Students should remember the value of free speech

TO THE EDITOR:

As a Russian who grew up in the former Soviet Union I write to you about the events this past week involving former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo R-Colo.

I came to the United States for my education including a master's of business administration from the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School because I have a passionate intensity for freedom and free speech. For that reason I had unbounded pride in becoming an alumna in 2002 of such a great university with such a long and distinguished tradition of academic freedom and free speech and ideas.

I personally disagree with many of Mr. Tancredo's views. But whether I do or not is completely irrelevant. He has a total right to express them.

That is why I came to America. I therefore cannot imagine that he was treated as he was. The people who perpetrated this attack on freedom of speech and ideas this week are cells of a political cancer that has in past decades in other countries quickly metastasized in those institutions and countries that tolerated it. Such embryonic events conjuring up as they do nightmares about how repressive regimes develop must never happen at UNC again.

Both UNC-system President Erskine Bowles and Chancellor Holden Thorp have expressed commitment to take whatever steps are necessary to preserve UNC's great tradition of freedom of speech and ideas and I am sure that I and all alumni will in the future be just as enormously and justifiably proud of our great institution as we always have been.



Natalya Fedorova MacWilliams

Kenan-Flagler MBA '02