southchild

Back in April, Democrat candidate for President, Barack Obama, had a campaign appearance on the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta, Georgia. More information on the event, including photos and videos, is available here. According to the AJC, 20,000 supporters were in attendance.

However, what you won’t read about on those sites is that all 17,000 students attending the Georgia Institute of Technology were solicited by University officials to volunteer for the event. Frontpage Magazine has the story on how the taxpayers of Georgia, through the taxpayer-subsidized University, paid to solicit volunteers and supporters for Obama.

In the email message sent through the Buzzport announcement system, usually reserved for official Institute business, all 17,000 Georgia Tech students were informed about Obama’s visit and solicited to volunteer for his campaign.

Here’s the e-mail that Tech officials sent to the students:

Senator Obama is also in need of a lot of volunteers to help him publicize while he is in Atlanta. If you are interested in volunteering you can check the box that says volunteers on the RSVP page.

Volunteers will be needed for Wednesday (street publicity team),

Thursday (sign making party) and Saturday (helping with the actual event) you can also reply to this message if you’d like to volunteer.

Is Georgia Tech a Leftist organization that uses its funds and resources (computer networks and e-mail systems) to support Democrat candidates? Yep. The arrogant liberals at Tech are still thumbing their noses at the Constitution and taxpayers, even after a Federal judge shot down Tech’s unconstitutional speech code that punished Conservative students who have the nerve to exercise their First Amendment Right to free speech.

The Frontpage Magazine article has more:

Does the message sent out by the Dean’s Office concur with their mission statement?

Unfortunately, this incident can be added to the already long list of examples of Tech’s promotion of a single ideology and of the preferential treatment afforded those students and organizations who adhere to a Leftist worldview. This unfair treatment creates a double standard, which in turn guarantees success to only select groups. …

It’s all well and good that the rally was a success, but the role played by the Dean of Students in promoting a far Left candidate as if it were the normal course of business at Tech was inappropriate at best. It appears more like the Dean of Students misused student, alumni and taxpayer-provided resources as in-kind contributions to a political campaign.

Georgia Tech desperately needs to respond to, and find solutions for, the problems that have spanned the spectrum from unconstitutional policies to unprofessional practices among administrators and professors. Despite a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in March 2006 challenging policies that infringed on free speech and religious liberty on campus, the school has failed to address its unlawful behavior except when “encouraged” by court order. Couple that with an open disregard for the Institute’s own policies and a failure to even pretend to adhere professional standards, and it’s obvious that Tech is more interested in a radical political agenda than providing a challenging and fair learning environment.

Thanks to a federal judge’s decision last August to repeal Georgia Tech’s speech code, administrators no longer have the authority to selectively deny students their basic First Amendment right to free speech. However, there are still policies in place that limit students’ ability to be an equal member in campus debate unless the student or organization marches to the tune of the administration-approved ideology. Conservative students who engage in partisan political activities have routinely been denied access to mandatory student activity fees. But the Dean of Students feels comfortably justified in providing Sen. Obama what amounts to campaign contributions. That email is a glaring example of a powerful administration doing whatever it can and whatever it wants – just like good Socialists appropriating someone else’s resources and providing valuable access — to advance a particular viewpoint.

It’s a Ramblin’ Wreck all right.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 5:27 pm and is filed under General, politics, stupidia academia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.