Student disciplined for his unusually loud sneeze during conservative speaker’s lecture
By Adam Fearing | Nov. 20, 2017Maintaining that he had absolutely no intention of disrupting discourse, junior Nicholas Mullen found himself reprimanded by the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to an allegedly voluntary sneeze that he had during the lecture of Dr. Gordon Biederman. Biederman, a professor at the University of Alberta, was invited to give a talk on “owning liberals” by campus conservative group Young Americans for Prosperity (YAP). Originally specializing in cartography, Biederman has found recent acclaim in conservative circles for his outspoken views on the silencing of free speech on campus by those unfriendly to conservative views. Mullen describes himself as a liberal, but says he went to Biederman’s talk to hear views from a different side of the spectrum other than his own.
