Late Saturday on CPAC, a panel called “Campus Crackdown” moderated Charlie Sykes of WTMJ, highlighted how college students’ protests are a “snowflake rebellion” and how college administrations are cracking down on free speech.
The panel featured Karin Agness of Network of Englightened Women (NeW), which has faced backlash at American University; Everett Piper who is the president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and also penned the viral op-ed “This is not a day care, it’s a university!”; and Josh Zuckerman, a college senior at Princeton University.
In sharing what’s happening at Princeton, Zuckerman called it a “microcosm of what’s happening nation wide.” About these protests:
Zuckerman recapped the situation at Princeton, which involved students occupying the president’s office full of ridiculous demands, including to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name, but also for there to be sensitivity training for teachers and required classes on “marginalized peoples” for students. Zuckerman spoke of it as “getting rehabilitated” and “get indoctrinated by the university.”
He also spoke of the group he and “some like-minded dissenting students” founded, known as the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC). While they are like-minded on this issue, they are also “very diverse students” who are for:
To demonstrate to the audience that “these protesters do not care about free thought,” he read of a campus newspaper op-ed which claimed “freedom of thought… should have no place in universities” if a black student “cannot feel safe.” Zuckerman, to applause, mentioned that these protesters “have not gotten this memo” that “the entire point of college is to encourage free thought.”
Other examples include how black students have been bullied for saying they oppose the student protester demands. A student who wrote an article defending free speech on campus had her article torn up on and taped on her door. Zuckerman and fellow student Devon Nicole Naftzger both wrote a piece for the National Review and have appeared before Congress.
At the end of the panel, Zuckerman offered his advice:
One the same note as advice, Agness had earlier in the panel spoken specifically to conservative women on campus. As a student at the University of Virginia, her women’s center had laughed at her request for their help to start a group. But, she went on to form NeW and there are other ways to speak out:
Overall then, despite the insanity of college protests, there may be a message of hope.
