Students at the University of Southern California are protesting sweatshop-made school merchandise. Boing Boing has a good take on this:
The students from SCALE — the anti-sweatshop group — tell me that the last time they protested, they were thrown out of the “free speech zone” by a security guard who told them they had “too many people for the free speech zone.”
It’s shameful for the university to buy sweatshop goods, and doubly shameful for the administration to betray the principles of free speech and free inquiry that are supposed to be uppermost in the academy. What a crummy civics lesson to impart to our students: “get in the box and shut up.”
Or, the box exists so that the University can tell people what they’re allowed to say by disallowing free speech outside the box and regulating who can enter the box.
Both major corporate-funded political parties had “free speech zones” at their national conventions.
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