Planned Protest Shuts Down BCG’s Penn Presentation

The Daily Pennsylvanian reports:

An on-campus information session for the Boston Consulting Group was canceled at the last minute Wednesday against the backdrop of a planned student protest.

The Student Labor Action Project, a student workers’ rights advocacy group, planned to protest the presentation because of BCG’s involvement with school closings in Philadelphia. In a report commissioned by the School District of Philadelphia, BCG recommended the closure of 60 public schools.

Earlier this month, officials voted to close 23 schools.

Protesters were set to meet outside Houston Hall — where the session was planned to take place — claiming “that since BCG decided to shut down our schools it’s only fair to shut down their meeting,” according to the protest’s Facebook event.

I’m a firm believer in that if you don’t like bad speech, you solve it by bringing more speech to beat it. But there’s something about Philly’s recent trend of denying the other guy a chance to speak at all—yes, I’m also talking about Mayor Nutter’s budget speech last week—that’s troubling to me. It suggests that dialogue and discussion and debate are being abandoned in Philadelphia in favor of merely being loud. Maybe it was always thus. But it doesn’t seem like a great way to do democracy.