Many colleges and universities have become breeding grounds for Leftism, intolerant of the values and worldview that founded this country and made America a great nation.
David French offers an excellent response to political correctness this week in the National Review . . .
"This might
come as some surprise to observers of our campus culture wars, but there was a
time, not long ago, when the situation in American higher education was much
worse. There a wave of vicious campus activism aimed at silencing heterodox
speakers, and it was typically empowered by a comprehensive regime of speech
codes that exposed students to formal university discipline for daring to utter
dissenting views. Moreover, there did not (yet) exist networks of lawyers
ready, willing, and able to defend speech on campus.
These were
the days of the Shadow University, the days before Twitter and
today’s vibrant conservative media, when campus free-speech outrages occurred
time and again without attracting the slightest bit of public attention. Even
as a civil-libertarian resistance formed and began litigating on campus, many
of the fact patterns were almost comically insane. University officials would
destroy newspapers, force students to change their religious beliefs as a
condition of graduation, and even — in one particularly memorable case — try a
student group for the crime of desecrating the name of Allah after its members
stomped on the flag of Hamas.
When I look
back at my old litigation files, I see case after case that would light
conservative Twitter on fire if it happened today. But courageous students
fought back, they filed suits in courtrooms from coast to coast, and they won.
The era of the speech code is over. The few remaining unconstitutional campus
speech policies lie largely dormant and unenforced, with university officials
keenly aware of the risk of lawsuits. That doesn’t mean that substantial legal
challenges don’t exist — the Obama administration’s Title IX guidance initiated
a tidal wave of campus due-process violations, to take one example — but speech
on college campuses is legally free. If you engage in unpopular speech on a
public campus and angry students demand your academic head, they’ll lose if you
have the courage to persist."
Picture used by permission from Pixabay.
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