.

I think that this is hilarious. Olbermann spent most of November and December reporting on how the election might have been fixed. He repeated statistics showing that Bush couldn't have gotten as many votes as were recorded. He quoted professors who said that it was mathematically impossible for Bush to have won (it turned out that these were grad students who didn't understand the equation that they were using). He went on at length about how a repairman must have loaded a special program to throw the recount in an Ohio county. Sometimes he posted two entries per day.

In short, he was off the deep end and he fed other people's conviction that Kerry actually won the election.

And he complains about other people's grasp of reality.

This article on TechCentralStation traces when the Democrats stopped supporting democracy. It s well done but it missed an important moment. Last April, Kerry announced that stability was more important than democracy. He even made some statements in support of Cuba's crackdown on dissidents, something to the effect that the dissidents brought it on themselves.