This year's award for the "the university president who does the most to look the other way when free speech is under assault on campus," is a tie.
Conservative columnist John Leo bestowed the "2006 Sheldon Award" to Washington State University president Lane Rawlins and DePaul University president Thomas Holtschneider, reports AgapePress.
According to the article, Rawlins "financed and organized an attempt to shut down a student play" and "threatened to expel a student from the school's teacher education program because of his conservative religious and political views." Meanwhile, Holtschneider "censored a campus protest against affirmative action" and "suspended a teacher without a hearing for debating pro-Palestinian students on campus."
The annual mock award is named in honor of former University of Pennsylvania president Sheldon Hackney who did nothing about 15,000 copies of a student newspaper that were stolen by “minority students” as a result of an editorial, according to the AgapePress article.
Leo says, "every time a university president exceeds all boundaries by allowing unconstitutional speech codes or theft of newspapers, I give an annual award - a mock honor - to the failing university president." The U.S. News & World Report editorialist goes on to say, "I look for liberal and moderate victims of this, and they're very hard to find because, as you probably know, the university has been taken over by the 60s radicals, and they don't like dissent on the right."
