College, where can you spend a ton of money and get disciplined for free speech

College, where can you spend a ton of money and get disciplined for free speech February 22, 2017

Institutes of higher learning, once the bastions of free speech, have now been captured by the New Fascists from top to bottom who are clamping down on anything that might “offend.”  And what’s the most offensive thing of all? Free speech.

Hundreds of campuses nationwide have these things called “Bias Response Teams” — let’s call them “Brats” for short — which are in place to police campus speech and turn in offenders. Adam Steinbaugh of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has personally surveyed over 230 of these reporting systems and found that “universities broadly define ‘bias’ to include virtually any speech, protected or not, that subjectively offends anyone.”

“On many campuses,” Steinbaugh adds, “administrators are called upon to referee whether speech is polite.”

Many of the reports turned into these Brats are anonymous yet uses the resources of police departments, administrators, and public relations staff to determine if the student or faculty has crossed the line — a very blurry line, apparently.

Steinbaugh writes about a few instances he has studied:

At Appalachian State University, students reported on one another for chalked messages that were pro-Trump as well as chalked messages calling Trump a “RACIST.” The former were reported by students as “hate speech,” the latter “politically biased slander” that was “unlawful.”

While students at Ohio State University reported each other for comparing Hillary Clinton to Hitler, students at Texas Tech were whispering to administrators that the Black Student Union’s tweets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement offended them. Meanwhile, the University of Oregon saw it fit to dictate “community expectations” to students who had the audacity to complain about oppression.

When a complaint is turned in, the Brats are supposed to come to the offended and help them through their hurt feelings, because by law a state college can’t censor speech. But oftentimes, a more devious response is launched. Steinbaugh said at the University of California-San Diego, the school’s lawyers were called in to find “creative” ways to censor speech after students became upset of a satirical piece on “safe spaces” appeared in the student paper. Those efforts have landed UCSD in court.

Steinbaugh said the response has also looked like this at some universities:

Many Bias Response Teams respond with what they characterize as an “educational” response. This might sound like a faculty member visiting a student who was reported for racist speech and discussing the Civil Rights movement. But it’s not. Rather, it’s often an administrator, not an educator, summoning a student or faculty member to a meeting, reprimanding them, and “educating” them about how their words upset someone.

“How will students be able to defend their rights in the legislature or the courts if debating them in the classroom is to be discouraged?” Steinbaugh asks.

But here’s my question: Why would anyone in their right mind send their kids to one of these indoctrination camps? College is a place where young people are supposed to learn to think and debate important ideas.  Today, colleges are nothing but large, fancy brainwashing centers, intended to make sure no one veers away from accepted orthodoxy and politically correct speech and thought.

Hit them where it hurts. Don’t send them your money. Enrollment is already down because of all of this progressive foolishness. They already have one foot in the grave dug by themselves. Just a few more inches and they’ll go under. I think it’s time American colleges have a near-death experience.


Browse Our Archives

Follow Us!