No Free Speech Allowed On College Campuses

The attitude of the college campus today is quite different from past eras. And I don't like it. Maybe it's because when I was a college student the college campus had become ( but only for a few decades longer) a truly democratic and tolerant place. The college ideal of free speech really existed then.  Prior to the mid sixties or so most college campuses were a bit too conservative and intolerant of difference. The sixties changed that making them open to every idea and tolerant of others. But today, the college campus in the U.S. is often the most intolerant and liberal gone mad place in society. It is a pity because liberalism is so out of control on campuses today that students and campus employees who object and speak out against it are not only marginalized, but harassed.

Sigh...I fear their is far too little freedom of thought on many college campuses today. Instead, the schools are an almost mindlessly politically correct state of ultra liberal views.  The Obama administration is riding to the rescue of this insanity as it promotes phony after phony (but vote getting) ideas on campus. The young being liberally inclined are sponges to those ideas. College students have learned the Obama mantra  that when they make victim hood a coveted status it confers privileges for them.  The liberal political faction has taken the college campus away from the ultra conservatives who controlled it (also badly) for so long as Obama and the ultra liberals have decided it is academia's turn to be broken into a liberal herd of sheep who bleat non sequiters like the imaged "The War on Women", or "Corporate abuse of the poor".

On most college campuses today campus speech codes punish "unpopular speech".  That would mean any speech that approves of traditional values or opposes the latest trendy liberal doctrine. "Diversity" is enforced, which means that anyone who is not a white, liberal, male is said to be a victim of hate and discrimination and therefore must be given copious amounts of extra "help" to overcome the imagined discrimination. The liberal college campus and its almost entirely liberal faculty impose their politically correct world on the students, like it or not. This is not good.

This intolerance on the college campus is organized around the principle of "racial and gender equality", which we should all be for, but whose idea is distorted to mean a special privilege class and a very repressive attempt to tell college students what and how to think.  Stalin would be proud!  The radical ideology on most campuses says there is no mainstream, no commonality about us. Instead, it has invented and enforces a multiculturalism that always looks for differences, and uses those to divide and conquer the college student. So we have victory for mindlessness, unthinking, unchallenging student. The commandment every freshman is assaulted with even before setting foot in his or her new school is, "Thou shalt not disturb the politically correct college bubble".
I think that when you create such an atmosphere and use repression to tell the student what he or she is to think, and establish codes to enforce the political correctness, you have a highly degraded college experience for everyone.

Need some examples? Try these (there are many more).

-At Duke University there is a campaign to remove the phrase, “Man Up” (and others) from the vocabularies of Duke students because that phrase supposedly de legitimizes homosexuals and oppresses people.
- International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde was forced to withdraw from giving the commencement address at Smith College following protests from students and faculty who hate the IMF. (There have been over 60 cancellations or withdrawals of commencement speakers in the past 5 years because the speakers were said to be "offense' to liberal college students)
- University of California-Santa Barbara women’s studies professor Mireille Miller-Young attacked a 16-year-old holding an anti-abortion sign in the campus "free speech zone" (on today's college campuses, if you speak against the prevailing liberal view on campus you must do it in those zones. Free speech elsewhere is not allowed)
- Brandeis University decided not to give Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree because she has written books critical of Islam's treatment of women. (On most college campus it is good to vilify Christian religions but a mortal sin to ever say anything bad about Islam)
- The U.S. Justice Department recently sent a memo to all colleges that receive federal funding detailing the new policy for prevention and punishment of sexual harassment on college campuses. (“Offensive” speech is now determined solely by the complainant, meaning that  reason, community standards, and adjudication to make a ruling on sexual harassment can't be the standard. The complainant now has all power. If she claims that an elderly man greeting her with the statement, “I like those shoes,” degraded and objectified her, she wins.)
- A University of Nebraska graduate student who faced suspension for keeping a photograph of his wife in a bikini on his desk. No, I am not kidding!
- A janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis nearly lost his job after coworkers complained about him reading a book that made reference to the Ku Klux Klan on the cover. The University charged that the janitor was “trying to disrupt the  campus environment.” (The book in question – “Notre Dame Versus The Klan”  is anti racist. It celebrates the efforts of Notre Dame to keep the KKK out of South Bend.)

The lesson of all this is that today it's left wing paternalism that has taken over the U.S. and it's college campuses, even on what should be a free speech center, the college campus. Colleges today are teaching college students to practice intolerance under the justification of preaching “tolerance”  in the liberal bubble of the college campus. The dull conformity and repressive regulations that characterize college campuses today suffocate students and take away the joy and enthusiasm of students and faculty who have independent minds, active imaginations, and appreciation for the pleasure of free conversation.  Freedom of speech and thought has been one of the great gifts of college life.

Years ago, we all got to expect that censorship would come from the right wing, but to expect it from the left wing, the Obama world, from the politically correct people on the campuses is just sad. We should speak out against it.....uh, if that's allowed