It’s the end of the year, and just in time for Jason Mattera to bring us the Young Americas Foundation top ten list of the worst academia abuses of 2008. Going to college as a conservative, after all, is only OK if you keep your head down and your mouth shut. Tolerance is preached, not practiced, on college campuses where unhinged liberalism runs wild and free speech is only something to give lip service to.
Don’t quite buy the hype? Here are just a few examples from Jason’s disturbing list (emphasis in the original):
Banned conservative speakers, stolen votes, assaults on religious liberty, gay English classes, and forbidden Thanksgiving & Christmas celebrations
Political correctness ran amuck in our nation’s school system this past year, and Young America’s Foundation has once again compiled our “best of the worst” academic abuses for 2008. From “free speech zones” to transgendered speakers at military academies, the following list may make you both laugh and cry in the same breath. That probably isn’t too surprising, however, since we are talking about academia after all…
1. The free speech “zone.” A student at Yuba College in California was sent an ultimatum by the school’s president: discontinue handing out gospel booklets or face disciplinary action and possibly expulsion. That’s right—gospel booklets. Ryan Dozier, the 20-year-old student, had the audacity to distribute Christian literature without a school permit, which restricts free speech to an hour each Tuesday and Thursday. Yuba College even directs students to where on campus they are allowed to exhibit free speech. In this case, it’s the school theater. Campus police threatened to arrest Ryan if he didn’t comply with the “free speech zone,” oblivious to the fact that students don’t need permission to exercise the First Amendment’s free speech and religious clauses.
… 6. You can’t pray here! The First Amendment, is it a bestowed right given from above and protected by our government or a meaningless, antiquated concept to be disposed of? If you’re the folks at the College of Alameda in California, you’d pick the latter. How else do you explain their threatening to expel a student who prayed on campus? It all started when a student, Kandy Kyriacou, visited her professor to give her a Christmas gift. But when Kandy saw that her teacher was ill, she offered to pray for her. The professor agreed. That’s when Derek Piazza, another professor, walked in and freaked out that a prayer—gasp, a prayer—was occurring on college premises. “You can’t be doing that in here,” Piazza purportedly barked. Kandy received a retroactive “intent to suspend” letter from the administration, claiming that she was guilty of “disruptive or insulting behavior” and “persistent abuse of” college employees. Further infractions would result in expulsion, the letter read.
… 10. Who knew? Universal health care is actually a non partisan issue. Administrators at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota—the nation’s largest Catholic women’s college—unexpectedly blocked young conservatives on campus from hosting Bay Buchanan, a popular conservative commentator and U.S. Treasurer under President Reagan. College officials deemed Ms. Buchanan’s remarks on “Feminism and the 2008 Election” too politically charged, citing concerns about the school’s tax status. Those same “concerns,” mind you, didn’t prohibit the school from sponsoring programs that push for universal healthcare and minimum wage increases or hosting Frank Kroncke, an anti-war radical who is reliving the Vietnam days. But Bay Buchanan? Well, she’s partisan, according to St. Catherine’s administration.
And those are just three examples — make you sure you go see the entire list.
Of course, there will undoubtedly be those who will whine that this is just cherry-picking, that most college campuses aren’t like this and conservatives are just trying to give liberals a bad name. I don’t doubt that some liberals will look at this list and see absolutely nothing wrong. The thing is, the abuses on this list are by no means an anomaly. You can find countless examples of egregious behavior like those listed above at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. On college campuses, thanks to the liberal strangehold found on virtually every campus, it’s free speech for me and not for thee. Only certain kinds of expression are allowed.
Yet somehow, we’re still expected to spend thousands of dollars “educating” our children there.
Hat Tip: Hot Air
Mat says: I work at a private university (not saying which one) and I’m not really all that surprised by some of the stuff I saw on the page. I take graduate classes, so I don’t see as much of the leftist nonsense, but I know that it goes on rampantly on the undergraduate level. Of course, there were a couple of screwball graduate students in my history class this semester. The daily campus newspaper also has some pretty dumb crap in it most of the time. I would agree that one has to be careful about talking conservative on campus, though I’ve had mixed reactions. I think a lot depends on what curriculum one is in. I’ll probably start a blog soon, but there’s no way I’d put detailed personal information out because although I doubt it would be a problem, I’m not going to take the chance of being fired from my job. Odder things have happened…
William says: I went to a campus that was like 90% engineering students. Seriously. There were the liberal arts classes, but they were required only so that us engineers were “well rounded”. I am not a churchy kind of guy, so I didn’t sit around talking religion or try to hand out bibles. We would have those guys that would hand out small copies of the New Testament every once in a while though. They were spread throughout campus and were polite and I never once saw a student do/say anything mean. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, of course. But, I also didn’t sit around and wax philosophic about conservative stuff either. I would either talk school stuff, or just talk about whatever game I happen to be into, or I would be off campus working. I had to work 2 and 3 jobs just to have money to eat, so I didn’t spend megahours on campus. I think most of the problem children come from families that are paying for college…i.e. the students don’t have to work. Thus, they have time to do crap like this.
Sara says: To William: Your comment is irrelevant. This article was not talking about STUDENTS doing things to suppress conservative thought, but the Universities themselves. They seem to think Free Speech only applies to you if you are a liberal. Just like most liberals, they preach diversity of thought and tolerance of different ideas–but only if they agree with you.
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