College students across the country are finding offense in the most inane things — but we already knew that.
Newsweek’s cover story, entitled “The battle against ‘hate speech’ on college campuses gives rise to a generation that hates speech,” takes a look, in great detail, at the state of free speech at today’s universities. It also notes the effects the current “war on free speech” will have for recent graduates.
“Graduates of the Class of 2016 are leaving behind campuses that have become petri dishes of extreme political correctness and heading out into a world without trigger warnings, safe spaces and free speech zones, with no rules forbidding offensive verbal conduct or microaggressions, and where the names of cruel, rapacious capitalists are embossed in brass and granite on buildings across the land,” wrote Nina Burleigh. “Baby seals during the Canadian hunting season may have a better chance of survival.”
Burleigh explains that many are to blame for the current assault on free speech, including students, administrators, feminists and the Education Department. That’s because the Education Department has been cracking down on speech — or “verbal conduct,” as some are now calling it — as a potential violation of the rights of women and minorities. Of course, the speech need not be objectively offensive, it merely needs to offend the most significant among us (or those looking for money or attention) for schools to step in to “protect” someone from words.
Burleigh compares the current climate on college campuses to George Orwell’s “Thought Police” or East Germany’s Stasi. She lists examples that illustrate why professors are now afraid of the students they are supposed to have authority over.
“Professors quake at the possibility of accidentally offending any student and are rethinking syllabi and restricting class discussions to only the most anodyne topics,” Burleigh wrote. “A Brandeis professor endured a secret administrative investigation for racial harassment after using the word wetback in class while explaining its use as a pejorative.”
She also tells the story of Williams College sophomore Zachary Wood, an African-American self-described liberal who created a club to host controversial speakers so that liberal students who live in a bubble would hear counter views and learn how to respond to them. As one can imagine, Wood received a backlash — including racist comments — for daring to invite such speakers.
“Shielding students from microaggressions does not improve their ability to argue effectively; it coddles them. At a time like this, uncomfortable learning is vital,” he said.
In a section titled “Sex: Exquisitely sensitive creatures,” Burleigh takes aim at the tendency of college students to elevate every minor or reinterpreted interaction as sexual assault.
“Accusers who say they have endured any sort of unpleasant incident with a male — from having to turn down a date request to deciding, the morning after getting naked and in bed with a man, that they wished they had not — are deemed as deeply damaged as child pedophile victims, battered women and rape survivors,” Burleigh writes.
These sensitivities have led colleges and universities — at the direction of the federal government — to create “star chambers” that ignore the constitutional rights of due process and include no rules of evidence, yet have the power to brand students as rapists for life.
Burleigh’s article is full of other examples of campus crybullies, I urge you to read the whole thing.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
