From Yawning Bread:
You will have noticed that Nanyang Technological University requires students to get its approval before creating web content touching on politics and religion. So, not only did it reiterate, reinforce and render immediate the imported rules from the MDA, it added its own.
Although the newspaper did not get a response to its request for clarification, I can make an educated guess why that happened. The university must have feared that if any student ran afoul of the MDA’s rules, it too would be dragged into the controversy. As an act of self-preservation, the university probably wanted to make extra sure that would not happen by setting up its own roadblock in addition to the MDA’s.
But even then, you still cannot account for their actions until one adds self-induced fear into the mix. … A hundred censors bloom when the soil is fertile for them to do so. We have a culture of allowing people to act as self-appointed vigilantes when they have no authority over us, or when they do, we get shockingly meek and never challenge them even when they apply that authority inappropriately.
Read the rest of the article here.
