Academic Fascism

Last week’s column highlighted college campus absurdities and the ongoing attack on free speech and plain common sense. As parents gear up to fork over $20,000 to $60,000 for college tuition, they might benefit from knowing what greets their youngsters. Deceitful college officials, who visit high schools to recruit students and talk to parents, conceal the worst of their campus practices. Let’s expose some of it.

Christina Hoff Sommers is an avowed feminist and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She’s spent a lifetime visiting college campuses. Recently, upon her arrival at Oberlin College, Georgetown University and other campuses, trigger warnings were issued asserting, in her words, that her “very presence on campus” was “a form of violence” and that she was threatening students’ mental health. At Oberlin, 30 students and the campus therapy dog retired to a “safe room” with soft music, crayons and coloring books to escape any uncomfortable facts raised by Sommers.

Florida State University has an “Equal Opportunity and Non-Discrimination Statement,” which says, “Behavior that may be considered offensive, demeaning, or degrading to persons or groups will not be tolerated.” That’s both broad and troublesome. Say that you’re a Muslim student and offended by homosexuality. Can you demand termination of campus activities that support homosexual activities?

A 2014 report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (http://tinyurl.com/mjvn4kl) found that 59 percent of the 427 higher-education institutions it analyzed have policies that infringe on First Amendment rights. FIRE found that the University of Connecticut prohibits “actions that intimidate, humiliate, or demean persons or groups, or that undermine their security or self-esteem.” The University of South Carolina prohibits “teasing,” “ridiculing” and “insulting.”

In 2012, FIRE listed the “12 Worst Colleges for Free Speech” (http://tinyurl.com/o94rour). In no particular order, they are the University of Cincinnati, Syracuse University, Widener University, Harvard University, Yale University, Saint Augustine’s College, Michigan State University, Colorado College, Johns Hopkins University, Tufts University, Bucknell University and Brandeis University.

University presidents, other academic administrators and faculty members all too often find the well-worn path of least resistance most attractive. They give support to claims of oppression and victimhood. These close-minded people are simply the “grown-up” leftist hippie generation of the 1960s and ’70s.

You might ask: What’s Walter Williams’ solution to these problems? For starters, benefactors should stop giving money to universities that endorse anti-free speech and racist diversity policy. Simply go to a university’s website. If you find an office of diversity, close your pocketbook. There’s nothing like the sound of pocketbooks snapping shut to open the closed minds of administrators.