By claiming that Bill O’Reilly is ignorant of the First Amendment, University President Dave Frohnmayer has shown just how out of touch he is both with the Bill of Rights and the situation at hand (“O’Reilly says UO president should be fired,” ODE, May 18).
By withdrawing funding from The Insurgent, no rights would be violated. If the members of its staff can find funds to continue publication, they can and should have every right to keep the paper alive.
Forcing students to fund, and by extension endorse, The Insurgent is by no means an issue regarding freedom of the press. Instead, it is an unjust allocation of funds that should be going to benefit the entire University population, not push the agenda of an extremist political group.
The claim that the issue can’t even be discussed because senators would have to be “viewpoint neutral” is ludicrous. When a publication is intended simply to offend, the specific content of the paper is unimportant. People will always have viewpoints, and the issue of funding to The Insurgent is one that must be discussed.
When the University forces its students to pay for a publication, it must make a distinction between those that foster intelligent discourse and those that only degrade it. A Neo-Nazi publication would never be tolerated, or more importantly, funded. Why should this?