A law professor at George Washington University says multiple students have come to visit him in his office to ask if they can espouse conservative or libertarian beliefs openly in classes.
Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington Law School in Washington, D.C., wrote last month that as the new school year began, students with conservative or libertarian political beliefs began visiting his office to ask if they would face grade penalties if they spoke in support of their political beliefs in other classes.
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“Despite teaching for decades, it is a question that I never heard from students until the last few years,” Turley wrote. “It is now routine. It is the widespread fear of conservative students who have faced faculties with overwhelmingly liberal viewpoints and growing intolerance on virtually every campus as undergraduate students.”
Turley told higher education news website the College Fix that he encouraged those students to “not yield” to the pressures of “the growing orthodoxy and intolerance on [campus]” that encourages students to chill their speech.
“Life is not like a Monopoly game where you get to go around the board repeatedly,” Turley said. “You go around once and need to make the most of this experience. To remain silent (or even worse to mouth expected viewpoints) is to surrender an essential part of your education.”
Turley, himself an outspoken advocate for free speech and academic freedom, urged the students to report professors whose actions betray an intolerance for conservative ideas.
“Free speech values atrophy and die from lack of use,” he said. “Despite the growing intolerance on many campuses, conservative and libertarian students need to speak out and to report any faculty members who show intolerance for opposing views.”
George Washington University has been a hotbed of free speech controversies in recent months.
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A group of students demanded the university cancel a class taught by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June and ended federal constitutional protections for abortion. The university declined to cancel the class, but the justice ultimately elected not to teach it.
In February, university President Mark Wrighton condemned a series of posters critical of the Chinese Communist Party that had been removed by campus staff before backtracking and apologizing.
