Last week, a disgusting display of depravity occurred in the University of Cincinnati student community. The campus’s Young Americans for Freedom group posted flyers around campus expressing support for Brett Kavanaugh, the now-confirmed justice on the Supreme Court. This occurred right before the confirmation vote in the Senate and came after three weeks of mind-numbing political discourse surrounding the judge and the accusations lobbed against him.
Right after the posters went up, the outrage boiled over.
As reported on Oct. 8, leftist students responded to these posters with vitriolic fervor and violent threats. YAF members were subject to online harassment and threatened with real-world aggression. Comments on the YAF Twitter account’s original tweet range from degrading to outright racist and sexist.
The radical campus Left has discarded the “tolerance” it claimed to own and regressed to outright bullying. But this kind of reaction is not new to college campuses. It is merely the latest episode in the inquisition unfolding within universities — except, in this inquisition, it is not religion at the center of the crusade but diversity of thought. The heretics they aim to eradicate are ones that express views not lockstep in line with their predetermined reservation of acceptable thought.
Since the 1960s, the radical Left has gradually become more and more dominant on campuses. But the campus radicals of a half-century ago would find little camaraderie with the inquisitors inhabiting campus today. First and foremost, those of decades past vehemently advocated for the freedom of speech to be applied broadly. The Kent State shooting occurred when dissent against the establishment was frowned upon to the point of suppression. Nowadays, student radicals actively quash freedom of speech on campus. Any view that is deemed hateful, no matter how strictly or loosely defined, can be extinguished thanks to hate speech codes. One college went so far as to ban a Taco Tuesday-themed recruiting event. Another reprimanded a professor for explaining the meaning behind a historical slur. These examples and so many more represent the campus Left’s full body of work in suppressing views they dislike.
Social justice warriors view themselves as the white blood cells of the student body, searching out and destroying views they deem unsavory. Armed with speech codes and hecklers’ vetoes, they seek to shout down and delegitimize thought which challenges theirs. While right-of-center individuals bear much of the assault, they are not the only victims. In 2017, left-of-center professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying of Evergreen State University were exiled after their criticism of the schools “Day of Absence,” in which white students and faculty were encouraged to stay away from campus. The philosophy of intersectionality, which is the underlying driver behind these illiberal outbreaks on college campuses, has supplanted much of the Left’s former gospel of equality and turned it into one seeking mere equity.
This metastasized at the University of Cincinnati, from which I graduated in 2017, in the form of bigotry among the most fervent self-identified critics of such intolerance. The head of UC’s Student Government even weighed in on it, siding not with the First Amendment but rather those who wish to extinguish its liberties through violence. For someone in a position that is supposed to represent all students, to come out and fault the students who are subjected to harassment and bigotry, shows just how far the institution has fallen.
With a fervor not unlike that of 13th-to-19th-century Spain, campus leftists jump at any and every opportunity to chastise and eliminate dissimilar ideas. Their inquisition of differing opinions takes the form of mob-like harassment, kangaroo courts levying punishment without due process, and illiberal speech codes. These are the product of ideological monoculture in a community. It spurs tribalistic mentalities, which can boil over into rank suppression. The Spanish Inquisition spanned more than 700 years and was made possible because overt tribalists controlled an institution possessing great influence and vast authority. In late-medieval Spain, that institution was the Catholic Church. Today, it is the university. The Bible is replaced with student handbooks, church tribunals are substituted for Title IX courts, and the stockades are traded for a public defamation of a more digital nature.
The Spanish Inquisition lasted for 700 years because of the power the Church possessed. It is a power not unlike that of college campuses today. The church regulated much of its constituent’s lives, as campuses do now. But neither would be possible without the tacit consent, and sometimes explicit applause, of the institution’s transgressions. We are in a new age, yet are plagued by the same evils hiding behind different masks. One thing is for sure: Nobody expects the inquisition until it arrives at their doorstep.
Brad Johnson (@bradjCincy) is a Young Voices contributor.
