Daily Cal Editorial Garbled
Today’s Daily Cal Editorial discussing the “federal court ruling allowing law schools to ban military recruiters from their campus” never comes out and takes a stand on the issue. First, Berkeley is chastised for its policy that, “aids and abets the efforts of the military on campus.” because of the military’s discrimination against gays and lesbians in the services.

Then, in the three concluding paragraphs, the Daily Cal makes their argument, which as far as I can tell goes something like this:

We support free speech, and don’t support groups that don’t support free speech, but we do support the free speech of those groups (but not too much free speech). Furthermore, we shouldn’t tolerate discriminatory organizations.

Then there is this:

If the United States military tomorrow became an equal-opportunity employer, they would be welcome on our campus. But since they show no inclination to do so, it is the university’s responsibility to demonstrate, through example, what we think of the military’s bigoted practices.

Not sure what that even means. What example are we supposed to take? Not let them on campus. But that would violate their free speech… The editorial doesn’t give an answer.

This is a long running gripe of mine with newspaper editorials. They oftentimes seem to go out of their way to avoid taking a clear stand on an issue. Why bother taking up space on the newspaper page if you’re not going to have something substantial and forceful to say on an issue? My only guess would be that in order to come up with an editorial view that a majority of the editorial staff supports, then it requires a compromise that makes it impossible to have a forceful editorial position.Email This Post!