L egislation to force institutions of higher learning in Maryland to create “cultural diversity” programs is making its way through the General Assembly with little opposition from lawmakers ? who should be defending academic freedom, not crushing it. HB 905, which passed the House of Delegates 122-to-9, requires all colleges and universities that receive state aid to submit a yearly report on what they?ve done “to promote and enhance cultural diversity.” A companion bill sailed through the state Senate on an equally lopsided 41-6 vote.
Campus multiculturalism has been sold to the taxpaying public as a sort of benign foreign-exchange program that teaches students to respect different cultures and religions. The reality is that these programs have devolved into ugly caricatures of toleration used by leftist professors and administrators as battering rams against free speech, merit-based advancement, religious liberty and national unity. Under the lofty-sounding rhetoric of “diversity” ? which inevitably refers only to politically correct racial, ethnic and gender categories ? campuses are in reality becoming less ideologically and academically diverse than ever. Once respected bastions of free speech, many colleges and universities have turned into dreary politically correct propaganda mills, as case after case chronicled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education makes abundantly clear.
For evidence of multicultural suppression in action, Maryland legislators need look no further than Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where administrators first looked the other way in 2006 when hundreds of copies of the Carrolton Record, a conservative student newspaper, were stolen from the library, and then joined in the theft by banning distribution of the paper elsewhere on campus. The situation is equally depressing at the University of Maryland, College Park, where advocates of non-approved viewpoints are corralled into so-called “free speech zones.”
Apparently the College Park commissars haven?t heard that the First Amendment makes the entire country a free-speech zone. For the record, FIRE gives Hopkins and College Park its lowest rating for failing to protect students? First Amendment rights.
Things will only get worse if this unnecessary and dangerous legislation is signed into law by Gov. Martin O?Malley.
Then all of Maryland?s institutions of higher learning, public and private, will be forced to bow before the same multicultural idol. That?s oppression, not diversity.
