Bucknell: Affirmative action is discriminatory

But only when conservatives do it. Inky:

The "affirmative-action bake sale," at which the Bucknell University Conservatives Club charged different prices depending on a customer's race, was shut down by the administration in April. But it didn't end there.

Bucknell president Brian C. Mitchell has received about 100 letters, e-mails, and phone calls protesting the administration's response.

A Philadelphia-based national free-speech group this month blasted the school in a news release that began, "Student rights are under assault at Bucknell University. ..."

And a fledgling group of alumni and other interested parties issued a statement of concern last week.

The controversy at Bucknell - a 3,500-student liberal arts university in Lewisburg, Pa., about 75 minutes north of the state capital - is not unique.

College campuses across the country frequently must deal with delicate issues of free speech, political posturing, and race relations.

"Delicate issues" of free speech? Free speech has only become a "delicate issue" because of the left's continuing attempts to silence free speech through political correctness.

In March, the [Bucknell Conservative] club complained that the administration shut down another of its activities - passing out anti-stimulus handbills that blared "The Socialist State of America" on the front with President Obama's face. On the back, the fake dollar bills read: "Obama's stimulus plan makes your money as worthless as Monopoly money."

That incident and the bake sale prompted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) to get involved.

"We want everyone around Bucknell to know that Bucknell is not a place that respects students' rights," said FIRE's Adam Kissel.

FIRE has successfully defended student groups at the College of William and Mary, Northeastern Illinois and DePaul Universities, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Colorado at Boulder when those schools attempted to stop bake sales, Kissel said. The group, which was co-founded by University of Pennsylvania history professor and free-speech advocate Alan Charles Kors in 1999, takes on cases of free speech at the nation's colleges and universities. Its Web site is www.thefire.org

Bucknell officials said that the school's reactions to the bake sale and the handbill handouts were not an issue of free speech, but rather of campus "safety and fairness."

Ahh, yes. Break out the old "student safety" trope when any group of students deigns to stop marching lockstep with the University's agenda of politcal correctness. What's left unspoken is why there would be any danger or "safety" issues resulting from a bake sale. I wish the University would elaborate on that.

Students did not have the required prior permission to hand out the handbills at the cafeteria entrance, the school said. Permission is required to prevent cross-scheduling and allow management to prepare for "possible reactions" to the events, "including for the safety of those involved," Bucknell's general counsel, Wayne Bromfield, wrote in a response to FIRE dated June 11.

And the bake sale was "discriminatory," Bromfield wrote.

"If students wish to engage other students in related discussions, there are opportunities for doing so that do not require us to sanction disparate treatment of our students, faculty, staff or visitors based on ethnic, racial, gender, religious, or other demographic distinctions," he wrote.

So the University squashed the free speech demomstration based on the premise that an "affirmative action" bake sale was "discriminatory."

Of course affirmative action is discriminatory; that's the point of it--to promote one group of people over another based upon the color of their skin. The Bucknell Conservative Club's crime was speaking that out loud.

But as I said, it's only offensive when conservatives do it. When women's groups do it, they are sparking important and critical dialog: