The president of a state college in New York has been forced to issue a campus-wide apology after a campus administrator admonished a student for sharing her conservative beliefs.
According to an official statement posted on the SUNY Oswego website, President Deborah F. Stanley apologized to the campus community for an email sent by a campus administrator that indicated that SUNY Oswego did not support freedom of expression on campus.
Last month, SUNY Oswego student Nicole Miller was warned by a school administrator for speaking out against the liberal hypocrisy of preaching tolerance, but not supporting the free speech of conservatives, during an open mic night on campus.
In an email sent using the official university email server, administrator Trish DeWolf informed Wallace that some students felt “deeply hurt” by her remarks, and threatened to invoke an “unwritten policy” where further complaints by other students may result in her being asked not to perform at future open mic night events.
“It was brought to my attention that students were uncomfortable with the letter that Nicole read during open mic last week,” DeWolf wrote in the email. “The unwritten policy has always been after one complaint, you receive a verbal warning and any complaint after that may result in being asked to not perform at open mic. I’ve already had to utilize this unwritten rule once this semester.”
In an email to Red Alert Politics, Miller expressed her gratitude to her university president for reaching out and reassuring her that SUNY Oswego fully supports the free speech of all students on campus.
“I’m glad that I was able to sit down and talk with her about this incident,” said Miller. “It show’s [sic] that she really does care about the campus environment and that students safety and rights are being protected, no matter who you are.“
The university president wrote: “While our employee acknowledged the speaker’s free speech rights and did not literally issue a reprimand, sanction or prohibition, the words used were of a nature that were easily interpreted as limiting the speaker’s freedom of expression,” said Stanley. “That is neither in accordance with our policy nor with our widely communicated and published commitment to free speech.”
Miller also noted that she did not use any obscene language or profanity during her performance, but told Red Alert that “there is often profanity in poems and performances speaking in opposition of conservative values, police, and so on.”
