Posted on 09/22/2017 11:26:10 AM PDT by Heartlander
As a conservative columnist for my campus newspaper, it’s not unusual for me to be derided and accused of hate by leftist students.
Some have been calling for my firing ever since I started writing. I’m a mainstream conservative-libertarian. Apparently, that is beyond the pale.
Campuses are lively places, full of debate on political, social, and religious topics. But new ideological boundary lines have been drawn, and their crossing is met with reproach, accusations of hate, and even violence.
In March, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont was hospitalized after protesters disrupted a speech by the social scientist Charles Murray.
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter also felt the wrath of campus extremism when threats of violence prompted the University of California, Berkeley to cancel her speech.
These events and others have marked the erosion of the free speech at colleges that were once lauded for their commitment to it. On today’s campuses, anyone with a remotely controversial idea comes under attack. Why?
Millennials seem to have a problem with free speech.
In a study by the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of millennials agreed that “the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups.”
The study found that today’s youth are much more likely than their parents and grandparents to support the suppression of controversial speech—a fact that young conservatives like me know all too well.
The hate mail, electronic diatribes, personal attacks, and threats I faced during my freshman year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst would make you think I’d done something horrible. In reality, all I’d done was write in The Collegian, the school paper—columns arguing against the sanctuary campus movement, safe spaces, political correctness, and overzealous cultural appropriation policies.
But what has fueled this hostility toward alternate ideas?
It’s simple: College campuses, once lively places of debate and controversy, have come under the tyranny of groupthink. In an age defined by diversity, we’ve left no space for differences that go deeper than the skin.
Some professors blatantly teach their opinion as fact and belittle the few students who don’t subscribe to their gospel of leftism.
The result? College classrooms that used to be places of robust conversation now cultivate a spirit of complacency. Institutions of higher education are complicit in fostering a culture of comfort—and in doing so, they are doing students a disservice.
The real world can be an ugly place where college graduates are regularly confronted by ideas they disagree with and things they find offensive.
College campuses are not that way. They’ve become “safe spaces,” where students are sheltered from the very expansion of their worldview that is meant to be the purpose of their education.
At Wellesley College, six professors suggested that the university set up a “censorship committee” in order to make sure that “guest speakers with controversial and objectionable beliefs” were barred from campus. In 2015, the president of Northwestern University, Morton Schapiro, took to The Washington Post to write that “we all deserve safe spaces.”
On my own campus, some professors responded to the election of Donald Trump by bringing therapy dogs to class and giving out free hugs. The desire to shield students from offense has stymied the debate that actually prepares them for life in the real world.
Students are being taught that opposing viewpoints are akin to intellectual violence and that “provocateurs” like me are basically assailants.
Free speech is dying on campus, but millennials aren’t the ones killing it. Guilt lies with the institutions that have chosen to coddle students when they should be challenging them.
One reason conservative speech garners such violent responses is that students aren’t used to hearing ideas they disagree with. On today’s campuses, liberal professors outnumber their conservative counterparts 12 to 1, even though the general public consists of more self-identified conservatives than liberals.
For all our talk about minority inclusion, we haven’t addressed the under-representation of nearly half the political population. Students have gotten used to their side of the story, and have no tolerance for anyone who rationally challenges them.
POLL: Should anti-Progressive speech be allowed on college campuses?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3588079/posts
You can have all the free speech you want, as long as I like what you say! < /libspeak >
If you want to know what life was like under the soviet union, or WILL be like if liberals get into power, just look at American colleges.
FTA: “But new ideological boundary lines have been drawn, and their crossing is met with reproach, accusations of hate, and even violence.”
If only Trump’s border boundary wall could be built to such specifications and standards...and soon!
It is not dying. It is being murdered.
Not to worry. The new radicals on campus are the conservative kids. They are all about free speech and being politically incorrect.
My son being one of them. I am betting the conservative kids will prevail. They are in the fight of their lives but they are fighters.
Leftists are lying murdering traitors and should be addressed and treated as such.
Don’t complain with any notion things will change. (But, complaining just to bother school administrators and make them consider leveling the field, is useful.)
AND, start your own newspaper or flier. Pass them out like candy everywhere. Post them in the lunch rooms and paste them on doors and windows. There will be some price to pay if it is against school rules, but be ready to pay that price. Act like a revolutionary in the old, best sense of the word.
Once, a free marketplace of ideas existed in America--especially on College and University campuses.
After all, isn't that what a University is supposed to do--expose students from closely-held communities and homes to a broad sampling of ideas from across the history of civilization in order for them to make informed choices as to what and why they believe what they believe?
No long is that true in America. The so-called "Progressive" regressive ideas of that cultish, dictatorial movement prescribe and limit what youth are to believe as fact!
The arbitrary and anti-freedom elites of Progressivism must control both thought and action; and, if they are allowed to continue their domination of political thought in America, then America and the world may be cast back into the dark and limiting Old World ideas which preceded 1776 and 1787.
Imagine...some day soon...when kids will rebel against their parents and society by...
* Refusing to get tattoos
* Reading the Bible
* Getting a decent job
* Getting married and honoring their vows
* Raising good kids
* And being proud Americans
The left will go InSaNe!!!!
If you aren’t put in jail, or fined, or prohibited by the government from changing colleges, I have a hard time sympathizing with “my 1st amendment has been violated”. Even in a public funded university. Even if your grades suffer because an employee of that public institution hates your opinion. I can sympathize with the situation, but not the use of “1st amendment”
The 1st amendment (and first 10) have very specific purposes. We can’t let them be watered down by saying they apply to EVERYTHING. Or we can’t complain then the 14th is watered down to apply to EVERYTHING the left wants. But the 1st is constantly watered down in the media and casual talk. An employer (i.e. the NFL) is not violating the 1st if they tell players to shut up.
I think that even if the employer is a public university, they can censor/allow their employees speech, and those employees can censor/allow other speech if the university allows. Even speech in public universities needs to be regulated by market forces (people do/don’t go there like Missouri?) rather than legal forces.
If you think a public university MUST NOT allow infringement on speech or they are “abridging the freedom of speech”, it gives me an argument that they MUST NOT allow any religious activity or they are “respecting an establishment of religion”. My argument may be a stretch. But liberals make it every day. And the speech argument helps them when it’s claimed universities have a Constitutional responsibility to meet. My argument is that the university (even if public) is not “Congress” and is not making law. They provide a public service (like any restaurant or the NFL) and should not be held to the constitutional limitations of Congress. Individuals cannot choose to disassociate with congress (or police or courts). They can choose a new university. And the solution is to choose alternate universities rather than complain about 1st amendment abuses. Ask Missou - it can work to depend on market forces rather than government.
Why would you attend a college that doesn’t allow free speech?
To the author:
You do understand that the Student Loan system and high tuition to leftist academics is set up to milk you generation to pay for their current lifestyle and prejudices, don’t you.
Starve the beast. Prior to retirement, I was a 1%er household and I never had a degree.
Not dying. Long dead.
All part of the 100-year Long March of the Frankfurt School.
All universities are just local branches of that one school.
We may need to connect free speech to Federal loans and grants.
However, at the time of Benghazi when Hillary and her pals made up the story about the cause of the riot being a video critical of Islam, MANY congressmen and senators called for banning such speech. So, I doubt you would have much support in Congress for protecting “hate” speech on campuses. Don’t make the Muslims mad..
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