At colleges and universities across the country, students are protesting hurt feelings, and they want campus administrators to change the rules to accommodate those feelings and punish anyone who feels or thinks differently.
Late last year, one college president, Dr. Everett Piper of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, took a stand against what the Wall Street Journal has branded the “crybullies.” Piper penned a blog post on the school’s website proclaiming that OWU is “not a day care.”
On Friday evening, during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Piper was awarded with the Bradley Foundation’s 2016 Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Award for Academic Freedom. I caught up with Piper during the conference to ask him about the award and for his advice to college administrators and students caught up in the current campus hysteria.
Surprisingly, Piper says he received a generally “favorable” response to his article and didn’t receive a negative reaction. “No negative reaction, no protests, nobody writing a contrary piece in the paper or anything like that,” he said. Of the more than 1 million page views the article received, Piper said 99 percent were positive.
“The irony was, most of the people who did disagree, did actually prove my point with me not having to open my mouth because they said: ‘Well, I think you were too harsh. You might have hurt their feelings,” Piper said.
“Did you not read the article? That was the point. The point was that education should not be about feelings as much as pursuing facts and actually learning something.”
Far from a backlash, Piper said OWU has seen “an uptick in admissions and deposits,” but acknowledged he couldn’t claim it was directly due to the article. They’ve also had a couple new donors, and he suspects there is a correlation.
Piper offered his advice to other college presidents looking to stand up to the crybullies, saying they needed to have a backbone and stand their ground and firmly tell their students the following:
I’m not here to coddle you so that you feel comfortable. I’m here to challenge your character. I’m more interested in you confessing your sins rather than you feeling comfortable in your selfishness.
He told professors and college presidents alike to “reclaim the high ground of the classical liberal arts, which is the pursuit of truth” and to not “back down in the face of this ideological fascism that exists on our campuses today.”
Piper said he believes that “Teaching lousy ideas for decades” led to the current outrage culture, that students have been taught “moral nihilism and moral relativism rather than moral absolutes.”
And the lousy ideas don’t stop at questioning free speech. Due process rights are also being eviscerated, and Piper is having none of that.
“I think if you’re accused of something, that I owe you – I owe you – the right of being heard and having a hearing and making a decision based on the facts, regardless of what the accusation is,” Piper said.
He added that it didn’t matter what the student was accused of – hurting someone’s feelings, stealing, cheating on a test, rape – the student deserved to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
“Now, that does not in any way mean that I will ignore a woman who claims that she has been assaulted,” he said. “We will attend to that aggressively and we will pursue the facts to their logical end. And we will discipline and prosecute accordingly when the facts are known.”
He also said that the rules should not be different for those accused of something on a college campus or off-campus.
“I don’t know why they should be different. If we start creating different rules for different subsets of culture, then I’m not sure what value constitutional liberty has any longer,” Piper said.
The Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick award carries with it a $10,000 stipend, which Piper said he would be spending almost entirely on a ministry in Laos supported by OWU that rescues young teenage girls from human trafficking.
Finally, Piper offered additional advice to college students who want to complain about “microaggressions” or demand “safe spaces” from ideas or thoughts they don’t like.
“You are so self-refuting and duplicitous at every turn you’re like a dog chasing its tail. Listen to yourselves,” Piper said. “You’re making no sense. You’re making no sense, and therefore there is no way for us to make sense out of the university, the univerity, the univeritas, the unity of the academy, which is supposed to be about doing something right and just and good.”
He added: “Because if you continue to prevail in this self-refuting argument, there is no unity, there is no goodness, there is no justice, there is no truth. It’s nothing about you and it’s nothing about power, it’s fascism. Listen to yourselves.”
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
