The latest critic of political correctness and liberal bias on college campuses is none other than President Obama.
At a Des Moines town hall on college affordability Monday, Obama fielded a question about political bias on college campuses. His surprising response, reported by Libby Nelson at Vox, was that college students shouldn’t have to be “coddled.”
The president acknowledged that college campuses are often liberal, and it can be a problem when students aren’t listening to the other side.
“I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women,” Obama said. “I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, ‘You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.’ That’s not the way we learn either.”
A recent article in The Atlantic titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” goes into many examples of college students demanding political correctness and protection from ideas they find offensive.
The question that prompted this response referred to Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson’s proposal to cut off federal funding to colleges that demonstrate political bias.
Obama dismissed the proposal.
“The idea that you’d have somebody in government making a decision about what you should think ahead of time or what you should be taught, and if it’s not the right thought, or idea, or perspective or philosophy, that person would be — they wouldn’t get funding, runs contrary to everything we believe about education,” he said. “That might work in the Soviet Union, but that doesn’t work here. That’s not who we are.”
The rest of the town hall with high school students and parents focused on his administration’s efforts to make college more affordable, including caps on student loan payments, a proposal that would make community college free, and a recent change to the Federal Application for Student Aid (FAFSA) allowing students and families to begin financial aid applications in October this year instead of waiting until January.
This week, Obama also announced a new online tool developed by the Education Department called the College Scorecard, which seeks to make college statistics more transparent, and hold colleges accountable for students who are unable to pay back their loans or get jobs after graduation.
