The on-line journal of DFTD reports on free speech and discourse and ideological balance issues at Davidson and serves as a clearing house for reports and articles nationwide illuminating the situation on other campuses, articulating the campus free speech cause, or proposing remedies to address the nationwide threat to free speech and open discourse on higher education campuses. In the interest of an informed and open dialogue, we encourage signed letters to the editor, and will consider, as well, original articles on free speech and ideological balance issues.
Davidson Freedom Roundup
When Davidson College senior Maya Pillai was asked about her greatest college memory, the first-generation immigrant answered, “I don’t have one.”
In an August 2020 interview with the Charlotte Observer, Pillai, the president of Davidson’s chapter of College Republicans, described her alienating college experience.
The Charlotte Observer
Maya Pillai is doing her best to show support for the president, though in this instance and on this topic, it’s proving to be a bit of a challenge. “Are there comments that President Trump makes that can be interpreted as racist?” asks the 21-year-old president of the Davidson College Republicans club. “Yes.” She points first, without needing to hesitate to think about it, to his repeated references to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus”; then to his tolerance — at a July 2019 rally in Greenville, N.C. — of the “send her back” chant directed at Somali-born Muslim U.S. Rep.
The Federalist
Administrators providing collegiate athletes the platform to speak out on important issues has transformed athletics into a system of coercive speech.
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
At Davidson College, the frog finally realized that it’s being slowly cooked alive.
As the theory goes, if you put a frog into boiling water, it will immediately jump out, but if you put it in lukewarm water and gradually raise the heat, it will not realize what is happening until it’s too late. The parable is often used to describe a social phenomenon by which an initially unpopular agenda can be made successful through gradual and subtle manipulation of opinions and language, without the populace being aware of what is happening.