The Campus War on Free Speech and Our Future

I’ve hesitated to post much on the enormities of Leftist students and campus administrators of late in part because said enormities are so . . . enormous and numerous it is difficult for me to get my arms around them in one post.

But one Conservative Wahoo has managed to do so in a manner that well reflects my concerns.

Your blogger is vastly more worried about the strong authoritarian impulse that seems to beat within the heart of today's undergraduates, at least at elite universities. Their first response when confronted with something they don't like is to appeal to authority. In doing so, they demand that the authorities impose a punishment on the target of their ire calculated not only to redress the particular perceived offense, but to intimidate third parties. In the linked case, they are demanding the termination of two professors because one of them voiced objections to a university policy, and the other one defended his wife. Seriously?

The term we would have used back in the day to describe these impulses -- and that is what they seem to be -- is fascistic.

The common response of my generation is "these delicate flowers are in for a real shock when they enter the real world."

I am more worried the effect this generation of students will have on the real world. We are breeding a generation whose first impulse is to appeal to power, and to demand that "the Man" crush people that the local majority finds offensive, or out of step, or in some undifferentiated way non-conforming in their ideas.

What are we going to do when these very bright and hard-working elite students become our judges, regulators, prosecutors, and politicians?

It do not feel comfortable quoting more, and the post is quite succinct, so go read the whole thing, which includes an already infamous Halloween conflict at Yale which prompted Mr. Wahoo's missive.

These campus speech Nazis seem destined to increase the number of New Totalitarians in power in the future, both by how they vote and by rising to power themselves.  And I have waxed vehement about the New Totalitarians and their attacks on freedom of speech and religion.  I look at what is already happening in government and politics and what is transpiring on the campuses and fear that American freedom will not survive this generation. 

I doubt it will even survive mine.