“CATHOLIC” ST. ANSELM COLLEGE BANS PEOPLE FOR GETTING DEATH THREATS~SO WHY WASN’T STUDENT WHO GOT DEATH THREATS EXPELLED?

 
 DiSalvo and the latte-sipping Levesque: unable to implement basic
security measures, or just Leftist ideological thugs and foes of free
discourse?

 Saint Anselm College, as seen from above | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
 
 http://images.f169bbs.com/content/2015-10/gonts-does-lauren-rose-batchelder-tickle-your-fancy-25727.jpg
 http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/wp-content/uploads/plant-bush-trump.jpg
 http://rabidrepublicanblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Lauren-Batchelder-Political-Groupie.jpg

http://images.hngn.com/data/images/full/146842/student-lauren-rose-batchelder.png?w=650
“CATHOLIC” ST. ANSELM COLLEGE BANS PEOPLE FOR GETTING DEATH THREATS~SO WHY WASN’T STUDENT WHO GOT DEATH THREATS EXPELLED?
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
 
 “Catholic” college sticks up for pro-abortion Trump foe. My latest in FrontPage:
 

According to a fawning profile
in New Hampshire’s Union Leader Sunday, after Lauren Batchelder, a
student at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, questioned
Donald Trump at a Republican candidates’ debate about equal pay for
women and abortion rights, Trump outed her on Twitter as a staffer for
Jeb Bush – whereupon, Batchelder claims, she received death threats from
all over the country. “Campus security at Saint Anselm was incredibly
supportive, she said” – which is ironic, since if Saint Anselm
administrators had been consistent, Batchelder would have been expelled:
in an ugly demonstration of how only the Leftist point of view is
acceptable on campuses nationwide these days, Saint Anselm last year
banned me from the campus on the pretext that I have received death
threats.
Saint Anselm claims to be a Catholic college, but it is actually just
another center for Leftist indoctrination, with a veneer of Pope
Francis-type Catholicism. Batchelder’s pro-abortion stance didn’t
trouble them at all – but my own opposition to jihad terror, violating
as it does so many politically correct shibboleths, troubled them a
great deal.
The sorry story unfolded this way. Several years ago, a student group
invited me to speak at Saint Anselm. The event was going ahead and
posters were being put up advertising the talk when Saint Anselm’s
then-President, Father Jonathan DeFelice, O.S.B., canceled my
appearance, reportedly citing complaints he had received from Muslim
students at the school. Islamic groups, like their Leftist allies, share
a taste for shutting down their foes rather than engaging their ideas,
and Fr. DeFelice was happy to oblige them.
The following year, after Fr. DeFelice was replaced as President of
the college by Dr. Steven R. DiSalvo, and Saint Anselm’s philosophy
department tried again to get me on campus, inviting me to be the guest
speaker at a symposium. But DiSalvo nixed that appearance as well.
Several Saint Anselm professors balked at this, complaining to DiSalvo
that colleges were supposed to be centers of free inquiry and
intellectual engagement, and that he was acting contrary to what
institutions of higher learning were supposed to be all about by banning
points of view in line with political correctness.
Cornered, DiSalvo found an excuse: he was all for free inquiry and
unpopular opinions (the unpopular question in my case being the rather
obvious point that Islam is not really a religion of peace), but he just
couldn’t allow me to speak on campus because I had received death
threats. He explained that, were I to be present on campus, Saint Anselm
students would be endangered – what if a violent extremist were to
burst onto campus while I was speaking?
Absurd. Since I first began receiving death threats, I have spoken at
universities nationwide, including UCLA, Temple, Penn State, UNC, UVA,
Dartmouth, DePaul University, SUNY in both Binghamton and Stony Brook,
Brown, Cal Poly, and many, many others. When people who have threatened
appear in public, they generally are in the company of security
personnel who are equipped and prepared to deal with any incident. Why
Saint Anselm considered any kind of security arrangements to be
inadequate, DiSalvo didn’t explain, leaving open the question: why is
Saint Anselm College so much more unsafe than all other campuses? Other
colleges and universities nationwide can and do host speakers who have
been threatened, and take measures to ensure everyone’s safety. Saint
Anselm, by its own admission, can’t do that.
But as implausible as it was, DiSalvo stuck with his security excuse.
And so, on one swing back up to New England last summer, however, I was
asked to appear on a Fox News show, but a Fox producer told me that I
couldn’t do the segment from the Videolink at Saint Anselm’s New
Hampshire Institute of Politics (NHIOP), as she had been told that I was
not welcome to use the Videolink there. This was based on the same
pretext: because I have received death threats, my presence constituted a
danger to the students.
Since I doubt that everyone who has received death threats is banned
from Saint Anselm College (and indeed, Donald Trump spoke there after
receiving highly publicized death threats over his proposed Muslim
immigration moratorium), I went to the college to try to find out why,
only to be violently confronted by a security guard, James Stankiewicz,
who became hysterical and unhinged, and assaulted me when I asked him
mildly if the NHIOP received public funding. I was then banned from
going onto the campus altogether, on pain of arrest. When I wrote
politely to Neil Levesque, the head of the NHIOP, which was directly
responsible for the ban, asking for information about why I was banned
and for a list of who else had been banned from campus for receiving
death threats, he had a corrupt cop from the Goffstown, New Hampshire
police department threaten me with arrest if I contacted Levesque again.
This is how a Leftist “institution of higher learning” deals with
dissenting points of view these days. Only one point of view is allowed:
when I received death threats, I was banned from Saint Anselm College,
but when Lauren Batchelder received death threats, she received
protection from the same college, even though her opinions oppose its
stated principles — but not from contemporary Leftist
fashion. Batchelder can only hope she doesn’t get Jim Stankiewicz mad.
What is happening at Saint Anselm College is happening at colleges
and universities all over the country nowadays: deviate from the
hard-Left line, and you will be brutalized, roughed up, and threatened
with arrest. The idea that Saint Anselm College or any similar
institution in the U.S. today is actually an institute of higher
learning, rather than simply an indoctrination center for the
authoritarian Left, operated by thugs with no respect for civil
discourse, is absurd.
Saint Anselm College, like so many other outposts of American
academia, has swiftly descended from the days when ideas could be
entertained and dismissed on their merits alone. But as ridiculous as it
is, the contention of DiSalvo and Levesque that those who have been
threatened should not venture onto campus should be taken at face value.
Anyone else who has received death threats and goes to Saint Anselm
should know that there they are exposed and vulnerable. Who wants to be
on a campus that claims that it can’t take elementary security measures?
It’s high time to drain the swamp, in academia as well as in the political realm.