Comedian Dennis Miller recently quipped that the political
climate on college campuses has grown so hostile that even a speech
delivered by Jesus would be protested by a mob of college students.
And barring the possibility that Jesus is a pro-affirmative action,
pro-reparations, pro-choice leftist, Miller’s assessment is
disturbingly accurate. More and more, students and faculty
hell-bent on achieving racial diversity have let diversity of
opinion fall by the wayside. Differing points of view are not only
put down, they are kept out.
Just ask UC Board of Regents member Ward Connerly, whose free
speech has been “shouted-down” at universities across
the country due to his stance against racial preferences. After
Connerly was characteristically forced to cut a speech short at
Columbia University due to an obscenely loud cacophony from
protesters, one student gushed, “I thought it was great. He
(Connerly) was entirely dislocated.”
Another protester added, “If he gets chased out of the
city, he gets chased out of the city ““ his ideas are not
welcome.” Even though Connerly’s ideas were embraced by
a solid majority of California voters in the passage of Proposition
209, they apparently have no place on a college campus.
Neither do the ideas of author Dan Flynn, who dared deliver a
speech at UC Berkeley in which he called convicted cop-killer Mumia
Abu Jamal a “cop-killer.” He should have known better.
Mumia (who completes the holy-college-trinity along with Che
Guevara and Karl Marx) was avidly defended by protesters who
shouted-down Flynn minutes into his speech. Soon after, copies of
Flynn’s book were burned outside the building he was supposed
to speak in. Ironically, some students participating in the
book-burning simultaneously held signs which said “Fight
Racist Censorship.”
The latest trend in the intolerant fight for “campus
tolerance” is newspaper theft. In the past two years,
thousands of college newspapers from schools across the country
have been stolen in order to prevent certain ideas and opinions
from seeing the light of day. In one case at Brown University, over
4,000 newspapers (almost the entire run) were stolen in order to
suppress an advertisement articulating the case against reparations
for slavery.
Never mind that the ad, placed by conservative commentator David
Horowitz, expressed a point of view that, according to the latest
FoxNews poll, 81 percent of Americans agree with. With typically
clouded vision, one misguided Brown professor argued
Horowitz’s position “”¦constitutes hate speech and
should have no place on campus.”
This kind of mentality, characteristic of a growing number of
universities across the country, has even begun to rear its ugly
head right here at UCLA. Just last year, Horowitz and conservative
author Dinesh D’Souza were hounded by student protesters
while speaking at a rally organized by Bruin Republicans. The
protesters, intent on disrupting the rally, resorted to
mischaracterization and petty-name calling to drown out the
speakers.
These tactics should alarm all UCLA students who value a college
experience rich in political and ideological diversity ““
regardless of their political proclivities. While UCLA is not yet
swallowed up by the hyper-repression that inflicts many of our
elite counterparts, the reception afforded to conservative speakers
last year suggests things might not be moving in the right
direction.
So as the new school year commences, UCLA students should make
an active effort to welcome opposing points of view and reject the
new wave of college censorship. With over 90 percent of UCLA
professors registering to parties of the left, conservative points
of view are already scarce. Little intellectual progress would be
made by thwarting them completely. So instead of exercising a
“right” to shout-down opposing points of view, I
encourage all UCLA students to exercise their right to listen.