Editorial: Colleges must stop coddling Herald Staff
http://www.bostonherald.com/opinion/editorials/2018/07/editorial_colleges_must_stop_coddling
College campus culture should be fair game for criticism. After all, college is very expensive and in many circles considered a compulsory rite of passage for young people.
More and more we hear stories of speakers being shut down by student protesters amid sometimes violent actions. Speakers running the political gamut from Ben Shapiro to Alan Dershowitz have been on the receiving end of angry mobs.
Yesterday’s college radical is today’s “social justice warrior” and their mission is to disrupt free speech whenever it does not conform exactly to their worldview. It happened at UMass Amherst in 2016 when Milo Yiannopoulos, Steven Crowder and Christina Hoff Sommers attempted to speak.
Whether it’s University of California, Berkeley, Middlebury College or Evergreen State University, there always seems to be at least one institution in the news associated with an attempt to thwart free speech.
Earlier this year, at Portland State University, when biologist Heather Heying made the point that women and men are biologically different, protesters in the audience screamed and excoriated her and tried to damage the sound system before they were removed. “We should not listen to fascism. Nazis are not welcome in civil society,” a protester said.
Year after year, our campuses seem to produce a bumper crop of loud and angry social justice warriors.
Yesterday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions took campus culture to task during a speech at Turning Point USA’s High School Leadership Summit in Washington.
“Rather than molding a generation of mature and well-informed adults,” Sessions exclaimed, “some schools are doing everything they can to create a generation of sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes. That is a disservice to their students and a disservice to this nation.”
“Speech codes protecting students from difficult or challenging ideas is a key aspect of this problem.”
The attorney general is absolutely right. Healthy debate should be aggressively cultivated on our college campuses. We cannot expect graduates to have a measured and impartial view of the world if they’ve never heard dissenting opinions or if the mere mention of alternative thought is verboten.
This is more crucial than ever because many of society’s influencers are biased actors posing as neutral messengers. For instance, yesterday CNN reported on the Sessions speech but only focused on the fact that students began chanting, “Lock her up” — a reference to Hillary Clinton. Sessions laughingly repeated the phrase in the most benign fashion imaginable. However, the CNN anchor positioned the events as the attorney general dangerously chanting about the incarceration of a private U.S. citizen.
It happens so often that it’s hard to keep track.
Our young people will need to know how to spot falsities and misinformation regardless of which side it emanates from. We must hope that they are equipped with the tools to make those determinations during their college years.
As Attorney General Sessions made clear, we cannot and should not protect students from speech. “Through ‘trigger warnings’ about ‘microaggressions,’ cry closets, ‘safe spaces,’ optional exams, therapy goats and grade inflation, too many schools are coddling our young people and actively preventing them from scrutinizing the validity of their beliefs,” he said. “That is the exact opposite of what they are supposed to do.”
He continued, “After the 2016 election, for example, they held a ‘cry-in’ at Cornell, they had therapy dogs on campus at the University of Kansas, and Play-Doh and coloring books at the University of Michigan. Students at Tufts were encouraged to ‘draw about their feelings.’ ”
We must demand more from our institutions of higher learning and hold them accountable. Not only is the exercise of free speech crucial to the college experience, but the very concept must be considered sacred, regardless of feelings, sensitivities or larger cultural agendas.
Most colleges and universities do a splendid job of educating their students and most graduates will find their way in the world just fine. If students are being underserved, it is a good use of free speech to call it out.
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